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LESSONS FROM THE GRAHAM PLATNER DISASTER  
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Michelle Goldberg
July 6, 2026
The New York Times
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_ If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of
listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to
hear. _

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Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped
out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to,
immediately.

His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many
people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left —
besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out
what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.

As you probably know by now, Politico published
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a story on Monday about a woman, Jenny Racicot, who says that Platner
raped her. According to Racicot, they’d been romantically involved,
on and off, for more than two years when he showed up at her house
drunk and uninvited one night in 2021, let himself in and forced
himself on her.

She confided her ordeal to a man she dated after Platner, as well as
to her therapist, and showed Politico text messages she sent in 2023
warning an acquaintance away from him. Her account is completely
believable and completely devastating.

Platner denies Racicot’s accusations but seems to realize that his
campaign may no longer be viable. In a video
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on social media, he said, “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the
reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we
are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

But that time needs to wrap up. According to Maine law, Platner has to
drop out by next Monday for Democrats to replace him on the November
ballot. The sooner this mess ends, the better.

The Platner campaign represented an electoral insurgency against the
Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations
against those who launched it. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Most at fault, of course, is Platner himself. He allegedly victimized
Racicot, and then his campaign victimized her again, putting her into
a situation where she felt she had to go public. He betrayed his
supporters by plunging into a campaign while knowing he had a closet
full of skeletons and drawing people who believed in him into a doomed
enterprise.

Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo,
his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he
was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement
he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every
reason to know it was going to be sawed off.

Also liable for this disaster are the progressive operatives who
recruited Platner and were so infatuated with his identity — a
gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics — that
they failed to do their due diligence. The Wall Street Journal
reported
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last month that Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff, didn’t want
to spring for a thorough background check, which can take weeks and
cost around $20,000. “Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review
to be done within days,” The Journal said.

Moraff, who travels the country trying to recruit left-wing,
working-class candidates, reportedly learned about some of Platner’s
troubling Reddit posts but decided to charge forward anyway. “Part
of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown
in vats,” he told The Journal.

He’s correct about the appetite for unconventional candidates, but
that is no excuse for such willful sloppiness. Before blithely
assuming that voters would forgive a candidate’s flaws, he had a
responsibility to try to find out what those flaws were.

This fiasco might seem to vindicate the establishment that Platner
railed against, but Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who
wanted to stop Platner, is also partly culpable here. Schumer badly
misread the Democratic electorate and tried to clear the field for his
preferred candidate, Maine’s 78-year-old governor, Janet Mills,
leaving a vacuum that Platner filled.

As NOTUS reported
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last week, Dan Kleban, a co-founder of Maine Beer Company, had been
preparing to launch a populist, anti-Wall Street Senate bid last
summer, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tried to
dissuade him. “He and his campaign were left with the impression
that if he ran, Democrats in Washington would make it difficult
because they were holding their support for Maine Gov. Janet Mills,”
NOTUS wrote. Kleban ended up delaying the start of his campaign, not
getting in until Platner had already caught fire.

While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last
October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first
broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey
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what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I
deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I
wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I
encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly
worse.

One person who tried to alert Democrats was Platner’s former
political director, Genevieve McDonald. She quit when the first
Platner scandals emerged and has been increasingly outspoken against
him. Progressive operatives made her seem like a vindictive person
eager to curry favor with Maine’s political establishment. In
retrospect, she looks much more like someone who took a profound
professional risk to do the right thing. I can’t be the only one who
regrets not taking her more seriously.

If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of
listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to
hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain
Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no
longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens
space up for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a
few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape
proper vetting.

Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for:
working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics.
Many progressives want to believe that with a sufficiently populist
message and style, they can win over voters alienated from the
Democratic Party, obviating the need for ideological concessions.
Platner seemed to embody this possibility, and that made a lot of
people look past a lot of red flags until it was almost too late.

_Michelle Goldberg has been a Times opinion columnist since 2017.  "I
write about politics and culture from a left-leaning, feminist point
of view, though I try to seek out stories that challenge my
preconceptions."_

* Graham Platner
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* Accusations of sexual assault
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