A sentient collection of red flags
Graham Platner's campaign should never have gotten this far.
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“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Graham Platner’s misbegotten Senate campaign collapsed in spectacular fashion this week, a swift dismantling of what had been seen as a juggernaut that could withstand an endless series of genuinely repugnant revelations.
The man turned out not just to have red flags but to be nothing but a sentient collection of them. Now, as his backers finally, FINALLY, rush for the exits, it’s worth looking at how things got to this point.
When it comes to who can be said to be most responsible for Platner — aside from Platner himself, of course — there’s no shortage of blame to go around. But the enthusiasm for his red-flag-laden candidacy didn’t fall neatly on one side or the other of traditional Democratic divides.
Platner had as many fans in the progressive wing of the party as he did in the centrist one. He was a darling of Intercept-adjacent types like Ryan Grim. His high-profile backers included progressive stalwarts like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But they also included the Pod Save America bros like Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau. These are not people who typically align on positions or on tactics.
They are, however, all people who, whether they admit it to themselves or not, fancy themselves kingmakers. He was everyone else’s ticket, and that made people sloppy and willing to accept things they believed were morally repugnant when others did them.
Part of what made it so easy for such a strange set of bedfellows to imprint upon Platner was that the man himself was somewhat of a cipher.
Not only had Platner not held a previous office, but he’d never even run for one. The bulk of his adult work history was in the military, a notoriously opaque institution. What we learned about Platner leaked out in dribs and drabs. Sometimes those were deliberately doled out by the campaign and his supporters, but sometimes they were things that escaped containment, bubbling up from the sludge of Platner’s Reddit history or other information sources that stubbornly could not be controlled. Only when multiple women were brave enough to come forward with credible sexual assault allegations did things finally crash down.
What ultimately did Platner in, however, was a lack of credibility. That’s not meant to diminish the facts of the allegations against him, to make some mealy-mouthed argument that the coverup was worse than the crime. Instead, it’s that there was never anything solid at his core, nothing that made his eternal protestations that he’d changed in any way convincing.
In the end, Platner was whoever people wanted him to be, and that was the biggest problem.
The rise and hard fall of wishcasting
Was he an insurgent working-class champion? Not really. At least not in any meaningful way. Even Platner’s own explanation of what he believed was “working class” was, to put it mildly, nonsense: “My definition of working class these days is essentially anybody who makes money from wages. If you work for a living and you go out and put in hours and you pay taxes just like everyone else, I think that’s quite fair.”
It’s clear that what Platner was trying to do here was to draw a distinction between those whose primary income comes from a job versus those with, say, generational wealth who can live off of their passive income. It’s a neat trick, a way to get everyone off his case about his background, because how else could he deal with the fact that he came from money? That’s a fact that he tried mightily to obscure with a tale of being a rough-and-tumble oysterman, a tale that overlooked the part where he was the grandson of one of the more famous architects of the 20th century, the child of a Dartmouth-educated lawyer, and went to prep school.
This isn’t to say that only the working class can serve as champions of the working class. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was about as landed gentry as one could get, but he gave us the New Deal. But FDR didn’t do that by feigning empathy with the gritty precarity of working-class life. Platner did exactly that, completely ignoring that the actual gritty precarity of working-class life does not allow for infinite second chances.
And we’re not even talking about how Platner initially got a pass for his Nazi tattoo, his lengthy history of shitty racist, homophobic, and misogynist Reddit posts, his bloodthirsty rankings of the wars he wished he’d fought in, and so on. Instead, it’s about the fact that Platner never saw his advantages as advantages, but rather as the sort of thing that everyone has access to, just Regular Joe sort of stuff.
Take, for example, his account of how he was able to purchase his home in Sullivan, Maine: he put down just $5,000, with his father lending him the remaining $200,000 of the $205,000 purchase price. Platner told the press he was paying it back at $954/month, while also saying it was a “much higher interest rate” than a bank would have charged him. Narrator voice: That works out to about 4 percent at a time when the national average rate was 3.91 percent.
Platner never seemed to grasp that even for comfortably middle-class folks, having dad buy you a home, no matter how modest, just isn’t an option. There was a similar tone-deafness in discussions about his wife’s fertility treatments. There’s no doubt that it was indeed cheaper for Platner and his wife to go to Norway for a couple of weeks and pay out of pocket for IVF there, versus the catastrophic cost to do so in America. But while Platner correctly framed this as an example of “a real indication of how flawed our healthcare system is,” he didn’t seem to grasp that for most working-class folks, having their father pick up the tab for a trip to Norway for IVF, along with being able to take two weeks off work and hang out overseas, is a pipe dream of almost comical proportions.
