Who's Afraid of Graham Platner?

The pundit class perhaps, but not the good people of Maine--who really don't like to be told what to think, what to do, or how to vote.

Image credit: Graham Platner for U.S. Senate

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Back in the fall of 2020, when I wasn’t phone banking for Joe Biden, I was making calls into Maine on behalf of Sara Gideon from my pandemically locked-down home in Western Massachusetts. You probably don’t remember Sara Gideon, but she was Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives. Elected in 2016, she was an effective counterweight to the governor, Tea Partier Paul LePage until Janet Mills was elected in 2018. And in 2020 she decided to run against….Susan Collins!

The result was astonishing: Joe Biden won the state of Maine by nine points, and Collins won her race by almost nine points. In other words, Gideon ran 18 points behind a winning presidential candidate in her own party. It was ticket splitting on an epic scale—and something that was showing up in the phone banking. Maine Democrats (when you phone bank, you always call voters from the party you are working for) would unhesitatingly say they were voting for Biden, but when I asked about Gideon there would be a silence. Then, I would hear some version of: “Susan Collins is from Maine—and Sara Gideon isn’t.”

Which was true. Gideon was born and raised in Rhode Island, had only lived in Maine for 16 years, and was de facto unable, in the eyes of too many Maine voters, to represent their state’s true interests. It was more important to them that Susan Collins (who is, I have heard, also terrific at constituent services) was a lifetime citizen of Maine than it was that she was a Republican, or that she had voted to confirm an anti-choice Associate Justice of the Supreme Court who had been accused of sexual assault by at least three women.

This should teach you at least two things: Maine Democrats make up their own minds, they think of their state as more like a nation within a nation, and they are more than willing to put the kind of bad behavior that would sink, say, a New York politician, in context.

In other words, if journalists and Democrats from other states seem to fear Graham Platner—lifetime Mainer, a veteran with four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt, oysterman, and currently under fire for a variety of sins in his private life—as the candidate to oppose incumbent Republican Susan Collins, Maine voters don’t. If the polls are right, Platner is poised to win that nomination.

For those of you who have not been following the story, the Platner controversy has mostly revolved around what we might normally categorize as free speech that is also, to many of us, repulsive. In October 2025, a team from Politico uncovered a series of deleted Reddit posts in which Platner had variously labeled himself a communist, declared that “an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice,” and mused about violently fighting fascists (by which, let’s be clear, he meant the Trump administration.) Then there was the Totenkopf (or “death’s head”) tattoo, commonly associated with Nazis, that he acquired in Croatia on leave from the Marines, and had to have covered up.

Now, there are women who have come forward to say that Platner, who has admitted to being treated for severe PTSD, was volatile and frightening when they were allegedly in an intimate relationship. According to Lyndsey Fifield, a Republican political operative who has spent her life working to bring MAGA to fruition, Platner was

“cavalierly contemptuous” of women, adding that his offensive online posts “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” In a 2016 diary entry, she described him as “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.”

In the article, Fifield alleged that Platner frequently grabbed her by the shoulders and once yanked her out of a taxi by her wrist. The article continued: “During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm’.”

The Times noted that Platner “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, and said it could not independently corroborate Fifield’s account of them.

Fifield further recalled that Platner would sharpen an axe while watching TV, and left an AR-15 lying around in his Washington apartment. She said he described women as “hatchet wounds”, a crude reference to female anatomy, and repeatedly asserted: “If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” adding that this would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way”.

Fifield told the paper: “He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”

Fifield also cast doubt on Platner’s claim that he was unaware that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became the center of controversy last year. “After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as ‘my Totenkopf’,” the Times reported.

OK, Now you know everything. Everything, that is, except why Fyfeld—a well-paid professional woman who presumably had her own money lots of options, and works for a party that is chronically casually contemptuous of women and riddled with Nazis—stayed with Platner beyond that first scary incident, or after she saw the Nazi tattoo, referred to her vulva as a wound, and learned that he kept an ax in the apartment in case raping the intruders did not deter them sufficiently.

She stayed in that relationship for two years.

