Platner in the Führerbunker

Are Democrats trying to 'do a Biden' on their scandal-plagued candidate?

Graham Platner campaigns in Maine (Linda Coan O'Kresik/Bangor Daily News)

The Democratic primary in Maine is June 9, less than two weeks away, and the question now is whether Graham Platner will get shoved under the party’s bus before it’s too late to find another candidate to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Hit by scandal after scandal in recent weeks, Platner’s status as “rising star” is now at risk because Democrats have belatedly realized that there might be even more damaging revelations to come — worse than his SS Totenkopf tattoo, which somehow Democrats had convinced themselves wasn’t really a scandal at all. What they’re realizing now is that Republican sources weren’t just bragging when they told Marc Halperin that their opposition research files on Platner were so toxic that he was not only guaranteed to lose to Collins, but “he'll have to leave the state.” Frantic social-media drama from Democrats in recent days suggests that party insiders have confirmed what those GOP operatives were hinting at — Platner is unelectable; if he is the Democrat on the ballot in November, Collins will win in a landslide.

Months ago, before almost anyone outside of Maine had heard of Platner, the process by which he became the “populist outsider” Senate candidate was enough to attract critical scrutiny from Michael Kruse in a lengthy Politico profile:

One night late this past July, marginally Boston-based but mainly itinerant duo Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan showed up at Ironbound [the restaurant in Hancock, Maine, owned by Platner’s mother]. Moraff and Fan, who are engaged to be married, met on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign. They aren’t recognizable names or faces even to political obsessives, but in the last few years they’ve helped recruit and guide several high-profile candidates: Navy veteran and mechanic Dan Osborn, who ran (and is running again) for U.S. Senate in Nebraska; and Marine veteran and mechanic Nathan Sage, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Iowa. Now Moraff and Fan were in Maine, and in a hurry — because the guy they’d tapped to take the blue-collar lane in next year’s Democratic Senate primary hadn’t worked out. Chris Williams, the former president of the Machinists Local S6 in Bath, was going to be Platner before Platner. “It was a go,” Williams told me. “But there was a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” he said. “They decided to go in a different direction” — some two and a half hours northeast [i.e., Platner in Hancock].

In other words, Platner was not the first choice of Moraff and Fan, the Sanders-supporting operatives who returned to Maine “in a hurry” to recruit Platner to run against Collins because their first choice, local union leader Williams, had backed out after the vetting process turned up “a skeleton in the closet.” Oh, the irony!

Precisely because these two left-wingers were “in a hurry” in the summer of 2025, there was not much time to dig into Platner’s own closet. It didn’t take long, however, before the new candidate’s boneyard would cause trouble for his campaign.

Genevieve McDonald, a former two-term Maine legislator turned consultant, was hired as the political director for the Platner campaign. Progressive consultant Morris Katz and Democratic fundraiser Ron Holmes III were also on board the Platner bandwagon. At that point, the chief task for Platner’s campaign was to defeat the front-runner, Gov. Janet Mills, in the Democratic primary. Mills is both old (78) and female, and therefore not much of a contrast to Collins, who is 73. Even worse, from the “progressive” point of view, Mills was recruited to run for Senate by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is hated by the pro-Hamas left wing of the Democratic Party. It’s not as if Mills lacks solid credentials as a progressive herself, but the vibe-shift with the party in the past few years — driven both by the Gaza War that began in October 2023 and the failure of the Biden presidency — has changed the calculus by which Democratic primary candidates are judged. The lesson taken from the defeat of both Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton was that Democrats can’t win with female candidates, and need young white guys with blue-collar “authenticity.”

Whether that analysis is true or not, it’s clearly what Moraff and Fan had in mind when they grabbed Platner as their hurried second choice for the Maine Senate race. And the failure to “vet” Platner thoroughly soon came back to haunt them:

The political director for Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate campaign resigned Friday [Oct. 17, 2025] after Platner’s past online posts featuring numerous controversial remarks resurfaced this week.

Former state Rep. Genevieve McDonald of Stonington was one of the most prominent Maine Democrats who joined Platner’s campaign after a buzzy August launch … She sent her resignation letter exclusively to the Bangor Daily News.

The past week has dealt Platner, 41, the biggest test yet in his nascent campaign, and it coincided with Gov. Janet Mills joining the Democratic primary Tuesday for the chance to take on U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in 2026. McDonald’s exit showed discord among the campaign that includes many progressive strategists from out of state.

