As they say, marry in haste, repent at leisure. It may already be too late for an annulment in Maine.
Voters go to the polls today in the Pine Tree State to cast ballots in their primaries, but the biggest contest in terms of publicity and impact has likely been over for weeks. After getting a makeover by Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) activists, Graham Platner went from barely employed nepo baby to the presumptive nominee for the Democrats in their US Senate challenge to incumbent Republican Susan Collins. All the money flooded toward Platner, abandoning sitting governor Janet Mills, who technically remains a candidate.
Now that the floodgates of scandal involving domestic abuse allegations from former girlfriends have emerged, not to mention Platner’s Nazi SS tattoo over his heart, Politico reports that Maine voters are starting to repent. It’s probably already too late:
Platner’s continued drumbeat of scandals has divided both Democratic Party leaders and voters as they stare down the must-win Senate race. Defeating Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November is crucial to the party’s plans to take back control of the upper chamber and provide a check on President Donald Trump. But even as Platner’s staunch supporters stick with him, his political baggage is threatening to sink him with some Democratic and independent voters heading into the general election, according to interviews with nearly two dozen Maine voters.
Several Democratic voters were hesitant to weigh in on the Senate race, saying they felt Platner’s candidacy was all but certain at this point and sharing their opinion on him was likely to be met with backlash. Others who were planning to vote Democratic in November are now toying with backing Collins or sitting out the Senate race entirely — a challenge for the likely nominee and his party.
Peter and Kelly Dufour were manning the grill at a Get-Out-the-Vote event for gubernatorial candidate Hannah Pingree in Portland on Saturday and excited about the former Democratic state House speaker’s candidacy for governor. Asked about the Senate race, Kelly put her head in her hands.
It’s a little late for facepalms, at least in terms of changing the trajectory of the race. Early voting – technically “in-person absentee voting” in Maine – began on May 11, when Platner’s profile soared and endorsements rolled in from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and other DSA-adjacent Democrat progressives. It ended last Thursday, just about the same hour that the New York Times finally published its watered-down, “tamp and tame” story about allegations of domestic violence from Lyndsey Fifield and more ambiguous claims of “unsettling” behavior from two other women. Reporting at the time suggested that 35,000 or more voters had already cast ballots at that time, and Platner likely got most of those votes in the Senate primary, considering all of the positive attention he received for most of that time.
That’s not necessarily an insurmountable head start if Maine Democrats turn out in force to change the direction of the primary. Mills remains on the ballot today, and she has made it clear that she still wants to win, even though she has run out of money for active campaigning. However, so does David Costello, who will likely split any protest vote with Mills:
The pair were looking to learn more about David Costello, who was Democratic Senate nominee in 2024 and is running in the primary again this year — the only Democrat candidate on the ballot besides Platner and Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April.
Voters got sold a pig in a poke by the DSA and its high-profile allies by Democrat Party leaders. Now they will have to buy another pig in a poke with Costello or choose Mills, who apparently has her own baggage from her gubernatorial career. That’s the choice that they have after their party allowed socialist activists to hoodwink them into believing that Platner was just a working-class stiff with a chip on his shoulder against the wealthy, even though he’s spent most of his adult life mooching off his own wealthy parents.
Platner will win the nomination tonight. It’s almost impossible for him to lose now, thanks to the manipulations of Sanders, AOC, Warren, and the DSA-besotted party establishment. The margins might matter here, though. If Platner doesn’t do well in same-day voting, Democrats may have to reach for their “Torricelli option,” but that has one key problem:
Some Democrats are hoping that a poor showing from Platner in Tuesday’s primary would help them convince him to step aside and allow the state party to replace him with another candidate. But the idea seemed fairly ludicrous to most voters in Maine, given not only Platner’s record of surviving scandals but also his strong base of supporters — many of whom see his controversies as outside attacks on his movement that have only hardened their resolve for him.
For this to work, Platner has to withdraw from the election before the state convention, which comes up in five weeks. Does Platner seem likely to do so? And what would he go back to doing if he withdraws? As John pointed out last night, Platner’s not much of an oyster farmer, and not much of anything else either. The Senate race is his brass ring, and it will take a lot more than the prospect of failure in November to pry his arm-twisting fingers off of it.
On the other hand, though, the humiliation might be enough to push him into considering a pull-out. Despite Politico’s assertion here, Platner has no record of “surviving scandals.” He’s in the middle of several right now, for the first time in his oyster-shucking life, and we may not have seen the last of them emerge. So far, he’s handling it poorly, and can’t even hit T-ball questions from Chris Hayes on M-SNOW. Platner’s campaign threatened a defamation lawsuit against a Maine reporter this weekend, a move akin to throwing gasoline on a grease fire in scandal-management terms.
Oblivion might be Platner’s best option, but don’t expect him to recognize that. Anyone who can wear a Totkenkopf tattoo for 18 years while styling himself as a military historian, only to think that he can claim ignorance of its meaning, is not exactly firing on all intellectual cylinders. That’s probably why the Senate appears to be Platner’s first real effort at finding a career that doesn’t involve the Bank of Mom and Dad.
We’ll have live results tonight from Maine and also from South Carolina. Stay tuned!
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