Mother Jones
Why the Scandal-Ridden Democrat With a Nazi Tattoo Won Maine’s Senate Primary
Graham Platner, the rugged oyster farmer positioning himself as a progressive populist, won Maine’s Democratic Senate Primary on Tuesday, earning more than 70 percent of the vote so far. He is now slated to face incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins in the November general election.
By some measures, the outcome was long-expected, since Governor Janet Mills announced she was suspending her Senate bid back in April. But at that point, only some of the salacious revelations about Platner’s past had come to light: namely, his tattoo resembling a Nazi Totenkopf symbol (he has since covered it up), and the racist and sexist posts he penned on Reddit more than a decade ago, including ones questioning why Black people “don’t tip” and criticizing sexual assault victims for not taking responsibility for what happened to them.
Since then, additional allegations against Platner have emerged. One June article by the New York Times quoted some of Platner’s past romantic partners, including one who was a Republican operative, who characterized their relationships with Platner as “unsettling.” And a May story by the Wall Street Journal indicated Platner had sexted other women while married. During his speech accepting the primary nomination on Tuesday, Platner leaned into a redemption-arc narrative. “If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics, and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change,” Platner said, speaking at a YMCA. “And the reason I believe that is because I have lived it—and the reason I have lived it is because of my wife.”
“If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics, and change our country, then you must also believe that people can change.”
A couple of decades ago, these revelations would have been disqualifying. But as the Democrats confront how to win back voters who have—now twice—elected a president with a penchant for his own sexist, racist, and even criminal behaviors, Platner’s proliferating controversies are perhaps less disqualifying, and possibly even endearing to some discontented Americans.
As New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie said in a recent podcast episode about the rise of the “dirtbag” Democrat, Platner is not just a candidate but a manifestation of the crossroads at which the Democratic Party now finds itself.
“It stands with how you view the kinds of people that Democrats tend to recruit to run for office. Should they be polished, with the right credentials?” asked Bouie. “Or should there be a bit of a looser and more open approach to candidate recruitment?”
And yet, character does matter. At least it seemed to be relevant in 2020, when Collins focused on her opponent, Maine Speaker of the House Sarah Gideon, the then-Democratic nominee, and accused her of not investigating a fellow state representative who had been accused of preying upon teenage girls. Six years later, I wanted to know how a candidate like Platner pulled off a victory in Maine’s Democratic primary in spite of—or maybe even because of—his questionable past. So I asked Musa al-Gharbi, an associate sociology professor at Stony Brook University who wrote the best-selling book “We Have Never Been Woke,” which examines how political correctness isn’t the remedy to inequality that elites have assumed.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think Graham Platner emerged as the winner in the Maine Senate Primary?
One thing that influenced how the primary shook out is that there are a lot of people within the Democratic coalition whorecognize there’s a large cultural distance between them and the rest of society. Maine is a pretty rural state; it’s a pretty purple state, and so they were maybe thinking, hoping, that someone like Platner would send a different set of social signals than the typical Democrat. The problem, though, is that on the one hand, he’s someone who positions himself as working-class, but the reality is he is from a pretty affluent family. He positions himself as an oyster farmer, but the farm provides stuff mostly to his mother’s restaurant. The house that he lives in was bought with a $200,000 loan from his father. An open question in the general election would be: To what extent are swing voters going to buy into this portrayal of himself that he’s tried to cultivate?
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) is another example of a wealthy person from elite schools who positions himself as this average-Joe kind of a person. Even to the point of wearing hoodies to Congress. Here’s a pro tip: Someone who’s genuinely poor and from a working-class background who made it into Congress wouldn’t be showing up in a hoodie.
So, how much do Platner’s alleged controversies factor into the choices of voters who are on the fence in the General Election?
A lot of working-class voters, irregular voters, and so on, are often willing to overlook various types of indiscretions of politicians who represent them, as long as they have the sense that this person is on their side and not looking down on them—even if the candidate isn’t a saint, even if they have serious character flaws.
In a world where a lot of voters have come to feel like neither party and almost no candidate is actually going to help them or improve their lives, then the main thing that they have left to vote on is basically, “Okay, well, if my life is not going to be meaningfully improved by these folks in Washington either way, then I can at least vote for the person who doesn’t hate me.”
In his best-selling 2024 book, “We Have Never Been Woke,” Sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi explains how elite progressives use social justice rhetoric to gain more power, without helping the marginalized people they claim to care about.
Is there a world in which Platner’s controversies and mainstream media’s reactions to them make him even more appealing to some voters in Maine?
To the extent that people feel like a politician is being held to an irrelevant standard (i.e. Who cares about his sex life? I’m not hiring him to be my son-in-law), or to a needlessly high standard, then that can redound to the benefit of the person who is being targeted. It can generate more sympathy.
