Imagine the ecstasy Democrats felt when they first found Graham Platner. The party, which lost chunks of its working-class base to Donald Trump in 2024, had discovered in Maine a gruff-talking, flannel-wearing, oyster-shucking, progressive man of the people. It made him the perfect person to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent who had vanquished every opponent she’d faced since 1996.
In all the excitement, though, it seemed that the party ditched proper vetting. The result was that the 41-year-old political novice was covering up a Nazi tattoo two months into the campaign. Democrats evidently reasoned that a checkered past in the Trump era needn’t tank a political career, and so party royalty lined up behind the self-described “vegetable-growing, psychedelics-taking socialist.” Never mind that doing so normalized what would have been considered disqualifying behavior a year before. When an “ally who challenges power is under attack,” one prominent Democrat advised in June, party members need to “fight harder.”
That ethos meant that until Jenny Racicot alleged this week that Platner raped her in 2021, Democrats had taken to excusing the inexcusable. The Totenkopf on his chest? He didn’t know any better. Online posts suggesting rape victims should “take some responsibility for themselves”? The candidate had “grown.” He shouldn’t be judged for sexting with women who weren’t his wife, and the allegations of mere physical abuse from an ex-girlfriend were probably politically motivated. She was a Republican, after all. “Seems like a lot of nothing,” one senator said last month.
To counter Collins’s record, Democrats put their trust in Morris Katz, a now-27-year-old alumnus of Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign, who helped produce the video that sent Platner into the progressive stratosphere. The aspiring pol motored into frame with the Maine coastline as a backdrop, interspersed with shots of kettle-bell-swinging, wood-chopping machismo and vows to fight the “oligarchy.” Platner wasn’t just an aesthetic match; he shared activists’ radical urban politics, too. The party needed “something different,” and the bet seemed to pay off. Platner won his primary on June 9.
Yet in shedding their old polish, Democrats along the way also dropped all sense of standards, too. Candidates rarely tick all the boxes on ideology and image, and a few shallow scratches would have revealed deep flaws in Platner’s candidacy. Put aside the long list of personal scandals. The “oysterman” — which, by the way, isn’t a term actual oyster farmers use — turned out not to be the working-class kid he portrayed onstage. The facade started to crack somewhere between revelations about his private schooling, his dad helping out with his mortgage and his mom’s restaurant being his biggest client.
Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, was one of the first people to warn Democrats that their vetting failure was turning into willful blindness. She quit the campaign last October, after learning about his trove of Reddit posts. Despite his denials, the archive of offensive internet commentary revealed that he knew what the skull on his chest meant.
“I was an outcast of the Maine Democratic Party for a number of months due to my refusal to accept Platner as a viable candidate,” McDonald told me. There were “a number of red flags” it chose to ignore because it thought he could win. Allegations of rape made by a woman who sympathizes with Platner’s platform were finally what did it. Platner denies those, too, but on Monday, state party leadership urged him to drop out.
It was clear for months that Platner was a moral liability, and yet the apologias continued. Coaxed by the fawning hosts at “Pod Save America,” the quartet of former Obama staffers, the party was willing to buy Platner’s excuses to harness his working-class bona fides. “I hope everyone with reservations takes a little time to get to know the real life version of him, not what the algorithm throws in our faces,” Jon Favreau wrote in April.
But people in Maine did get to know him, and the gruffness wasn’t translating into actual working-class appeal. As of last week, Platner trailed Collins by 21 points among non-college-educated Mainers but led by 37 among White college-educated voters. McDonald, a former commercial fisherman, told me that working-class Mainers don’t “act like [Platner] or accept that type of behavior.”
But the basic decency of those Maine voters was lost on Dems. After the sexting story broke in late May, Platner rushed to assure senators that nothing worse was coming. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) said she left the meeting “excited.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) was reported as saying there was a difference between marriage problems and alleged sexual assault. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) disliked the distraction, saying the party “should be focusing on the crises facing the working class and electing people of the guts to stand up to the oligarchs who control our country.” Each has since called on him to drop out.
The debacle was able to fester in the first place because of another party failure: the absence of a central message. Instead of finding one, the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer (New York), reverted to the habit of anointing an older — and, in this case, reluctant — establishment figure. Gov. Janet Mills, who would have been the oldest freshman senator ever, ran on a forgettable platform of anti-Trump resistance. In the end, Schumer didn’t give her enough support to have a fighting chance. She suspended her campaign in April.
Democrats’ 2024 defeat sent them on a desperate hunt for a new hero. They’re back where they started: struggling to connect with working-class voters and scrambling to find an alternative who can beat a strong Republican. Under state law, Platner has to drop out by 5 p.m. on July 13 in order for Maine Democrats to nominate someone else by July 27.
It’s a tight turnaround, and the “oysterman” apparently wants some influence in selecting his successor. The party can start to redeem itself by telling him to get lost.
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