People can change. I have seen it, and I have lived it. But just when change happens can generally be grasped only in retrospect. In the case of Senate hopeful Graham Platner of Maine, many Democrats are understandably eager to see evidence that he is no longer the man implicated by the drumbeat of damning revelations. Platner’s campaign promise has long been that he’s just an ordinary guy who has learned from his many mistakes—that he is no longer the man who picked fights online, belittled women, and otherwise drank and swore and argued too much. But on the eve of Maine’s primary elections next week, and in light of yet more reports of “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior, in the words of one ex-girlfriend, many voters may be wondering if this aspiring representative of the people has in fact changed enough.
Platner, a gruff 41-year-old Marine Corps veteran, is trying to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins with a platform of economic populism, universal health care, labor protections, and anti-interventionism. Although he was raised on the shores of coastal Maine by well-heeled parents who shipped him off to prep school, he has presented himself as a rugged man of the people: a military veteran (he served in Iraq and Afghanistan), an oyster farmer, and a family man. He launched his grassroots Senate campaign last year.
Democrats moved quickly to embrace Platner as the man the party needs to better speak to the working class—and particularly white men. But revelations keep emerging that are testing the party’s faith that he points a way forward.
While on military leave in Croatia in 2007, Platner drunkenly got a massive tattoo of a skull-and-crossbones design associated with Nazis. Platner has said that he was not aware of the meaning of the symbol, which he overlaid with a different design last year. But a new report in The New York Times has undermined this dubious claim. Among the various ex-girlfriends interviewed, one recalled that Platner had referred to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf”—the German name for the Nazi symbol—and explained that he and other members of his military unit had chosen it because they saw themselves as killers akin to the Nazi Schutzstaffel, or S.S., who carried out many of the Third Reich’s worst atrocities. (Platner’s campaign has disputed the woman’s account.)
Platner also spent years posting racist, sexist, and homophobic messages from a personal Reddit account, including a disturbing riff on sexual assault in the military. “Holy fuck,” he wrote in a 2013 post about women who are worried about getting raped, “how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?” These posts, combined with a 2020 video that showed Platner reminiscing about buying cocaine and using drugs in the military, led to the resignation of his campaign’s political director, Genevieve McDonald, in October.
Platner has said that his Reddit comments—posted between 2009 and 2021—constitute nothing more than “fucking around on the internet” at a time in his life when he was battle-scarred, traumatized, and adrift. “I don’t want you to judge me on the dumbest thing I ever wrote on the internet,” he said last year after the comments came to light. “I would prefer if people could judge me on the person I am today.”
[Shannon A. Mullen: Maine has a Graham Platner problem]
But new revelations have emerged that challenge Platner’s claims that his misdeeds are well behind him. Reports surfaced on Saturday that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, warned senior campaign staffers last year that he had been sexting at least six different women on the private messaging platform Kik early in their marriage in 2023. “Amy and I went through something hard—because of me. We did the work, and I’m grateful for her every hour of every day,” Platner responded in a public statement on Sunday. Rattled Democratic senators met with Platner this past week to ask if anything else worrisome in his past is likely to come out. Platner assured them that no “credible” allegations would be forthcoming.
According to the Times’s report, Platner’s ex-girlfriend accused him of occasional bouts of violence—grabbing her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, and twisting her arm to shove her into a bedroom, and holding the door shut so she couldn’t leave. “It hurt,” she said. But “it didn’t break my arm.” (His campaign told the Times it “strongly disputes” her account.) Multiple women said that Platner had cheated during their relationships.
The trouble with hiding damning information is that when it ultimately comes out, it demonstrates a willingness to readily lie, and invites reasonable suspicion that there may be yet more to the story. Platner’s dismissiveness about sexual assault in the military—he once wrote that anyone who believes the military purposefully covers up rape is “clearly both an idiot and junior enough in rank or life experience to think it matters”—is even more concerning in light of the Times’ interview with ex-girlfriends, one of whom recalled that Platner sometimes fantasized about raping home intruders in order to express dominance. (A campaign official, asked by the Times about that account, did not dispute it.) That, coupled with his apparently excessive need for sexual attention, points to some erratic and disturbing tendencies. Platner and his wife have characterized public concern about his past behavior and statements as mere gossip and trashy headlines, but there’s good reason to see in this mess both evidence of poor personal judgement and a harbinger of things to come.
Platner has insisted all along that he has changed. This is doubtlessly true, as we all grow and change every day. He has also presented his past indiscretions as a kind of asset, a sign of authenticity. In this political moment, when seemingly every screwup or shortcoming can be spun into evidence of sincerity—of a real and flawed and accessible humanity—perhaps Platner is on to something. “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” the politics reporter Ken Klippenstein wrote in a recent substack post about Platner. But questions remain about just how authentic Platner’s story really is—the island where he farms oysters, for instance, belongs to a well-to-do family, and the oysters appear to be primarily sold to a restaurant operated by Platner’s mother, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]
Failures, mistakes, and regrets are fundamentally human—what is meant when someone is said to be ‘only human’, after all, is that they are due some understanding for their wrongs. Change, too, is human. This notion is central to Platner’s sales pitch. “I made comments I’m not happy about, that I do not agree with, but they came from a time and place in my life, and as I read through the comments released, I can see myself changing,” Platner insisted last year.
Platner today may be nothing like the man he once was. Maybe he adheres now to a code of candor, honor, and prudence. And it may well be the case that the people of Maine are willing to set aside Platner’s past, even his very recent past, because they like his policies, which really do prioritize the needs of ordinary Americans. But Graham Platner arguably owes prospective voters a more fleshed out story about the ways in which he has changed, and a guarantee that those changes are real—and permanent, this time.
The post Has Graham Platner Changed Enough? appeared first on The Atlantic.