For instance, when people were calling Trump racist. For a lot of voters who themselves feel unfairly maligned as racists, it just evokes something in them that actually makes this person more sympathetic to them than they otherwise might be—even if they don’t like the way the [politician] is talking about racial issues.
And you could see a lot ofthis in the polls and surveys, even from most Republican primary voters in 2016. Most Republican voters reported being deeply disturbed by Trump’s rhetoric and behaviors with respect to race and gender. They [largely] didn’t approve of them, which runs contrary to a lot of our assumptions that they voted for him because he’s a racist. No, they voted for him because the other choice was this person that they viewed as corrupt, who called them deplorables, who said that they wanted to put coal out of business.
You also saw this with President Bill Clinton. A lot of polls showed that the way that the media responded to Bill Clinton made the public sympathize with him more, even though they didn’t approve of his behavior. They didn’t approve of him cheating on his wife or exploiting an intern, but they thought the attacks were out of proportion and were devoid, importantly, from the main responsibilities of the job.
Don’t President Donald Trump and Platner have a few things in common? They both ran as populist outsiders facing various controversies regarding racism, sexism, and infidelity. They certainly aren’t perfect on paper, but maybe that makes some voters feel less judged for their own improprieties?
They’re both deeply flawed candidates in many respects. But one disadvantage that Platner has is that a lot of the people who have felt frustrated or alienated have voted Republican in recent cycles. The Republican Party has been the party of people who feel that sense of alienation, and in this case, Platner is running against a Republican—a Republican, sure, who bucks Trump sometimes, but Platner is also positioning himself as someone who’s bucking Trump. For the swing voters who still think the Republican Party is a better vessel for their frustrations and more proximate to them in various respects, Platner has an uphill struggle there.
That said, one thing you can clearly seein the polling is that a whole bunch of folks who drifted away from the Democratic party in recent cycles are now very frustrated with Trump. They still don’t hold the Democrats in high esteem, either. But it’s a two-party system, and Trump is the one in power, so if people are dissatisfied with the way things are going, that will probably benefit Democrats in these midterms.
Why do you think swing voters are becoming dissatisfied with Trump?
One of the things anti-woke people often take for granted when they get elected is that they were elected in the first place because the public is tired of culture-war stuff taking precedence at the expense of the things that they care about. Rather than concluding, “Oh, people are tired of the culture wars,” the message that anti-woke people often internalize is, “Oh, people are done with left-leaning culture wars.”
Some anti-woke people, like Trump, think voters want the culture wars to simply go in the other direction. If you look at the Trump administration and its focus on wanting to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and put Trump’s face on everything from passports to coins—there’s this really intense focus on symbols, even though a lot of Americans are struggling with more concrete things. People whovoted against Biden voted because he seemed like this addled old man: The world seemed to be burning, and he seemed to be incapable of doing anything about it. Well, that’s basically the same situation that voters facenow with Trump in office, so that probably won’t work out well for him in the midterms.
If a conservative candidate were facing identical allegations to Platner’s, do you think the media and other perceived elites would be responding in the same way?
Certainly, if a Republican candidate said, “Hey, look, I got this Nazi tattoo. I didn’t know what it meant at the time”—they wouldn’t be given the same grace.
In terms of the extramarital stuff, that’s hard to determine, because Trump has really lowered the bar with that for Republicans. In the past, a Republican who had serial infidelity would have been lambasted by the media as a hypocrite, especially if he positioned himself as some kind of Christian or family-values kind of guy. In Platner’s case, he doesn’t really position himself that way. He says he loves his wife and all, but he’s not the family-values candidate, and the Democratic Party isn’t the family-values party. So he’s maybe less susceptible to that kind of angle.
What should establishment or elite Democrats and the mainstream media learn from Platner’s race so far?
Someone like Platner is kind of directionally correct for the party. He’s plain-spoken and tends to emphasize issues voters care about in a very economically populist way. He’s also unapologetically manly. He’s a war vet, he has a strong physique, he does a job that is, at least superficially, physically demanding. He has this kind of unapologetic masculinity about him that isn’t necessarily toxic, or that doesn’t have to be. You’d want a guy whose understanding of what manliness means is—among other things—taking care of your family, being a good leader, putting the needs of your community ahead of yourself and your own ambitions and desires. Unfortunately, the extent to which Platner could be this kind of positive male alternative is undercut by the allegations against him.
That doesn’t mean women can’t be strong Democratic candidates. The real problem for both Hillary [Clinton] and Kamala [Harris], wasn’t that they were women, it’s that they were both kind of urban, highly credentialed people whose whole public persona and manner was like, “Look, I have all these wonky technical plans, and I’ve workshopped everything I said with seven different committees before it comes out of my mouth.” If [Democrats] nominate a man who’s like that, that man is not going to succeed in Maine, either.
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