Graham Platner’s exit from Maine’s Senate race was a crisis waiting to happen
The day before Maine’s Democratic Senate primary in June, a CBS News reporter asked Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., whether he still supported the left-wing populist candidate Graham Platner in light of the controversies surrounding him. At the time, they included a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol (which he covered up in response to criticism after it was revealed), a history of inflammatory and bigoted comments on social media, and allegations that he mistreated romantic partners.
Sanders replied, “There are people in the United States Senate right now who are not saints.” He explained that he continued to enthusiastically support Platner as the kind of Senate ally who would “have the guts to take on the big money that is dominating this country, who [would] have the guts to say that every American is entitled to healthcare as a human right.”
Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer with little political experience but possessed of an exceptional ability to whip up crowds, won the primary decisively. Yet on Wednesday, just a month after that win, he suspended his political campaign for Senate following a damning report in Politico detailing an allegation that Platner sexually assaulted a romantic partner. (Platner denies the allegation.) Among the many Democrats who withdrew their support and called on him to drop out of the race was Sanders, who apparently decided Platner’s nonsaintly activities had crossed a red line.
It was clear before the primary that Platner had made a number of poor decisions and wasn’t a reliable lefty.
Platner’s downfall illustrates a broader lesson for the left: Ends-justify-the-means thinking can be shortsighted — and can even backfire. Progressives have lost their most high-profile candidate in the midterms, and Democrats now have just a little over two weeks to find a replacement to compete against Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. This is all because of a crisis that had been foreshadowed for months but downplayed by people on the left desperate to secure the next great populist hope.
As I wrote back in October, there were red flags about Platner’s character and questions as to his true ideological commitments very early on. His claim about the tattoo on his chest — that he did not know before the campaign that it resembled a Totenkopf — was possibly true, but it strained credulity. Moreover, his slowness in covering it up was not a promising sign either. Platner apologized for his vulgar online remarks from the past, including homophobic statements, comments downplaying sexual assault in the military, and a post calling rural white Americans racist and stupid, but the language still suggested both immaturity and reactionary views. Platner’s work in Afghanistan in 2018 as a contractor for Constellis — a successor firm to the contemptible private military contractor Blackwater — was not considered as controversial by the mainstream press. But it was worthy of outright condemnation, given how brutally and immorally that war was waged and the dark role of defense contractors in the “war on terror.”
In the run-up to the primary, news of Platner’s poor life choices kept emerging. There were revelations that he had sent sexually explicit text messages to other women while recently married. There were allegations that he had acted in a physically intimidating manner during an argument with a romantic partner. (Platner’s campaign said he “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations.) And more concerning deleted online comments surfaced, including posts in which he described his decision to enlist in the Marines and enter the war in Iraq as an effort to “have an adventure and kill some people.” (This was after protesting against the war as a teenager.) In another post he said it was “hard to explain how much I enjoyed combat.”
Platner’s campaign largely tried to absorb this torrent of scandals by attributing his missteps to post-traumatic stress disorder from tours of combat, and a phase of immaturity that he has evolved beyond. But taken as a whole, it was clear before the primary that Platner had made a number of poor decisions and wasn’t a reliable lefty. There were signs that indicated he was a politically homeless edgelord and thrill-seeker who had recently decided that becoming a populist politician would be his new adventure.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
