Not even Sen. Elizabeth Warren seems to care about Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo. The progressive Massachusetts Democrat endorsed Platner in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary last week, just days after his opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, released her first attack ad on the 41-year-old Marine veteran and oyster farmer.
The ad features women reacting to old Platner social media posts making light of sexual assault. That’s just one scandalous theme in a trove of more than 1,800 deleted Reddit posts. There’s no shortage of material from Platner’s past: Socialist Rifle Association instructor, self-labeled “antifa supersoldier,” and did I mention the (now covered-over) Nazi tattoo? This week, Mills released another ad highlighting an old anti-gay slur and other offensive language. “The closer you look,” the ad concludes, “the worse it gets.”
Platner has apologized for some of his past posts, saying he was struggling after his military service. And when I talked to voters, his controversies never came up — unless I asked about them.
“There’s always going to be controversies brought up on both sides,” Tom Caswell, a 56-year-old nurse at a veterans facility, told me in front of a Walmart in Oxford, Maine. There’s “no controversy,” 75-year-old Denise Johnson said at a town hall for Platner in South Berwick. “Are you kidding me?” she said, and pointed to the controversies surrounding President Donald Trump. “Do you think a tattoo is gonna matter to me?”
As Mills trails in the polls, she has resorted to spotlighting oppo hits to slow the political newcomer’s momentum as they vie for the chance to unseat Maine’s senior U.S. senator, Republican Susan Collins. Mills’s calculation seems to be that voters haven’t had enough time to acquaint themselves with Platner’s iniquities. But in today’s political climate, Americans are also plenty conditioned to controversy. And Democrats, desperate to reanimate the party, have been quick to drop the faux outrage. Though the 78-year-old Mills still has establishment backing in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), big-name senators like Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) are supporting Platner. Many Maine voters feel similarly.
Caswell is backing Platner because “I think he really cares about Mainers” and the state is “ready for a change.” Even some of Mills’s supporters are unbothered by her opponent’s past. At one stop on her “Candid Conversations” tour, at a bar in Westbrook, 83-year-old Jay Lacke explained that he prefers Mills because of her experience. But he didn’t begrudge Platner his social media history.
“I did stupid things when I was young, and even when I was not so young, I would make some really stupid posts,” he told me. “I’d get angry. I’d go online, I’d post something, and then I’d say, ‘Why the hell did I do that?’”
Anger is as central to Platner’s political survival as it is to his appeal. He is relying on his supporters to understand the human impulse to say — or tattoo — abhorrent things when angry. And voters are either satisfied with that explanation or cynical enough about the current state of politics not to care. In any case, Platner is packing venues across the Pine Tree State.
When a March 8 town hall in South Berwick filled the Marshwood High School auditorium to capacity, Platner strode right into the overflow crowd in the atrium. If a circle of people hadn’t formed around him, it would have been difficult to pick him out: The bearded strawberry blond wore a Patagonia fleece paired with khaki-colored jeans and Blundstone boots.
“The ultra rich and powerful … they hold all of the money, and they got it, they got it because they cheated,” Platner intoned in a gruff baritone, one hand in his pocket. “I refuse to believe that some billionaire works so much harder than the people I know in eastern Maine who have three to four jobs just to keep a roof over their head.”
Gone are the days of Democrats peddling hope. Platner’s stump speech relies entirely on grievances: the “hoarded” wealth of the ultrarich, establishment politicians who are paid off to protect it, wars he blames on Trump’s desire to distract us from “reading the Epstein files,” a Supreme Court that’s simply an “activist wing of a form of American conservatism.” The biggest applause line of the night was his plan to “bring all of these people who’ve been breaking the law” during the Trump administration “in front of Senate committees” to “hold them accountable in front of the American people.” He added: “I want to drag ICE agents in front of a Senate committee. We cannot just move on again.”
What Platner makes up for in anger, he lacks in policy particulars. His America is a land of fixed wealth and potential. The only way to spread prosperity is to take it back from those who hoard it, or to have the government create more.
“We need to go after wealth where it is right now, via the tax code, because the wealth is not down here with regular people,” he told me. When it comes to funding big-ticket promises like universal health care, Platner shrugged off concerns about finding the money to do so, citing the $8 trillion spent on post-9/11 wars. “Nobody’s taxes went up” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he told me. “We just magicked it up and threw it away.”
It might be hard to hocus-pocus $32 trillion, which is the estimated cost of Medicare-for-all. And when I expressed worry about tax hikes for more than just the ultra-wealthy, Platner told me to read John Maynard Keynes. “We’ve got, we have plenty of economic theories and structures that allow us, and have allowed us, by the way, in the past, to use public money for large public projects.”
Platner backs a billionaire minimum tax, but it’s still unclear where he draws the line between money-hoarder and self-made success. “I’m not talking about taxing people who made $25 million a year because they, like, started a small business and got very successful,” he explained. “I’m talking about going after the corporate power, or the corporate wealth, and, frankly, the financialized wealth.”
When the state legislature’s efforts to pass a millionaire’s tax came up, Platner said he wasn’t involved. But he supports “the concept.”
At this point in the primary, Platner’s appeal isn’t the finer points of his policies — it’s his novel approach to politics. His accessibility, his youth, his anger and, yes, his mistakes are piquing voters’ curiosity more than repelling them. Gabe Cohen, a 26-year-old who drove up from New Hampshire to see the candidate, told me, “He’s part of the next generation of politicians that’s going to change the face of the country.”
That’s if Platner can pull off his big ideas. Anger might be enough to win the primary in June. But it will be difficult to persuade working Mainers to replace the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee with a junior senator who thinks he can deliver universal health care without raising their taxes.
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