BAR HARBOR, Maine — As Democrats wrestle with the past behavior of their Senate candidate in Maine, one name keeps coming up: Donald Trump.
The president lowered the bar, some liberal voters and lawmakers argue, when he won the highest office in the land despite facing allegations of misconduct from multiple women and being caught on tape bragging about grabbing women’s genitals. The stakes, they say, are too high to obsess over a candidate’s past when flipping control of the Senate to Democrats would give the country a needed check on the president.
“Look who’s in the White House,” said Abigail Woods, a 37-year-old city councillor in Biddeford. “Purity politics don’t get us anywhere.”
Democrat Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and veteran, faces Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the fall, and winning the blue state is crucial to Democrats’ uphill battle to retake the Senate. Platner won his party’s nomination in the state’s primary Tuesday, easily overcoming a small protest vote for Gov. Janet Mills (D), who suspended her campaign in April.
Platner has weathered reports that he sent sexually explicit texts to multiple women while married and had volatile relationships with women in the past. He also faced questions over a Nazi-linked tattoo he said he mistakenly got while serving in the military and has now covered up, and over deleted social media posts in which he insulted rural Mainers and police officers and downplayed the seriousness of sexual assault. Platner has disavowed the posts, saying that when he made them he was suffering from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder after multiple tours in Iraq as a Marine.
This week, Trump ridiculed Democrats for making “excuses” for Platner. “I mean, he’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably,” the president told reporters.
The controversies have opened up a debate among Democrats about how much matters of personal character should count after a decade when they’ve decried the thrice-divorced Trump’s personal failings, with little result. Before he won reelection, Trump was held liable for sexual abuse in a civil case in New York. (He denied the charge and has never been criminally charged with sexual assault.)
Some Democratic voters in the Trump era are not impressed by lesser scandals and don’t want to play by a different set of rules than the opposition.
Joan Brown, 77, who lives in Skowhegan, was disappointed by Platner’s texts, but she said they weren’t a dealbreaker for her.
“Is this the first man in civilization who’s ever been a pig?” she asked.
Whatever Platner’s issues, they aren’t on the same scale as Trump’s, Brown said. Trump is “morally bankrupt” and “doesn’t care about people.” She thinks Platner does.
When the president slammed Platner as a “thug,” Brown laughed. “I thought, [Trump’s] the thug.”
Other voters say they appreciate that Platner has openly said he made mistakes while he was struggling with PTSD, at a time when many politicians refuse to ever admit fault. Platner has denied an ex-girlfriend’s account in the New York Times that he restrained her in a room and roughly pulled her out of a taxi during their relationship, however, saying he never was physically violent in his past relationships and pointing to the woman’s history as a Republican operative to cast doubt on her claims.
“I have listened to many Zoom calls with Graham. He’s talked about the tattoo, he’s talked about the old Reddit posts,” said Kathleen Grover, a 73-year-old attending Platner’s Bar Harbor rally last week. “I find him to be completely credible.”
Platner’s resilience has flummoxed political consultants and experts. Not so long ago, his tattoo and his more controversial Reddit comments “would have been disqualifying,” said David Farmer, a Democratic political consultant in Maine.
The relationship between character-related scandals and election prospects for aspiring politicians “really broke down” starting in 2016, when Trump survived the release of the “Access Hollywood” recording, where he spoke in lewd terms about groping women, Farmer said.
“Things that would have been completely campaign ending and disqualifying a decade or so ago, that’s no longer the case,” said Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine. “The primary driver of that is the Trumpfication of American politics. He changed the rules.”
Many of the Republicans who abandoned Trump on moral grounds have lodged some of the heaviest criticism of Democratic Platner supporters, calling them hypocrites. These “Never Trump” conservatives paid a political price in many cases and are now wondering what happened to the Democrats who applauded them for it.
“Democrats have built their coalition on a premise that women’s voices matter and that character in public life is not optional,” former senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona who frequently criticized Trump, wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post. “Those are excellent values to base a political movement on. Here is a chance to prove they mean it.”
Joe Walsh, a former congressman and former Republican from Illinois, wrote on social media that Democrats should admit to themselves that “you’re just like every Trump supporter … they don’t care about personal character either.”
Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential run, said there’s no doubt that Platner will lose some Democratic-leaning voters over his past behavior. “But you also are going to have a group of people who show up because they love this guy and he’s from outside of the system,” he said. The question is which group will be bigger, he said.
Recent elections have shown that voters don’t always reward the candidate they see as having the best moral character. In 2024, voters said Kamala Harris had a strong moral character over Trump by a double-digit margin, according to Gallup polling, but Trump won on being a strong leader and showing an ability to get things done. After President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky became public during his second term, Democrats over-performed in the 1998 midterm elections, and Clinton’s approval ratings stayed high.
Trump’s Teflon-like quality so far has appeared unique to him and untransferable. Republican Herschel Walker lost his 2022 Senate race in Georgia, despite Trump’s backing, after allegations from women that he had paid for their abortions, which contradicted his antiabortion stance in the race. This year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who won a hard-fought Republican Senate primary with Trump’s backing, is testing whether he can withstand prior corruption investigations and the public airing of an extramarital affair in a general election against Democrat James Talarico.
Sue Hall, 67, a veteran who is not registered with either party but dislikes Trump, said that at first Platner’s military service and work as an oyster farmer intrigued her. Then she learned that Platner had written on Reddit in 2013 that women concerned about rape should avoid heavy drinking and “take responsibility for themselves.” Hall survived a sexual assault when she was in the military, she said. “So no,” she said. “Not my vote.”
Hall said she is flabbergasted by the support Platner has garnered. “People want Trump out of there so bad that they see a Democrat and they’re like, ‘Yay!’” she said.
Platner has capitalized on an antiestablishment mood among Democrats in Maine. After losing the presidential election in 2024, Democrats’ view of their own party dropped, according to a February AP-NORC poll, and many voters are clamoring for major changes to the brand and new blood. That sentiment helped prompt Mills, the sitting governor, to exit the race.
“The national pundits, the political establishment, they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by,” Platner said in his victory speech earlier this week. “But in trying so hard to understand me, they fail to understand that this is not about me at all. This is a movement about us.”
The post Democrats have a one-word defense for supporting Graham Platner: Trump appeared first on Washington Post.
