Graham Platner is “reflecting on the best path forward” for his Senate campaign. That is the phrase this week for a nominee whose own party spent the weekend telling him to quit. Maine Democrats handed him the nomination with 72 percent of the vote in June. It’s July, and Schumer, Gillibrand, Warren, and Bernie all want him gone before the withdrawal deadline on the 13th.
So everyone is asking how we ended up here. We ended up here in stages, every one of them public, while a specific slice of the left spent the whole time insisting the warnings were the real problem.
What “obvious” actually looked like
The week Janet Mills entered the race last October, the drip started. On October 16, CNN surfaced years of deleted Reddit posts where Platner called himself a communist, called cops bastards, called rural white Mainers racist or stupid, and asked why Black people don’t tip. He apologized in a video, blamed a bad stretch after Iraq and Afghanistan. Five days later, a family video surfaced showing the tattoo on his chest: a Totenkopf, the SS death’s head. He said he got it drunk with other Marines, thought it was a generic skull and crossbones, didn’t know what it was, had it covered.
I’m Jewish. I’d like to tell you the death’s head was the moment the campaign should have ended, and for me it was. What I can’t put down is that it obviously wasn’t that moment for enough other people. He wore it, he covered it, he said he hadn’t known, and eight months later he won a primary by forty points. In February he quote-tweeted a clip that came from the white supremacist Stew Peters, then deleted it. The symbol turned out to be a thing you could apologize past.
The accusers nobody would spend credibility on
In June, the Times reported that multiple women had described unsettling behavior. One of them, Lyndsey Fifield, said he twisted her arm behind her back and closed her into a bedroom during an argument. Fifield is a conservative operative. She’s worked for the Heritage Foundation and the Independent Women’s Forum.
You already know what happened to her account, because you can guess it from that last sentence. A lot of people on the left read “Heritage Foundation” and stopped there. CNN’s Abby Phillip said it out loud: the party didn’t believe her because of the letter next to her name. Believe women, and then the terms and conditions. I had people in my Bluesky mentions telling me that these women were less credible because of their background.
It took until July 6, when Jenny Racicot accused Platner of raping her in 2021, for the caucus to move. Racicot isn’t a Republican. Platner has called her account categorically false. But the timing is the whole story: a Republican woman described physical abuse in June and got waved off, and the machine only started turning when someone without the wrong registration came forward. The standard wasn’t the severity of what was alleged. It was who was doing the alleging. She said she didn’t come forward because she liked his politics, and I presume was hoping the party, or anyone, would make the decision for her.
”But he’s against the billionaires”
Even now there are people holding the line. Chris Murphy said he “sounds like a human being.” Ruben Gallego called the campaign authentic. Bernie said he went through a dark period. The framing on sites like Common Dreams is that this is a corporate-media hit on a working-class champion.
I want to be careful here, because I actually agree with Platner on the money, and a lot of other things!! Citizens United is a disaster, billionaires are buying elections, and a candidate who says so plainly is rare and worth something. None of that is the point. The point is that “he’s against moneyed interests” got used as a shield against every other thing on the list. The economics being right didn’t make the tattoo smaller. It didn’t make Fifield less credible. A movement that lets one correct position buy down a Nazi symbol and a pile of accusations is telling on itself, and the tell is that it will do this again for the next guy who says the right things about billionaires.
Where that leaves us
Mostly it’s left me lost. The one thing I can point to cleanly is the seat: a race against Susan Collins that looked more winnable than it’s looked in years, and now might not be. Everything else I’m still stuck on.
It was clear a long time ago that this was a bad guy. People I respect came out to defend him anyway, and I genuinely cannot tell you why. I’ve turned it over for months and the only answer I keep landing on is the seat, which means the answer is that the seat was worth a Nazi tattoo and a stack of accusations to a lot of people who would swear up and down that it wasn’t. A seat that seems winnable by multiple of the other candidates that ran for it. What was the value prop past that? I don’t have one. If you have one, I’d like to hear it, and I mean that.
And now there’s a fracture, and I don’t see it closing soon. None of the people who did this are going to apologize. They’ll say they were lied to. Or that the timing was convenient, the rape allegation landing right at the withdrawal deadline. Or that they were defending the movement and not the man. And I’ll still be standing here wondering how much more obvious it needed to get.