Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner is looking to steer his campaign past controversies over an old tattoo and Reddit posts.
Platner’s campaign is undergoing damage control, making key staffing changes, including hiring a campaign manager with ties to former President Barack Obama’s presidential bid, sending nondisclosure agreements to employees, and bringing in a compliance firm “to institute standard practices that had yet to be put into place,” according to Politico.
In addition to internal changes, Platner has been aggressive in seeking to retake control of the narrative after his campaign was shaken earlier this month over the candidate’s digital footprint and 2007 Nazi-themed skull and crossbones tattoo.
His disciplined strategy appears to be paying off, with a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released this week showing Platner’s campaign leading rival candidate Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) by 34 points.
The military veteran and oyster farmer has apologized for years-old Reddit posts calling himself a communist, making “anti-LGBTQ+ jokes,” and criticizing police and white people. He has also apologized for the tattoo, saying he had no idea about its Nazi connotations when he got it during a drunken night out with his Marine friends nearly two decades ago.
Skull and crossbones motifs “are popular amongst military units,” Platner said, adding this week that he had the tattoo covered up.
He has now picked Kevin Brown, who worked on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) and former President Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, to be his campaign manager and enlisted the help of a compliance firm to advise him on adhering to ethical and legal operations.
The campaign has been rolling out “retroactive” practices, including nondisclosure agreements. One former campaign staffer, Genevieve McDonald, told Politico she was offered $15,000 to sign the agreement.
The Platner campaign waved off concerns about the proposal, saying the newly hired firm is instituting standard practices.
“Some of those standards had to be instituted retroactively, but as a matter of course, we do not require anyone previously involved in the campaign to do so,” a campaign spokesperson said. “Genevieve McDonald was offered severance, which is standard for all campaign employees and contractors.”
But while Platner has taken accountability for his actions, he has also argued that the wave of negative publicity only came out after Mills, the establishment-favored candidate, launched her campaign earlier this month. Platner told voters that over the years, he has become a different version of the man struggling with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder who made the controversial online posts and got the tattoo, contending that the intense scrutiny into his past is being led by a hostile Democratic establishment seeking to tank his campaign.
“I’m not going to minimize what has come out. I am not today, who I always have been. I used to hold different opinions. I used to use different language. I said things and believed things that today I find abhorrent … the more I realized that many of those stories and beliefs that I had were wrong, and I changed them, and it was through that journey that I became who I am today,” Platner said during a recent campaign event.
“And I will say this, I am ashamed of things I once said, but I am not ashamed of who I am today. The establishment is spoofed. And I’ll say this, if they thought that this was going to scare me off, if they thought that ripping my life to pieces, trying to destroy it was going to make me think that I shouldn’t undertake this project, they clearly have not spent a lot of time around Marines,” the progressive Democrat added to cheers from the crowd.
Platner made most of the same argument during a Vanity Fair interview earlier this week as he aims to stabilize his campaign, saying the attacks are a “hit job” coming “from Washington, D.C.”
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“I am not the chosen candidate of the D.C. establishment,” he said. “It’s been made abundantly clear to me that in the leadership of the Democratic Party and the people that choose candidates and campaigns, I am not the kind of person they want. … The idea that I’m supposed to not see any correlation between the governor getting in the race, and then the next day all this oppo research dropping against me — the idea that I’m supposed to not see what this is, and the idea that people in Maine aren’t going to notice what this is? I think that is laughable.”
“Every breath I have to spend talking about this is a breath that I’m not talking about the problems that we’re trying to fight against here in the state of Maine,” Platner added. “The reason that opposition research happens is to rip people’s lives apart, and make regular human beings think that politics is something they would never want to get involved in,” he said.