CNN first reported Thursday on since-deleted posts Platner made a few years ago on Reddit that included Platner calling rural, white Americans “racist” and “stupid” and describing all police as “bastards.” Other old posts suggested violence is necessary to achieve social change, according to Politico’s reporting.

The BDN followed up Friday with a story about more Reddit posts from 2013 in which Platner asked why Black people “don’t tip” and suggested people concerned about being raped should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—-ked up.”

McDonald … wrote in Friday’s resignation letter the past statements “were not known to me when I agreed to join the campaign, and they are not words or values I can stand behind in a candidate.”

”While I am empathetic to Graham’s experiences and respect his personal journey and growth, I cannot overlook the volume and nature of his past comments, many of which were made as an adult, not as a young man,” McDonald wrote.

McDonald was blindsided, you see. The most prominent Maine Democrat to join a campaign run by “progressive strategists from out of state,” McDonald is a young woman who may yet rise high in Maine politics, and even if her “values” would have allowed her to stand behind Platner, her concern for her own reputation could not.

McDonald jumping ship should have been a red flag for the national network of progressives backing the Platner campaign, but they waved it off as trivial — or as an example of “ratfucking” tactics by the Democratic establishment, as the CNN story about their candidate’s Reddit archives came in a probably-not-coincidental proximity to the establishment-backed Mills throwing her hat into the ring for Senate.

Now, however, with less than two weeks to go until the June 9 primary, clearly there are Democrats who have begun coming to grips with the reality that Platner has so many more skeletons in his closet that he’s doomed to defeat in November.

In recent days it was learned that (a) Platner was sending sexual-themed text messages to other women after his 2023 marriage and (b) Platner had an account on Kik, a platform notoriously popular with guys seeking underage partners. It does not appear that either of these revelations came from Republican sources. This isn’t GOP operatives “ratfucking” Platner — it’s Democrats trying to sink his campaign, and Genevieve McDonald is being scolded as a backstabber by Platner’s supporters.

Plagued by bad polls and weak fundraising, Mills suspended her campaign April 30, although her name will still be on the primary ballot, and Democratic primary voters may not actually have the final say in choosing their party’s candidate. A Republican lawyer (@shipwreckedcrew) has looked into Maine’s election laws and determined that Democrats can replace Platner if “he withdraws by the second Monday in July [i.e., July 13] he can be replaced by the party by the 4th Monday in July [i.e., July 27]. They have 6 weeks to force him out.” That appears to be what they’re planning.

The “Throne of Skulls” meme of Susan Collins is what is perhaps most ironic about this whole campaign. The septuagenarian Maine senator is arguably the most liberal Republican in Congress, and has represented Maine in the Senate for 30 years. Conservatives don’t much care for her, but she can be arm-twisted for crucial votes (e.g., Supreme Court nominees) and this is enough to make her a target for Democrats, who have never yet found a candidate who could beat her. They have come close a time or two, but still Queen Susan sits on the bones of her defeated challengers.

Democrats are quite desperate to beat her this year. Given the current landscape, with Trump’s approval rating at 40%, and gasoline still above $4 a gallon, Democrats feel pretty confident they can win a House majority in the midterms, but the Senate map is less favorable to their hopes. If Collins somehow survives in November, the chances of Democrats controlling the Senate are not very good at all. This explains why so many progressives, anxious to bring a halt to the Trump agenda, are demonizing Collins as a way to rationalize their support for Mr. Nazi Tattoo in Maine. Yet it also explains why more sensible Democrats, realizing that Platner’s scandals are likely to make him unelectable, are trying to push him out and replace him.

Republicans are probably the winners either way it goes. If the Democrats do a repeat of their 2024 Biden-Harris switcheroo, it once again highlights the undemocratic methods which Democrats are willing to use in order to “save our democracy,” as they claim to be doing. What’s the point of voting in a Democratic primary if party insiders are going to impose their own chosen candidate? Yet as much as Republicans might enjoy pointing to this hypocrisy, our preferred outcome is for Platner to hunker down and resist all efforts to wrest the nomination from his grasp. We want him on the ballot in November, so that he can lose in a landslide after the GOP unloads their full arsenal of opposition research on him, tainting the Democratic Party with such a stench of disgrace that they not only lose the Senate race in Maine, but also fail in their bid to capture the House. Let Platner take down the Democrats with him.

Stay strong in the Führerbunker, Herr Platner. We’re counting on you.