As of Tuesday night, virtually everyone who could abandon Maine Democratic senatorial nominee Graham Platner in the face of his latest scandal, had abandoned him. Heck, even a few people who couldn’t really abandon him had done so, too.
This included the Maine Democratic Party, which happens to be in a bit of a spot right now. See, it turns out that Platner — a man who raised more red flags than the marshal at a NASCAR race being held in a minefield — is that party’s duly voted-upon nominee, which means he holds all the cards when it comes to stepping back.
That also means he has to consent to what the party wants, which is for him to step aside before the fast-approaching deadline for him to be replaced on the ballot and allow the party to pick his replacement through a process which he plays no part in.
And I know you’ll never believe this, but it seems Platner has issues with consenting.
In a video posted on the official Maine Democrats X account Tuesday night — a video that looked every bit like a cry for help recorded from deep inside a collapsed Peruvian coal mine — party executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson insisted that the state Democrats were “working around the clock to develop a process to replace our U.S. Senate nominee that is open, inclusive, transparent, and fair.”
The problem is that 1) they do have a nominee who hasn’t indicated that he’ll allow himself to be replaced, despite the fact he’s almost certainly unelectable at this point, and 2) if he does drop off the ballot before the Monday deadline for replacing him on the November ballot, his team has indicated that he would only drop out if he were sure he was going to be replaced by someone ideologically aligned with him.
“If he was to step down it would only be with a guarantee of being replaced by a candidate who he believes is true to the values and vision and policy agenda of the campaign that Maine voted for,” a campaign insider told The New York Times on Monday after the rape allegation broke in Politico.
Will Graham Platner withdraw?
That person is probably former state Senate President Troy Jackson, who — while backed by Platner’s OG hard-left benefactor, socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — would not likely be the person that an “open, inclusive, transparent, and fair” process run by Democratic Party establishmentarians would select.
Platner aide lists terms for dropping out: “If he was to step down it would only be with a guarantee of being replaced by a candidate who he believes is true to the values and vision and policy agenda of the campaign that Maine voted for.” @ShaneGoldmacher https://t.co/x2Jyofd0xi
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) July 7, 2026
Ergo, the issue: The sway the Democratic Party bosses now have over a man who’s basically been destroyed by a fuller exposure of just how deeply sick he is — who has no other political career to go back to, whom no one in the party is even willing to go near, who has no cushy Beltway job to fall back upon, but who does have the party nomination technically sewn up in a seat the Democrats covet like nothing else — is apparently a lot less than they thought they had after the allegations broke on Monday.
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like,” Murphy-Anderson said in the video.
“We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like. We have also reiterated that Graham Platner must drop out of this race so that Democrats in Maine can focus on defeating Susan Collins this November.
“We look forward to making this process public as soon as Graham Platner formally withdraws from this race.”
Update from Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson on the Maine Senate race. pic.twitter.com/Jzj9ofinU8
— Maine Democrats (@MaineDems) July 8, 2026
You may notice the contradiction: Graham Platner has no role in determining who the nominee is, but for that nominee to be chose, Graham Platner must drop out of the race for which he has officially secured the nomination.
Bob Dylan may have said it best: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
Perhaps there really is another Graham Platner allegation out there so damaging that the Democrats really do have some leverage over him. Heaven knows that establishment media has finally gotten interested in treating this as seriously as they should have months ago. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that one of the women who initially accused Platner of abuse, Lyndsey Fifield, also alleged Platner would surreptitiously remove condoms during sex without permission, despite the fact she wasn’t on birth control.
And, she claimed, he did it repeatedly.
At some point, even Democrats can’t deny the reality that Platner is not exactly working for the common good.
So, why would a man with no prospects and nothing but a nomination to trade decide to trade it away out of the goodness of his heart? On the basis of available evidence, I don’t think that goodness exists. A practiced expert in non-consent isn’t going to suddenly consent to do the right thing.
The only reason the Racicot allegation caused everyone to drop their support for Platner, aside from that July 13 ballot deadline, was that it was a corroborated accusation of behavior on the part of Mr. Platner that was simultaneously 1) disqualifying, 2) illegal, and 3) made by an ardent Democrat.
Except, we had plenty of corroborated allegations that met at least one (and sometimes two) of those criteria before Monday, and that wasn’t enough for almost any Democrat to step back. To hit the panic button now is to ignore all the occasions when that button should have been hit, and hit hard, but wasn’t.
Heck, we had Fifield’s very similar allegations in June, published — albeit in heavily whitewashed form, Fifield (quite credibly) says — by The New York Times five days before Maine’s primaries. We had Platner’s social media history, which included (among other things) the fact that he didn’t think rape or violence was that serious. There was even a Nazi tattoo, for the love of Pete. A Nazi tattoo!
If you are shown every red flag in the book that a guy is a bad character and you look right past them, do not be surprised when you find out that he’s not only a bad character in his private life, but in public life as well. And he is, as of Tuesday evening, the duly selected nominee of the Democratic Party for the U.S. Senate seat in the state of Maine, with no means of statutorily changing that status without his consent.
How would getting that consent happen? Appealing to the better angels of his nature is to make an assumption that they exist, when conservatives (and some liberals) spent the better part of a year providing you with receipts that those angels had vacated the premises, had they indeed ever lived there in the first place.
Threats and ultimatums won’t work either when those threats and ultimatums, when delivered in an impassioned video posted to the official account of the Maine Democrats, showed the inherent contradictions in them.
But yes: After all that, good luck trying to get Mr. Platner to learn lessons in properly consenting to what you want at this very late hour, Devon Murphy-Anderson. I can’t imagine how this would backfire.
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