Let’s start simply by listing some of what’s made Graham Platner one of the most stomach-turning political candidates in memory. Democrats seem set to choose the Maine “oyster farmer” and former Marine to try ousting five-term Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in November’s midterm elections.
If they do pick him, however, it will be despite knowing that:
- Platner had a tattoo on his chest depicting the skull and crossbones insignia of the SS, the black-uniformed Nazi military force that ran Hitler’s extermination camps. This Totenkopf was inked onto Platner’s right pectoral muscle in 2007 when he was 23. He covered it up last year when it became a political liability, and he claims he didn’t understand what it connoted when he had the work done. There are acres of room for doubt about the truth of this, not least because military personnel tend to know the significance of their body art in minute detail.
- Platner does not like, let alone love, his country. He informed readers on Reddit in 2021, only five years before beginning his run for office, that he had “become a communist” and he admitted having lost all his patriotism, saying: “I did used to love America, or at least the idea of it. These days, I’m pretty disgusted by it all.” There are many things citizens should be able to assume about their political leaders, and one, surely, is that he or she has a decent and affectionate prejudice in favor of our nation.
- Platner has gloried in being ostentatiously revolting, flouting norms of decency as outrageously as he can. For example, he posted detailed and explicit descriptions of sexual acts and sexual organs on social media, and he revealed that he repeatedly masturbated in portable lavatories, saying nauseatingly that he was primed to do so by the blue-water smell of them.
- He ran an account for years on a messaging platform used by sexual predators. His avatar on the site was a photograph of himself from the neck down, wearing nothing but a white towel draped below the waist. In the background of this charming self-portrait is a gaping lavatory with the lid up.
- He mocked a private soldier who had won a Purple Heart after being shot four times in a clash with the Taliban in Afghanistan. On the social media site Reddit, Platner commented, writing, “Dumb motherf***er didn’t deserve to live. At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt. Poor marksmanship on the Taliban’s part is the only reason this mouth breather made it home. He managed to make every s*** decision possible when it comes to small unit combat.” Platner deleted the post but did not apologize for it.
- He sent sexting messages to six or more women shortly after his 2023 marriage to Amy Gertner, who remains his wife. She revealed the existence of these messages to members of her husband’s Senate campaign in 2025 when they were conducting internal opposition research to prepare for the rigors of intense public and political scrutiny. A campaign aide who resigned made the texts public last month.
This is far from a complete list of Platner’s depravities, and Democrats reasonably fear there could be more. Any one of them would in an earlier epoch have disqualified Platner for office. A politician who was revealed to have behaved as he has done would have skulked away from the public eye and hidden his face in shame. The fact that Platner for the moment shows no sign of regarding his disgrace as sufficient reason for withdrawing from the Senate race says much about the condition of our culture and politics, about the cynicism of the parties, and about the personal shamelessness of the candidate himself.
Some aspects of this affair reflect particularly on the Democrats, but certainly Platner’s vulgarity, boorishness, fecklessness, and defiant rejection of decent norms do not. As Jessica Tarlov, a Democratic Fox News contributor, noted this week, members of her party can hardly be blamed for rejecting lectures from Republicans, who have embraced President Donald Trump and who more recently gave the odious Ken Paxton a thumping victory over the decent and respectable Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the Texas primary.
Platner would probably not have become the Democratic frontrunner or been able to sustain that position in the face of such revelations about him, nor could he have been so powerful as to force Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) to suspend her campaign against him, had America not become coarsened by the declining standards of its culture and by constant exposure to the low moral quality of some politicians.
We have lived for a decade with the crude, damn-your-eyes defiance of Trump. Then again, Trump would not have been possible if Bill Clinton had not defined presidential deviancy down a generation ago with his sexual encounters with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office and with his associated self-abuse in a small adjoining room.
Pollster Dick Morris revealed during the Lewinsky investigation that Clinton asked him to conduct an instant poll to see if he could survive in office if he told the truth about his affair. Morris told him he couldn’t and Clinton responded, “Well, we’ll just have to win.” He did not choose to be left alone with a bottle of Scotch and a revolver, as he might in years gone by. He simply wanted to calculate whether truth or lying was most expedient. Truth was held hostage and then killed by political ambition. This set the standard for politicians to choose bravado, deception, and toughing it out rather than honesty in the face of disgrace, followed by resignation. It pointed to the declining trajectory that has led to the candidacy and surly defiance of Platner.
Platner’s past depravities are far from the only things that demonstrate his unfitness for election to the Senate. After news broke of his extramarital sexting, the candidate appeared arm-in-arm with his long-suffering wife to face reporters. It was an empty show, not an honest reckoning. He neither admitted nor denied reports of his deeds but falsely blamed the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, which broke the sexting story, for running unsubstantiated gossip and engaging in “journalistic malpractice.”
His answer was dishonest and implausible. It merely tried to strike a chord that might resonate with public distaste for news media and, in Platner’s vague words, the “powers that be.” It allowed him a simulacrum of candor, a fake dollop of authenticity.
Platner then plunged into prepared pieties which revealed his utter misunderstanding of what the public needs in politicians. He said of his detractors, “instead of wanting to talk about the things that actually matter in this race, which are the realities that Mainers are working with, these people are going to try to make this race about anything but what it is supposed to be about, which is policy.”
