Graham Platner’s Very Online Undoing

Last week, Graham Platner announced his withdrawal from Maine’s race for U.S. Senate as any self-proclaimed regular person might: by recording a front-facing video with his smartphone and posting it to social media. He held the phone close enough to his face that you could make out the shallow lines on his forehead, the flecks of white in his mostly auburn beard. Two days earlier, Jenny Racicot, a woman who once dated Platner, had alleged, in an interview with Politico, that he had showed up drunk at her house, in late 2021, and raped her. Staring sternly into his phone camera, with a verdant, sun-streaked treescape behind him, Platner explained that he was suspending his campaign not because he’d done what he had been accused of—he insisted that it was not “an admission of guilt”—but because the baseless “attacks” against him were aiming “to take everything away from us,” namely the inroads his campaign had made for progressive politics in the state of Maine. He claimed, not for the first time, that he’d never harbored a “desire to run for office,” that he and his wife were “regular people” who had not been “looking for this experience.” He implored us, the viewers of his video, to consider what we would do if “large forces were working against you personally to accuse you of the worst thing that a person could do, and it was not remotely true.” Would we keep fighting in the face of such a “brutal political reality”?

Since entering Maine’s Democratic Senate race, last August, Platner has cast himself as a “random guy” with zero political ambition. He was living a quiet life as an oyster farmer in the small Down East town of Sullivan, when two political consultants and Democratic Socialists of America organizers—Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan—reportedly showed up at his door and asked him if he’d be interested in running for U.S. Senate. Morris Katz, a top political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, also became involved, telling Platner, per the Times, that he was a potential “historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution” if he accepted the challenge and ran for office. Apparently, they’d seen a video of him on the internet talking about Norwegian salmon and knew he was “the one.”

Platner’s skepticism of the pitch only made him more closely resemble Plato’s ideal philosopher-king: the reluctant leader who had to be persuaded to take power for the good of the people. Platner suspected that the “corporate media system” and the “political establishment” would not welcome him—a kettlebell-swinging, gun-toting, callous-handed combat veteran and manual laborer—but he eventually decided to risk personal disparagement if it meant advancing the progressive platform he so vigorously championed: enacting universal health care, taxing billionaires, lowering housing costs. That establishment Democrats didn’t accept him made his candidacy even more appealing. A man of the people, a working-class hero, a diamond in the rough unearthed by political operatives riding the high of Mamdani’s rise—the narrative, in and of itself, was a winning strategy.

In Maine, where I live, Platner generated swift and feverish support, the type of political enthusiasm that’s impossible to manufacture. Genuine excitement fomented among my milieu of twenty- and thirtysomethings—we finally had a guy we could throw our weight behind and organize around, someone who embodied the sort of uncompromising leftist politics that, just months before, had appeared unlikely to take hold in a state whose voters had elected Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, to the U.S. Senate for five consecutive terms. Like much of New England, Maine has an independent-minded, anti-establishment electorate, with third-party candidates, Tea Party Republicans, and mildly progressive Democrats all achieving statewide electoral success over the past few decades. On the surface, Platner’s politics seemed like a non-starter for a Maine Senate candidate, and a prohibitive obstacle when courting the state’s rural, right-leaning voters. But his anti-establishment attitude and antagonistic relationship to power made his message resonate among unexpected populations, including the northern working-class demographics that have increasingly moved away from Democratic candidates in recent elections. Platner is fluent in the language of “freedom,” a word that goes a long way in Maine. (I grew up across the border, in New Hampshire, where the state motto, “Live Free or Die,” is a jingoistic, oft-evoked rallying cry.) The brand of freedom he presented, however, was not the libertarian ideal of uninhibited personal sovereignty but a more collective vision rooted in economic security, “the freedom to live lives with dignity and fulfillment, the freedom to not be ripped off by a for-profit health-care system, the freedom to have a roof over our heads that we own,” as he put it.