The Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner has absorbed enough oppo research to kill half a dozen healthy candidacies. Among the stream of revelations, Platner has called himself a Communist, hinted at political violence, labeled all cops bastards, broadly described rural white people as racist and stupid, downplayed sexual assault, and mocked gay people.
He recently covered and apologized for a skull-and-crossbones tattoo associated with the Nazi SS, claiming he hadn’t been aware of its political connotations. There is a famous comedy sketch in which an SS officer, finally noticing in the final stages of war that SS caps feature “little pictures of skulls,” is moved to wonder: “Are we the baddies?” The joke is that it took until 1945 for this Nazi to grasp the symbolism of the death’s-head logo. Yet Platner spent 18 years blissfully unaware of the implications of the symbol inked on his torso.
Platner is toughing it out, as scandal-plagued candidates almost always do. What’s surprising is that his supporters appear completely unfazed by the bad-news avalanche. Rather than abandon his candidacy, or even back off slightly until they’ve seen the end of the damaging stories, they have accepted his apologies and backed him to the hilt. “I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to have gone through a dark period,” Senator Bernie Sanders explained.
[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]
Indeed, progressives have treated the Platner revelations as a scandal revealing more about the perfidy of his enemies than about him. “Still like Graham Platner a whole lot more than I like the prim little hall monitors digging up dirt on him, sorry,” Ben Burgis, a philosophy professor and Jacobin contributor, wrote on X. “Not to overstate it, but this is a crucial moment for the Democratic Party,” Ryan Grim, a former D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept, argued on X. “If they decide that normal people with some small skeletons in their closet (or inked on their chest) are not welcome, they are finished.”
You’d think it would be possible for Democrats to find a normal person who is not a one-man Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Most normal people, in fact, would qualify.) But the left’s continued embrace of Platner has a certain logic. Progressives have a theory of political change for which he remains, despite his massive and ever-expanding political baggage, the ideal prototype. That is, rather than abandon unpopular positions, Democrats should court voters by nominating more candidates who look like, talk like, and ideally even are working-class people.
The progressive donor network Way to Win recently held a conference in Washington, D.C., to advocate for the left-wing blueprint for regaining power. The conference’s argument was that the party cannot compromise any of its left-wing social-policy commitments, as this would amount to “throwing constituencies under the bus.” To the extent that a majority of Americans hold regressive social positions on issues such as immigration and trans rights, these “unacceptable” beliefs, in the words of one organizer, are a kind of false consciousness—a dire product of economic desperation and right-wing propaganda. The solution progressives propose is to avoid addressing these concerns at all by changing the subject to economics, advocating a left-wing populist program, and recruiting candidates who can speak to blue-collar white voters.
The conference’s keynote speaker was Graham Platner, who is a perfect embodiment of this grand strategy.
He is, if not quite an authentic member of the proletariat, seemingly close enough. Platner is a brawny Marine veteran who works as an oysterman. As his candidacy emerged over the summer, a procession of left-leaning journalists made the trek to Maine (where some already summered regularly) to pronounce him the movement’s next star.
The New Republic touted “The Political Awakening of the Oyster Farmer Taking on Susan Collins.” “Can a Maine Oyster Farmer Defeat a Five-Term Republican Senator?” asked The New Yorker. “The only way we’re going to get that is by sending up fighters from the working class who are willing to fight for the working class,” Platner told The American Prospect.
The details of Platner’s biography present a muddier picture than this working-class-hero account. Platner’s grandfather Warren Platner was a famous modernist architect who designed the interiors of the Ford Foundation building in Manhattan. His father was a lawyer, and Platner attended private school. The bits about oyster farming and the Marines are real, however, and Platner does look the part—which is what matters in politics. The New Yorker quoted an excited online commentator who gushed, “Wow this guy looks like a progressive mind in [a] MAGA body.”
Platner has become a progressive superstar because, in addition to having rare biographical military-farmer chops and central-casting proletarian looks, he does not break ranks with progressive orthodoxy. Platner wrote in a Reddit forum recently, “I stand right in the fucking way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community.” He doesn’t just follow the progressive tactic of refusing to compromise on social issues and changing the subject to economics, he espouses the strategy overtly. “Talk about health care affordability, about housing affordability, about basic material issues,” he told The New Republic. “Be who you are and stick to it and don’t get dragged into the nonsense.”
In a video of a town-hall appearance Platner’s campaign posted online earlier this month, an attendee shouted about undocumented immigrants receiving benefits, The candidate responded by dismissing these concerns as a natural if unfortunate product of misinformation and economic scarcity: “People are propagandized, people are misinformed, but people are not stupid, and we shouldn’t treat them as such. People are angry because they know they’re being screwed. They might get lied to. They might get taken in … People are being robbed. They’re being robbed of their critical thinking. They’re being robbed of their empathy.”
While Platner sounded compassionate, his response gave himself and his party permission to ignore the substance of the “angry” views expressed by the voters they wish to court. The theory here is that progressives can win over these voters by convincing them that they have been manipulated into holding their socially conservative beliefs, rather than ceding any substantive ground.
The evidence strongly suggests this theory is bunk. People are more likely to vote for politicians who agree with them on issues, and politicians with moderate voting platforms tend to do better. The most reliable way to deal with voters holding views that are more centrist than yours is not to convince the voters they’ve been brainwashed, but to adopt more popular positions.
More radical politicians can do well in districts that have an overwhelming partisan tilt—Zohran Mamdani, despite being extremely unpopular nationally, can still win his campaign for New York City mayor because New York City is overwhelmingly Democratic—but this has no relevance to the problem of winning national majorities. All things being equal, a more extreme ideological profile is a handicap, not a benefit.
[Jonathan Chait: The coming Democratic civil war]
Platner’s approach may yet work. He does possess charisma and a sympathetic background. Assuming he survives the primary next June, he would be running in a state that Kamala Harris won by seven points and that has not voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988. Democrats will almost certainly need to compromise with the electorate if they want to win majorities in both congressional chambers, but they might get away with not doing so in Maine.
But the reason Democrats are underdogs in this race is that its incumbent, Susan Collins, has won election after election by cultivating a reputation as a moderate, which illustrates the value of ideological moderation. So far, Platner is making little effort to do this. While he and his backers seem to believe his populist economic message is all upside, his former self-description as a “Communist” may be a potent general-election liability—although Platner has tried to use the Nazi-tattoo controversy to negate the Communist label. (If you average out both ideologies, he winds up as a safe moderate.)
The gushy New Republic profile from August proclaims that “what he’s building now is rooted in the work of a lifetime.” Given that Platner is disavowing things he posted on social media four years ago, maybe lifetime is the wrong word. But he is the product of a political movement that still has few better prototypes, and has invested too much hope to walk away just yet.