This is a reductive idea of what an election campaign is about. Platner either does not realize or does not care that many voters still want, and certainly would be best served, by a senator of good character. Citizens confer an honor on the recipient of their votes, and he should deserve that honor. Character makes a huge practical difference in the conduct of public affairs.
It is easy to work out positions on policies, or pluck them out of thin air, whether they be communist or otherwise. But it is more difficult and much more important to be able to deal with the flow of events as they arise. What tests a politician’s mettle is how he responds spontaneously or instinctively, not what he has in his prepared briefing notes and ready-made answers. Congress already has too many men and women with policies but without good character, which accounts for its 29% public approval rating. It’s one of the reasons for political polarization and dysfunction because character and decency are what allow better politicians to deal squarely with each other and arrive at the sort of compromises that the public wants.
This takes a certain kind of character, formed over a lifetime and honed by experience to respond appropriately and with assurance at such times. It requires personal readiness and a fitness for office that equips a politician to meet challenges with transparency, decency, honesty, and wisdom. This has nothing to do with his or her view about such matters as the cost of housing or the availability of childcare. It has everything to do with who one is, what one is made of. Platner doesn’t want people to look into what he is made of, for obvious reasons.
His autopilot reference to policy also, however, reveals a lamentable truth about what too many members of Congress have become. They are what in British politics are said to be “lobby fodder.” The term does not refer to pols being prey to lobbyists and thus changeable in the way they vote. Quite the opposite. They are lobby fodder, the way soldiers fed into the maw of war are “cannon fodder.” They are there merely to be spent under orders from their leaders.
Too many representatives and senators are on Capitol Hill merely to be fed into the maw of political struggle. They are there only to vote with their party. That is why Democrats have, for the moment, stuck with Platner. He has shown an ability to connect with Maine voters, and as long as can win he is all his party wants or needs. The Democratic machine does not care about his insight, expertise, or character. If he gets to the Senate and votes as he is told, his ugly, grubby past will get a free pass.
Platner’s boilerplate rhetoric showed that he is nothing like the authentic candidate depicted by his campaign. His answer was canned, scripted, and had the stale smell of a formula that had been poll-tested and concocted by advisers.
The same was true of a line of attack he used against Collins, accusing her of sending him to die with her vote in support of the Iraq War. Even as he uttered this ludicrous canard, you could hear ancient and inauthentic gears grinding into motion, fueled by antiquated leftist anti-war assumptions. The ring of falseness was utterly at odds with Platner’s crafted persona. He presents himself as bringing the freshness of a non-career politician, but his words and ideas are desiccated in their antiquity, borrowed from previous generations of leftists.
As Collins pointed out, Platner volunteered for the military two years after Congress voted to approve the war in Iraq, so he knew what he was doing and chose it. He actually extended his time in the Marines into a second contract, and even after he left the corps, he went back to Iraq yet again as a paid mercenary. Pretending that he was put into harm’s way by his Republican opponent is a contemptible falsehood.
Fraud is what we must expect from Platner almost whenever he opens his mouth. He presents himself as a sort of honest Joe Sixpack who can properly represent the people of Maine because he is an ordinary working-class fellow like them. But he is nothing of the sort. He is cosplaying the role. He comes from a rather wealthy family; he attended a $75,000 a year prep school; the only customer of his oyster farm appears to be his mother’s restaurant; his financial records show that his income comes not from oysters but from disability payments; and he did not pay for his home with a loan from the Veterans Administration as he claimed, but with $200,000 from his father.
Platner is such a sham that it is impossible not to wonder if he is an invention of the cynical establishment he pretends to oppose. It is certainly Democrats who are now leaking dirty details against him. Is he being set up for a fall?
Suddenly, after Platner’s travails deepened last weekend, his former rival, Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME), popped up to remind voters that her name was still on the June 9 ballot.
“People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,” but I simply suspended active campaigning,” the governor, who was the candidate desired by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, told the Lewiston Sun Journal. “I am still on the ballot,” she said, so if Democrats finally get queasy enough to abandon Platner, they can always vote for her instead.
They might be able to vote for her even if she is beaten by Platner in the primary. Under Maine law, if Platner is forced out of the race after winning the primary, the state Democratic Party can nominate a replacement.
Where have we seen something like this before? Where recently did we watch the Democratic Party become so concerned by the low quality of its nominee that it disgorged him and replaced him with a woman assumed to have a better chance of winning in the general election? Ah, yes, that’s what Democrats did to President Joe Biden, replacing him with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Voters tend not to like such shenanigans, perhaps especially from a party that calls itself Democratic and has spent the past 10 years boasting that it alone can save democracy from Republicans. But Democrats have their backs against the Senate wall. If they don’t win in Maine, they have virtually no chance of retaking the upper chamber, which is essential if they are to thwart Trump for his final two years in office, for example, by blocking his Supreme Court and other judicial nominations, and also impeaching him for a third time.
A lot is riding on Platner. Despite his broad (and sometimes naked) shoulders, his party colleagues have reason to worry that he is not strong enough to carry them to victory.
Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner.