Graham Platner’s Very Online Undoing
Last week, Graham Platner announced his withdrawal from Maine’s race for U.S. Senate as any self-proclaimed regular person might: by recording a front-facing video with his smartphone and posting it to social media. He held the phone close enough to his face that you could make out the shallow lines on his forehead, the flecks of white in his mostly auburn beard. Two days earlier, Jenny Racicot, a woman who once dated Platner, had alleged, in an interview with Politico, that he had showed up drunk at her house, in late 2021, and raped her. Staring sternly into his phone camera, with a verdant, sun-streaked treescape behind him, Platner explained that he was suspending his campaign not because he’d done what he had been accused of—he insisted that it was not “an admission of guilt”—but because the baseless “attacks” against him were aiming “to take everything away from us,” namely the inroads his campaign had made for progressive politics in the state of Maine. He claimed, not for the first time, that he’d never harbored a “desire to run for office,” that he and his wife were “regular people” who had not been “looking for this experience.” He implored us, the viewers of his video, to consider what we would do if “large forces were working against you personally to accuse you of the worst thing that a person could do, and it was not remotely true.” Would we keep fighting in the face of such a “brutal political reality”?
Since entering Maine’s Democratic Senate race, last August, Platner has cast himself as a “random guy” with zero political ambition. He was living a quiet life as an oyster farmer in the small Down East town of Sullivan, when two political consultants and Democratic Socialists of America organizers—Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan—reportedly showed up at his door and asked him if he’d be interested in running for U.S. Senate. Morris Katz, a top political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, also became involved, telling Platner, per the Times, that he was a potential “historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution” if he accepted the challenge and ran for office. Apparently, they’d seen a video of him on the internet talking about Norwegian salmon and knew he was “the one.”
Platner’s skepticism of the pitch only made him more closely resemble Plato’s ideal philosopher-king: the reluctant leader who had to be persuaded to take power for the good of the people. Platner suspected that the “corporate media system” and the “political establishment” would not welcome him—a kettlebell-swinging, gun-toting, callous-handed combat veteran and manual laborer—but he eventually decided to risk personal disparagement if it meant advancing the progressive platform he so vigorously championed: enacting universal health care, taxing billionaires, lowering housing costs. That establishment Democrats didn’t accept him made his candidacy even more appealing. A man of the people, a working-class hero, a diamond in the rough unearthed by political operatives riding the high of Mamdani’s rise—the narrative, in and of itself, was a winning strategy.
In Maine, where I live, Platner generated swift and feverish support, the type of political enthusiasm that’s impossible to manufacture. Genuine excitement fomented among my milieu of twenty- and thirtysomethings—we finally had a guy we could throw our weight behind and organize around, someone who embodied the sort of uncompromising leftist politics that, just months before, had appeared unlikely to take hold in a state whose voters had elected Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, to the U.S. Senate for five consecutive terms. Like much of New England, Maine has an independent-minded, anti-establishment electorate, with third-party candidates, Tea Party Republicans, and mildly progressive Democrats all achieving statewide electoral success over the past few decades. On the surface, Platner’s politics seemed like a non-starter for a Maine Senate candidate, and a prohibitive obstacle when courting the state’s rural, right-leaning voters. But his anti-establishment attitude and antagonistic relationship to power made his message resonate among unexpected populations, including the northern working-class demographics that have increasingly moved away from Democratic candidates in recent elections. Platner is fluent in the language of “freedom,” a word that goes a long way in Maine. (I grew up across the border, in New Hampshire, where the state motto, “Live Free or Die,” is a jingoistic, oft-evoked rallying cry.) The brand of freedom he presented, however, was not the libertarian ideal of uninhibited personal sovereignty but a more collective vision rooted in economic security, “the freedom to live lives with dignity and fulfillment, the freedom to not be ripped off by a for-profit health-care system, the freedom to have a roof over our heads that we own,” as he put it.
Platner’s national profile grew when clips from his early town halls began circulating on social media. These short-form videos captured him as a hoop-earring-wearing populist with sun-worn skin and a roll-neck sweater, a guy next door who expressed the requisite anger about the country’s mass-deportation crisis and the genocide in Gaza. He is a theatrical, gravitational speaker, with a facility for channelling anger and discontent into forceful, emotionally rich rhetoric. His specific policy plans could be opaque, but his pathos was distinctive, his convictions bone-deep. (He’s said he viewed his campaign as a continuance of Bernie Sanders’s Presidential bids, in that it centered on “movement politics” and orchestrated “power through organizing.”) Unlike Mamdani, whom Platner has often been lazily compared to, and who wielded social media to novel and wildly fruitful ends, Platner is not as much of a digital native, and is a far less polished poster. During his campaign, he seemed most drawn to the front-facing-video format, whose intimacy mirrored his rustic persona and allowed him to provide confessional-style, improvisational-seeming direct addresses to his base. Whereas Mamdani’s social-media content appeared engineered by zippy creative directors and frequently crossed over into the realm of content-creation accounts and influencer TikToks, Platner’s campaign tailored his social posts to a more targeted audience: people who, like him, didn’t use the platforms for brand-building but as a way to share unvarnished ideas and interests, to “connect,” in the more originalist conception of the apps.
