Lessons from the Graham Platner disaster

Graham Platner speaks to supporters in Blue Hill, Maine, after winning the Democratic nomination for the Senate on Tuesday night, June 9, 2026. (Sophie Park/The New York Times)

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG

Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to, immediately.

His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.

As you probably know by now, Politico published a story on Monday about a woman, Jenny Racicot, who says that Platner raped her. According to Racicot, they’d been romantically involved, on and off, for more than two years when he showed up at her house drunk and uninvited one night in 2021, let himself in and forced himself on her.

She confided her ordeal to a man she dated after Platner, as well as to her therapist, and showed Politico text messages she sent in 2023 warning an acquaintance away from him. Her account is completely believable and completely devastating.

Platner denies Racicot’s accusations but seems to realize that his campaign may no longer be viable. In a video posted on social media, he said, “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

But that time needs to wrap up. According to Maine law, Platner has to drop out by next Monday for Democrats to replace him on the November ballot. The sooner this mess ends, the better.

The Platner campaign represented an electoral insurgency against the Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations against those who launched it. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Most at fault, of course, is Platner himself. He allegedly victimized Racicot, and then his campaign victimized her again, putting her into a situation where she felt she had to go public. He betrayed his supporters by plunging into a campaign while knowing he had a closet full of skeletons and drawing people who believed in him into a doomed enterprise.

Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.

Also liable for this disaster are the progressive operatives who recruited Platner and were so infatuated with his identity — a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics — that they failed to do their due diligence. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff, didn’t want to spring for a thorough background check, which can take weeks and cost around $20,000. “Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days,” the Journal said.

Moraff, who travels the country trying to recruit left-wing, working-class candidates, reportedly learned about some of Platner’s troubling Reddit posts but decided to charge forward anyway. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” he told The Journal.

He’s correct about the appetite for unconventional candidates, but that is no excuse for such willful sloppiness. Before blithely assuming that voters would forgive a candidate’s flaws, he had a responsibility to try to find out what those flaws were.

While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.

One person who tried to alert Democrats was Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald. She quit when the first Platner scandals emerged and has been increasingly outspoken against him. Progressive operatives made her seem like a vindictive person eager to curry favor with Maine’s political establishment. In retrospect, she looks much more like someone who took a profound professional risk to do the right thing. I can’t be the only one who regrets not taking her more seriously.

If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain President Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens up space for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape proper vetting.

Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics. Many progressives want to believe that with a sufficiently populist message and style, they can win over voters alienated from the Democratic Party, obviating the need for ideological concessions. Platner seemed to embody this possibility, and that made a lot of people look past a lot of red flags until it was almost too late.