We have learned that he was serially unfaithful to his girlfriends, a real shocker, since almost a quarter of married men and a quarter of unmarried men, admit to infidelity, and we have a thrice-married President who hired a sex worker less than four months after his third wife gave birth.

Yet another accuser brings us the breathless information that she told Platner not to come over, but he got really drunk and came over anyway and yelled at her. Is this where we point out that the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has an ex-wife who hid in a closet when he was in drunken rages and gave her friends a “safe word” that she would use if she believed her life was in danger?

If we have lowered the bar on male violence to the Hegseth standard, or the Trump standard (convicted by a jury of sexual assault, and accused by his ex-wife of beating and raping her), or the Representative Corey Mills standard (dating two women while still married, becoming engaged to one of them, and engaging in sketchy international arms deals), Graham Platner should not be sending anyone, in either party, to the fainting couch.

I want to repeat, in case you rushed through that block quote: the Platner campaign “strongly disputes” that Platner attacked Fyfeld physically, and the campaign has not disputed a great many other things which, for some people, seem to fall under the category of being a “bad boyfriend.” Platner points to PTSD, and a massive amount of self-medicating, as the trigger for being a serial cheater, shit poster, and generally incoherent person for many years during and after his military service.

Honestly, this makes sense to me. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you have never known someone who came out of a theater of war broken by the experience and needing to be healed. Not every veteran does, but some do. That doesn’t make them bad, sick, or scary people—a caricature that I thought we had disposed of after the Vietnam war. But it is what military service can produce—that is, if you are not Vice President JD Vance and spent your tour abroad manning a fax machine in the Green Zone.

The storm that has descended on Platner is profoundly cynical, driven by paid Republican operatives who insinuate he is a John Rambo waiting to happen, and journalists unable to resist a juicy story about Democratic Party dysfunction. The Platner crisis is also a perfect example of the Democrats wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They claim to want candidates who are military veterans, regular guys with regular guy experiences, who will win over other regular working-class guys? Well maybe, just maybe, regular guy experiences aren’t very nice, particularly when they involve combat duty in an unwinnable, horrendously violent war fought for the benefit of Halliburton and Erik Prince.

I mean, aside from the well-documented fact that the military has very high rates of domestic violence, what do people exactly think goes on when someone who has dedicated his youth to being professionally violent has to deal with everyday strains and stresses?

But instead of having this conversation, or encouraging Platner to have it, Democrats are playing the frantic short game. Janet Mills is still on the ballot! Maybe she is more popular than she was when she dropped out! Maybe Platner could just resign his candidacy to someone voters do not know and played no role in picking, because that worked so well in the 2020 presidential!

By contrast, Republican operatives are playing the long game. They don’t care whether Platner wins the primary, any more than they care about the Nazi thing, or the violence thing, or the infidelity/misogyny thing. Instead, they are betting that either he will win the primary, and that they can damage him enough that out of state donors who do care about those things will turn away from him; or that Janet Mills will replace him, and they can batter her with endless ads about how she wants your little girl to lose her swimming scholarship to a big, hairy man.

Do you think I am a bad feminist for not caring that a male Senate candidate who has treated women badly? In fact, I do care about women being treated badly, very much, but I am not sure how we got to the point where we had to believe all accusations made by all women in all circumstances. Remember former Biden aide Tara Reade? That’s right—the sexual assault accuser who now lives in Moscow as a guest of Vladimir Putin?

That said, it doesn’t matter whether I am, or am not, on board with Graham Platner, whether I am a good or a bad feminist. Why? Because I don’t live or vote in Maine and neither do you. Nor, for that matter, do any of the op-ed columnists for any of the national newspapers I read, live or vote in Maine. No one who votes in Maine cares whether we in the other 49 states think Graham Platner has the “character” to be a Senator.

Nor should they. It’s their election, and if we want Maine on board with winning back the Senate, let’s try respecting that and not derailing the candidate they choose..

