The leading candidate in the Democratic primary for Maine’s Senate seat, Graham Platner, has had a very long week.
Reports emerged last weekend that Platner had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with several women while married to his spouse of two and a half years. If that was not bad enough, the New York Times released a report Wednesday containing alarming accounts from multiple women who dated Platner. The stories of Platner from the interviews run the gamut of derogatory comments about women, violent thoughts, and physical intimidation.
One woman alleges that Platner often referred to women as “hatchet wounds” and would fantasize about what he would do to a home intruder: “If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them … I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”
Platner has had to pick and choose which allegations to address, such as his unfaithfulness and sexually crude statements, but he denied in an interview Thursday the allegation that he twisted an ex-girlfriend’s arm and held her in a room, saying the claim was “politically motivated.”
One woman also alleged that Platner was aware of the significance of his skull-and-crossbones tattoo as a Nazi symbol, even referring to it as “my Totenkopf.” Platner had denied knowledge of the tattoo’s significance when the controversy arose last year.
With the Maine primary fast approaching, as it is set to take place on Tuesday, national Democratic figures have proven reluctant to abandon Platner or even acknowledge the extent of the allegations against him. Responding to questions about Platner before the release of the Times report, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, “Is he a saint? I guess not. I don’t know too many saints here.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., also defended Platner before the most recent slew of allegations, with Gallego adding, “he’s willing to accept that he has grown as a person, and I think we should accept that.”
Platner is slated to appear with Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., at a “get-out-the-vote” rally Friday evening in Maine.
The brush-off of these allegations comes as little surprise with how crucial Maine is to Democratic hopes of flipping the Senate in the November midterms. The Maine seat is one of the handful seen as viable pickups for Democrats this cycle to flip the 53–47 Republican majority. Incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, currently serving in her fifth consecutive term, is viewed as highly vulnerable due to the state having swung by 7 percent of the vote to Kamala Harris in 2024. Without Maine, Democrats would need an upset election in one of the states won by President Trump in 2024 to flip the Senate majority.
The question for Democrats moving forward is not just whether Platner can survive the scandal in the polls. It is whether a party that so often trades on arguments of “character” and “decency” can explain why these qualities suddenly become negotiable when it is their man under fire. The party brass has made its bed with the well-polling Platner, and now they have to lie in it.
