Platner Just Made Things Harder For Democrats

The Nazi tattoo wasn’t bad enough to force Graham Platner to abandon his Senate bid, his defenders argued earlier this year. Any young Marine, under the powerful influence of alcohol and immaturity, might see a skull and crossbones and think: Badass. The now-deleted Reddit posts mocking rural white people, insulting cops, and making light of assault? Well, chalk that up to the same. Extramarital sexting is not ideal, of course, but then there was Platner’s wife assuring us that the couple had healed. And never mind the allegations of volatile behavior from a couple of past girlfriends; one of them is a Republican activist.

But when Politico reported on Monday that a woman had accused Platner of rape, even his most steadfast supporters began to call for his exit. And tonight, the oysterman finally gave in: “For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” he said in a video posted to social media. But Platner added to the problems facing Democrats as he exited the race. He fervently denied the sexual-assault allegations—and seemed to imply that the party establishment was somehow responsible. “We did it the right way. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change,” he said. “And now they are not going to let us have it.”

Democrats were never going to win easily in Maine, where for nearly 30 years the electorally sturdy Susan Collins has hung on to her Senate seat. But pile up all of Platner’s baggage, and defeating her might have been an especially difficult project. Now Democrats have a chance to replace Platner with a new candidate—someone who is, perhaps, less encumbered—and redouble their efforts to flip Collins’s seat.

But each silver lining has its corresponding cumulonimbus, and in this case, it’s that Platner has assembled a powerful grassroots coalition in Maine that may or may not be transferable. It depends on whom the party replaces him with—and how. “They may get a mulligan,” the political analyst Charlie Cook, who lives in Maine, told us. “That doesn’t mean they’ll hit it well.”

The implosion of Platner’s candidacy—first bit by bit and then all at once—has Democrats nationwide throwing up their hands in exasperation. The party must flip at least four GOP-held Senate seats in November to capture the majority, and this particular seat has long been considered the party’s most important, and maybe most feasible, pickup opportunity: Maine is the only state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 where an incumbent Republican senator is now up for reelection. Collins, who is running for a sixth term, is something of a unicorn in these polarized times. In 2020, she defeated a well-funded Democrat, Sara Gideon, by nearly nine points even as Joe Biden carried the state by roughly the same amount. But Collins is now 73 years old, and lately, her approval ratings have slumped.

For months last year, Democrats in Maine and in Washington were waiting for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s preferred candidate, the two-term Governor Janet Mills, to decide whether she was going to run. Mills initially expressed ambivalence about the race and put off a decision until last fall. Other battle-tested Democrats were uninterested or opted for other races.

[Read: A 79-year-old freshman senator? ]

Into the void charged Platner, who emerged last fall seemingly out of nowhere but with a well-connected and well-choreographed campaign rollout managed by advisers who had worked with high-profile insurgent candidates: John Fetterman for Senate in Pennsylvania, in 2022 (before his more recent shift rightward), and Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City in 2025. They saw Platner as a gruff but charismatic oyster farmer with a military-combat record who could channel both the left’s progressive energy and the electorate’s growing distaste for establishment politicians. By the time Mills finally declared her candidacy, in October, many of the voters she would have relied on in a primary had already decided to support Platner.

Platner led Mills in nearly all public polling, sometimes by wide margins and despite the revelations about his past. At the end of April, Mills, who is 78, suspended her campaign, essentially conceding the Democratic nomination to Platner.

Establishment Democrats were irritated, and not only because they found Platner’s behavior both personally offensive and politically damaging. They saw a campaign that seemed to make little effort to vet a first-time candidate, and a candidate who did not appear to have been honest with his own campaign. “If we’re going to start running people that are unconventional, we have to be even more strict in the way that they run their campaigns,” Yemisi Egbewole, a Democratic strategist who worked in the Biden White House, told us a few weeks ago. “We can pluck people out of obscurity, but it’s the responsibility of the candidates themselves and also the people that are running this candidate to frame an accurate narrative.”

Other Democrats questioned whether Platner was really the “authentic” working-class outsider he claimed to be. He had been educated at expensive private schools in New England and, like many future congressional candidates, had worked as a staffer on Capitol Hill. Possibly the biggest customer for his oyster business is a nearby restaurant owned by his mother. Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way, who’d backed Mills, told us in an interview last month that Platner “feels like a D.C. person’s idea of a working-class candidate.”

