It remains to be seen whether Graham Platner, the by turns troubled and troubling Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, sees his campaign end like Joe Biden after that ill-fated 2024 debate performance or, instead, like Donald Trump after the 2016 release of the “Access Hollywood” tape (or any number of other controversies).
The Democratic establishment never wanted Platner to be the nominee to take on Sen. Susan Collins, would probably still like to push him out, have a long history of ruthlessness on this front, and may have a Biden-like path for doing so.
Democrats have also at times been equally ruthless about dragging flawed candidates across the finish line, though they may regret one of their most recent examples.
But Platner is in this position in the first place because rank-and-file progressives are in an anti-establishment mood reminiscent of the Tea Party across the aisle more than a decade ago. Many Democrats don’t trust their leaders or elders. They could rally behind Platner’s wife amid his new sexting scandal or take it out on Democratic operatives presumably involved in leaking damaging information.
Democrats could easily point to their favorite Trump scandals, or those of Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and decide they simply don’t care—unless the polls show Platner has become sufficiently radioactive to put Collins’s Senate seat out of their reach. (Although, after Collins’s last victory six years ago, who can trust the polls?)
It’s widely rumored that Platner’s present controversies—extramarital sexting, inflammatory Reddit posts, and an apparently Nazi-themed tattoo—are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the coming opposition research dump. Maybe that does him in, or perhaps the Trump era has demonstrated the sheer volume of scandals can sometimes actually make them easier to weather if the candidate is audacious enough.
The parties have flip-flopped over the years on how much they think character counts. The Democrats have seemingly at least settled on consent, though the role of electoral politics cannot be lightly dismissed.
In the end, the Platner story will likely be written by whichever faction of the Democratic Party is in control, how willing their voters are to win at any cost, and how much hypocrisy liberals are willing to live with.
On that last point: It simply strains credulity to believe that leading Democrats would accept any Nazi tattoo explanation offered by a Republican in a competitive race, no matter how much personal growth or overcoming of serious struggles was allegedly involved, even if true. Yet they’ve been awfully forgiving of Platner, who is running against arguably the most liberal Republican left in either house of Congress. To some degree, this is normal (for our current environment) partisanship and as such probably not worth getting too upset about.
Platner may also benefit from a phenomenon that should worry people who profess to care deeply about the mainstreaming of bigotry in politics: The weaponization of accusations of racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc. has clearly played a role in getting some people (including those on the right) to tune such allegations out, even when there is credible evidence that they are true. In some extreme but perhaps no longer numerically trivial cases, it leads to the denial that these hatreds are important things to be concerned about at all.
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It is in the crevices between unambiguous hatemongers and those who believe the mark of political courage is to treat accusations of bigotry as a badge of honor (or at least with indifference) that the “alt right” rose 10 years ago and the “Groypers” grow now.
I’m on record criticizing the “woke right” pejorative, clever though it may be, in part because saying neo-Nazis are woke is transparently absurd. That line of attack also gets backward what attracts people who are neither insane nor of vicious personal character to some of the more troubling trends on the right: They believe that accusations of bigotry are politically motivated and essentially fake, intended only to marginalize and defeat their political causes.
That doesn’t mean the widespread progressive acceptance of Graham Platner, for however long it lasts, excuses people who wind up larping as Nazis on the internet or doing even worse things. But it will soon become an important part of how people who are adjacent to that cesspool try to explain themselves.