Platner’s lack of digital savviness had a dark side, of course. His old Reddit posts surfaced several months after he launched his campaign. The archive was mostly military-focussed—comments that discussed firearms and the intricacies of platoon life—but scattered throughout were homophobic comments and offensive slurs. His political outlook could be discerned from these posts, many of which seemed derived from left-wing political podcasts like “The Majority Report” and “Chapo Trap House.” Platner went on to film a video in which, positioned in front of a stack of empty lobster traps, he apologized for his insensitive language, claiming that it came from an “alienated” and “isolated” post-military temperament. These were intended as “stupid joke comments,” he said, designed to “get a rise out of people on the internet.” Even when, some time later, his account on the live-chatting platform Kik came to light, in which he reportedly sexted with women while married, the divulgence appeared more depressing than disqualifying—surely Platner could not have envisioned, in his past life as a “regular person” and a “random guy,” that a picture of him wrapped in a towel from the waist down would be plastered across the home pages of major media outlets.
These scandals—along with the revelation that Platner had drunkenly got a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, apparently thinking it was a standard skull-and-crossbones insignia—certainly dampened his otherwise surging momentum. But they also perversely deepened his veneer of authenticity. (In a video posted to Instagram, Platner apologized for the tattoo while standing in front of a barn, his sleeves rolled up and his hands tucked into his pockets.) When trying to explain these controversies, he characterized himself as a flawed man with a complicated past, someone who suffered from P.T.S.D. and stubborn masculine conditioning but who was doing the work and walking the righteous path toward redemption. He’d married, gone to therapy, and started a new career as an oysterman. Besides, part of his appeal relied on his craggy imperfections, his aesthetic and ethical opposition to his buttoned-up political contemporaries. Even when the Times published, several days before the June primary, the stories of three women who had dated Platner and claimed that he displayed “unsettling” and “aggressive” behavior at various points in their relationships, his campaign still managed not to crater. He apologized for past mistakes and poor behavior but denied claims of physical altercations or intimidations. He labelled one of his accusers a “politically motivated” Republican antagonist. Other women who had dated Platner offered their support for his character. He won the Democratic primary in a landslide.
Racicot’s allegations made it difficult, if not impossible, to offer Platner any further grace. Her narrative of abuse is harrowing, and vivid—any denial of it scanned as delusional and self-protective. (Platner and his campaign described the allegations as being “coached and coordinated by out of state establishment operatives.”) A saturation point had been reached; it soon became clear that Platner’s days as the Party’s nominee were numbered. High-profile politicians, establishment and progressive alike, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, urged him to withdraw from the race before the statutory deadline. Left-wing internet personalities such as Hasan Piker, Mehdi Hasan, and Emma Vigeland also denounced Platner and called for him to drop out. Before any official announcement had been made, volunteers from his campaign lamented the inevitable end of his candidacy in a string of leaked Discord posts. “People can be flawed and become better, but hanging your movement on the coattails of somebody credibly accused of sexual assault is the exact thing we are trying to be better than,” one user wrote. “He is not coming back from this and we should find someone to carry on the ideals now.”
Many misguided assessments of Platner and the progressive movement have emerged in the week since he exited the race. Conservative pundits have giddily lambasted liberals for their hypocritical moral standards, painting Platner as a predator and a Nazi, using his downfall as a way to deflect criticism away from their own movement’s rampant misconduct and abuses of power. Establishment Democrats, too, are taking a victory lap, marrying Platner’s anti-establishment ethos with his personal transgressions. To hear them explain it, he’s a “dude-bro,” a leftist Trump, a “shameful catastrophe,” someone who cosplayed working-class aesthetics without any of the necessary experience or ethical standards. These characterizations—especially the comparison to Trump—seem reductive, at best: as Jon Allsop recently wrote, for The New Yorker, Platner, when speaking about his past transgressions, “has used a language of therapy, self-improvement, and belonging which is almost impossible to imagine coming out of Trump's mouth.”
And yet, in his eleven-minute campaign-suspension video, Platner did not come across as the romantically earthy or sympathetically imperfect figure his supporters so badly wanted him to be. Instead, he possessed the desperate and agitated posture of someone backed into a corner. He did not apologize or take accountability; he attributed Racicot’s claims to a wider smear campaign. I struggled to watch the entire thing in one sitting, to endure the framing that “larger forces” had fabricated Racicot’s story and strategically planted it in the media with mere days left before the deadline for removing a candidate’s name from the general-election ballot. Throughout his campaign, one of Platner’s most compelling thematic frameworks was his erasure of self, his egoless subsumption into the working-class voting body he sought to represent. “The race has never been about me,” Platner said, in April. “It’s about a movement of working Mainers who are fed up with being robbed by billionaires and the politicians who own them.” In his drop-out video, as traffic whooshed in the distance, Platner evoked this message with dwindled enthusiasm. “My name might be on the ballot right now,” he said, “but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.” He was dropping out, he went on, but he was not admitting defeat. His face told a different story. ♦