The crumbling of Platner’s campaign forced a reckoning for his most loyal backers. And reckon they did: Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, and many other progressives who had stuck with Platner through the drip-drip-drip of allegations rescinded their support for him this week after Platner’s ex-girlfriend alleged that he had entered her home in 2021 and raped her. (Platner has called the allegation “categorically untrue.”)

“The bottom line is, there’s no secrets in politics,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, a Sanders-aligned group, told us yesterday. “Candidates should be transparent with the electorate. We grassroots organizers invest a lot of time and energy to advance a cause in this movement, and it’s disappointing when we are let down by our standard-bearers.” Did he feel betrayed by Platner? “It is a punch in the gut, given the level of energy and enthusiasm that he engendered,” Geevarghese said. “You feel deeply, deeply disappointed.”

The question now is how the party responds. “It is really important that Democrats act with confidence and with clarity in deciding on their strategy moving forward,” David Farmer, a Maine Democratic strategist, told us. “The longer this carries on, the weaker position we will be in come November.” Who will replace Platner as the party’s nominee—and can that candidate reassemble the coalition that, until recently, seemed at least fairly well positioned to give the Democrats a must-win Senate seat?

Perhaps just as important: How will that replacement be chosen? State law requires that a replacement candidate be named by July 27, so the state party must settle quickly on a process for selecting him or her—something officials said yesterday that they were prepared to do and would have done by now if not for Platner’s obstinance. “We look forward to making this process public as soon as Graham Platner formally withdraws from this race,” the executive director of the Maine Democratic Party said in a video statement.

All options appear to be on the table: State party leaders could meet behind closed doors to pick a new contender. They could hold a party convention, wherein state delegates select a nominee. They might hold a caucus. Perhaps the most likely move is to deploy a statewide version of the mini-primary that some national Democrats wanted the party to hold in 2024 before it anointed Harris as the replacement for Biden atop the ticket. “The reality is, they have to choose a process that party members will accept as legitimate,” Mark Brewer, the chair of the political-science department at the University of Maine, told us. “If it’s a process that’s perceived as being controlled by the so-called establishment, they won’t go for that.”

Already, Democrats are picking their horses. Some of Platner’s supporters quickly endorsed Troy Jackson, the former state-Senate president who had earned Sanders’s endorsement in his bid for governor earlier this year. Jackson, who finished third in that race, filed papers to run for Senate yesterday and declared his candidacy shortly after Platner’s announcement. His backers included Our Revolution, which had endorsed Platner last fall and, in calling for his exit on Monday, warned the Democratic establishment against replacing him with “another status-quo candidate.”

Platner, too, was trying to influence whom the party might select to replace him before agreeing to bow out. “The ballot line belongs to the people of Maine,” he said in his statement tonight. A few hours earlier, his campaign had been asking volunteers to weigh in on Platner’s next move, writing that the Democratic Party “must consult the feedback and proposals of the people who built” the movement. But some in the party worried that giving Platner a say in the decision would undercut the new nominee. Republicans clearly relish this prospect. “The Democrat candidate in Maine will either be an alleged rapist with a Nazi tattoo, or someone he selects with the same ‘values and vision,’” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement.

Others suggest that perhaps this moment presents an opportunity for Democrats to move more toward the middle. Recent polling of the Maine Senate race showed Platner running behind a generic Democratic nominee. Although Platner “had consolidated the Democratic base, no question about it, his problem was reaching beyond it,” Cook said.

[Read: The Democratic base is angry]

Maybe, Cook and other analysts suggested, another candidate could better appeal to independents in Maine who are tired of Collins but aren’t particularly eager to embrace populism. Someone like the centrist Representative Jared Golden—who has recently taken himself out of contention for the job—or Mills. Or maybe that person is Nirav Shah, the former director of Maine’s CDC, who came in second in the nomination fight for governor. In a statement declaring his interest, Shah called for potential replacement candidates to agree to participating in at least one televised debate and holding town halls “across every corner of the state.”

Cook said that a generic Democrat could win in Maine. But especially these days, the Democratic base isn’t interested in generic—or safe or milquetoast or whatever synonym we’re using these days for moderate. The base wants fire and fury. And this puts Democrats in Maine somewhere between a rock and a cliff: Replace Platner with an ideologically adjacent progressive, and you’ve probably got the base, but you might not attract Maine independents. Replace him with a Mills-adjacent electability candidate, and many dejected base voters might stay home in November.

Platner’s resignation gives Democrats some relief—but also a brand-new problem.