Maybe I am a bad feminist for wanting Platner to succeed today, but I don’t think so. I think I am a realistic feminist, one who would like to see transgender people not used as punching bags, women dying in hospital parking lots because they are losing a baby and some idiot hears a heartbeat, poor people getting their SNAP benefits back, medical research restarted, not having new evidence every day that Trump and his cronies are looting the government, or knowing that hard-working immigrants leave for work every day wondering if they will see their children that night.

These are my current feminist goals. All of them mean winning the Senate back: Susan Collins is vulnerable as hell, and the polling suggests that Graham Platner can beat her. If that means supporting a man with a difficult past, one that allegedly includes saying gross things about women and engaging in a peculiarly 21st century form of online marital infidelity?

I can handle it.

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What I’m doing when you aren’t looking:

• Reading Amy Fried’s kick-ass Substack that is exclusively about Maine politics, Political Sightlines. Fried is a recently retired political scientist from the University of Maine, and a 30-year observer of the political scene in her state.

• Hanging out with the University of Canberra’s Will Behm on his terrific podcast FreshEd. Will and I met up on the interwebs to record a conversation that extended my recent post about the Canvas Hack: you will be able to tell what a good time we had, even if you just read the transcript and don’t listen.

• Obsessively hunting down Instagram reels with Jean Smart and Hannah Einbeinder to try to salve my pain about never being able to see a new episode of Hacks again. It was a brilliant pairing of talents; the fifth and final season—even the final episode—was perfect. In my constantly mistaken television watching career, Hacks was yet another series where I watched an episode, said Nope! and then tried again four years later when a friend’s son landed a very bit part in the show. Now I just pray that the writers don’t ruin everything (like they did with Entourage) by making a movie. This cast was made for half-hour comedy: don’t screw it up, HBO. Let them fly free: Deborah Vance 4Evah.

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Short takes:

• If you want to know what is going on in one of a half-dozen Senate races that are crucial to ending Donald Trump’s warped presidency, read political scientist Amy Fried’s Political Sightlines, a Substack about Maine politics. In her most recent post, Fried suggests that Graham Platner stop minimizing the impact of his behavior on women and lean into a real-time reckoning with misogyny. “A lot of voters are moved by Platner’s redemption arc, and his shifts in how he deals with women might be read as another dimension to that growth, but it’s less credible until he demonstrates a greater depth of understanding, combined with a larger policy agenda focused on women’s lives,” Fried writes in her most recent recent post. “Then the contrasts to what Collins has done to harm women would hit home even more as voters hear his commitment to helping all women live in safety, with emotional well-being, economic security and the ability to thrive.” (June 8, 2026)

• “All racial identities were named and valorized, except one,” Thomas Chatterton Williams writes in The Atlantic: whiteness. No more: MAGA policymakers are ramping up their campaign to persuade white Americans that, even after every shred of DEI and “woke” has been stamped out, they are culturally endangered. “This idea has found perhaps its most alarming expression in the government’s dehumanizing messaging around immigration,” Williams continues. “Meanwhile, the United States government has retooled its refugee program to prioritize Afrikaners, or white South Africans of predominately Dutch descent. And last year, Vice President Vance scolded his German hosts at the Munich Security Conference for isolating hard-right parties that organize around white nationalism.” (June 8, 2026)

• It looks like The Nixon Foundation is working hard to make the most disgraced, if not most disgraceful, United States President great again. A “Nixonmaxxing” campaign is rewriting the Watergate story as….that’s right: a conspiracy! True, Nixon partisans have always promoted the idea that Tricky Dick was set up, but “Gen Z-focused content by the Nixon Foundation epitomizes a new strain of Watergate revisionism that began around the start of Donald Trump’s first presidency,” Tomo Chien writes at L.A. Material. “A growing movement of young conservatives are lionizing Nixon, celebrating his attacks on the media, academia, and his political opponents, while bolstering conspiracy theories that exonerate him of wrongdoing,” Chien reports, while media figures like “[Christopher] Figures like Rufo, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Rogan have bolstered alternative Watergate theories at a moment when public trust in government and media is cratering and Trump has upended norms of the presidency.” (June 4, 2026)