Was Platner a political outsider? Sort of. It’s true that he seems to have had little to no interest in politics prior to his decision to run for Senate, but his parents are both staunch long-term Democrats. His father has donated over $65,000 to Democratic candidates over the last 15 years, while his mother was a delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention and had been a county party chair.
Was Platner’s campaign a people-powered one, small-dollar eager donors coalescing organically behind an unexpected candidate? Again, sort of. Of the roughly $16 million raised by Platner from July 1, 2025, to May 31, 2026, over $11 million of that came from people who gave under $200. That’s indeed genuine enthusiasm. However, Platner didn’t come to the attention of Mainers thanks to, say, being on the school board or a lengthy history of volunteering for political campaigns.
As much as Platner derided those who he perceived were creatures of consultants, he was essentially tapped to run by two well-known political strategists, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan. Then, he got a near-immediate hookup with Joe Cavello and Morris Katz. The former worked on John Fetterman’s Senate campaign; the latter is still riding high off helping Zohran Mamdani win in New York City. And a pretty big chunk of that $16 million went back out the door to consultants.
When it came to Platner and his most fervent supporters trying to push back on the misdeeds that ultimately doomed him, there was never anything of substance, never anything real. He simply demanded that people accept he was an entirely different person than all past evidence showed him to be.
It’s pretty clear from his video dropping out of the race that, left to his own devices, Platner had no intention of leaving the race. That isn’t really surprising. All along, he’s seemed equal parts angry and confused that any past misdeeds couldn’t be batted aside with one of two answers: (1) never happened or (2) he changed. But by the time Jenny Racicot’s story of being raped by Platner appeared in Politico, neither of those was enough.
Dems do not need their own Trump
In the wake of Platner, Democrats are going to have to do a lot of reckoning about authenticity, class, antisemitism, sexual assault, and more. Platner got far too much runway, had far too many apologists.
But there is a meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans here, however belated the reckoning was: Platner is out. Contrast this with, of course, the most notable late-in-the-race reckoning Republicans faced: Donald Trump’s “Grab ‘em by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape, news of which dropped in October 2016. After a brief flurry of recriminations, Republicans settled in for the long haul, backing Trump at every turn.
Sometimes it’s astonishing to summarize the sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump and to realize just how tame the Access Hollywood tape seems in comparison now.
We learned that not only did he barge in on Miss USA contestants while they were naked, but bragged about it as well. The man was literally found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll. He has warped the entirety of the Department of Justice in an effort to stop anyone from ever learning the depths of his connections with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. He even defended Platner in the wake of Racicot’s rape allegation, saying “it's really a question of whether or not you believe the woman. A lot of people say big falsehoods."
Graham Platner is no Donald Trump, but they are both object lessons in what happens when people choose to ignore an avalanche of red flags simply because someone is on the right team.
Democrats do not need to settle for this sort of thing, do not need their own Donald Trump to win. Real credibility, real authenticity, real insurgency, real people-powered campaigns — these things are all within our grasp, but not via the incredibly flawed vessel of Graham Platner. Thank goodness.
That’s it for now
We’ll be back with a new episode of the PN Pod this afternoon, with the next edition of PN dropping Monday (there will be no special Saturday edition this week).
Thanks for reading, and for your support. Have a great weekend.
Looks like an image from The Shining
During my 45 years in DC as a Navy Captain and federal official, I could not help but notice that the majority of people in Congress were not adept at critical reasoning. Now and then, I would identify bills that overlooked unintended negative consequences and help get them reworded to minimize them. As any lobbyist will likely affirm after 1 beer, legislators are rather easy to talk into promoting something they view as likely to get them re-elected. Most legislators are nice, affable, sociable folks. They are just not deep thinkers. Supposedly, they have staff for that - and many do.
In that environment, it is not a stretch to see that the Platners in politics are not as rare as the MSM's coverage might suggest.
Working my way through college, I worked as a private investigator. I checked out candidates for executive promotions, high-level new hires, and people applying for insurance policies. It was great work because my working hours were flexible enough to not miss classes. I soon realized that it was not very tricky to find skeletons in people's closets and ghosts hiding under beds. Just chatting up neighbors, landlords, and even the police, negative history would seep out in conversations that I could later verify for my clients. So I wonder, what the heck do party operatives do to explore the fitness of potential candidates? Obviously, the answer is not very much.