Graham Platner’s “reputation is in tatters,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post, and “so should be the reputations of all those national figures” who tried to make him a U.S. senator. For months, Democrats stuck by the 41-year-old political novice, primary voters’ choice to challenge Maine’s longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November, despite a steady drip of scandals. They weren’t fazed by his troubling Reddit posts, the Nazi chest tattoo, his habit of sexting women not his wife, or claims of physical abuse by an ex-girlfriend. It took one ex’s claim that Platner showed up drunk at her house in 2021 and raped her to dislodge him from “the warm embraces” of left-wing populists such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leaving Platner little choice but to end his “ludicrous-from-the-start” campaign. Democrats would have you believe they turned on Platner because of the rape accusation, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch—an accusation that Platner, in a “mopey, 11-minute” exit video, called “all false.” In truth, they looked at his sinking poll numbers and reports that this supposedly working-class oysterman was actually the privately schooled son of a successful attorney, who sold his oysters mostly to his mother’s upscale restaurant. As Democrats scramble to find a new nominee for a race that could decide control of the Senate, what lessons can they learn from this “Frankenstein-tier experiment gone wrong?”
They can start by accepting the need to vet their candidates, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Platner was discovered and groomed for the spotlight by a pair of progressive operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who were “so infatuated with his identity—a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics—that they failed to do their due diligence.” This was Platner’s first run for office, yet they skipped the standard $20,000 background check for a budget-friendly “expedited” version that didn’t find the many skeletons in his closet. These are the corners you cut when you “fall in love too easily,” said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe. Why bother vetting when in this gravel-voiced Marine combat veteran they’d been handed the perfect “white working-man whisperer” to sell socialism to the masses?
The truth is darker than that, said Monica Potts in The New Republic. When Platner’s “questionable treatment of women” started coming to light, his boosters did more than defend him. They celebrated his “checkered history” as proof of Platner’s “authenticity,” that he was, in the words of independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, not a “smoothgroin” politician. In defending Platner, Democratic elites revealed their disdain for blue-collar voters, said Noah Rothman in National Review. A binge-drinking, woman-abusing, Nazi-curious liar, they clearly thought, is “just what you get when you meet the American working class where they live.”
Platner was a “train wreck,” said Perry Bacon in The New Republic, but it wasn’t crazy to think an unconventional outsider might resonate with Maine’s white, rural electorate. Maybe not, said The New York Times in an editorial, but Platner’s initial appeal “was never really about oysters or facial hair.” He won June’s primary by 50 points because, unlike many Democratic candidates, he seemed to stand for something beyond simply opposing President Trump—he spoke with “conviction” about fixing “an economy that seems rigged for the powerful.” The lesson of Platner is not that the party needs to find scandal-free saviors, but rather that it should find a “purpose.”