I liked Graham Platner

god forbid I be hopeful about a man

When I first heard of Graham Platner, it was on an airplane returning from a week in Maine in August of 2025. My soon-to-be husband has spent every summer in Maine since his birth, and it was time for me to be introduced to the sounds of the loons, rocky beaches, and 55-degree nights in August.

When I saw Platner’s ad, it said he was an oyster farmer, an Iraq and Afghanistan war vet, and a left-of-liberal. I found this intriguing and tentatively exciting. He seemed rough around the edges, which I welcomed, as opposed to someone who planned to be a politician since they were seven years old and had curated their whole life around that possibility. He also reminded me a little bit of my partner, who I say is “republican coded with leftist politics,” which really just means that he works a union job, likes the gym, and presents as traditionally masculine while believing in Medicare for all and that billionaires shouldn’t exist. Graham Platner graduated from high school in 2003 and earned the senior superlative, “most likely to start a revolution,” in which he was shown holding a sign that read, "Free Kosova, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Kurdistan, Tibet.” Everything I read about him signaled that he was the real deal and had believed in these issues for decades, and also, he had frankly been through the wringer and acquired both a PTSD diagnosis and substance abuse issues.

Platner, to me, was a blue-collar, union Democrat who both cared about everyone’s rights and wanted to fix our big issues rather than using the “Woke 1.0” playbook, which many Democrats seem stuck in. He worked as an organizer for a local Democratic grassroots movement, which is very unglamorous work, and I found the willingness to do something so un-flashy appealing. In fact, I found him so appealing as a candidate that, when his initial scandal broke, and old Reddit posts resurfaced, I was most concerned about his response to it. Would he handle it with humility, or gaslight the public? I was pleasantly surprised and felt like he took accountability, called himself a moron, and talked about the ways he had changed and the kind of person he was becoming. I obviously didn’t like what he said, and I'm also nowhere near the person I was a decade ago. You know better, you do better, and I have always found accountability incomplete when we hold people’s sins over them without any possibility of public redemption.

Then came the scandal of his tattoo, which folks claimed bore a resemblance to “Totenkopf,’ a Nazi symbol. I must confess that to me, it looked like a skull and crossbones, and I personally had no idea about any link to Nazism. The idea that Platner was a secret Nazi always fell flat with me, particularly since he had gotten the tattoo 20 years prior while drunk in Croatia. It never made sense to me that a charismatic white man with a populist message would run as a Democrat if he was harboring Nazi sentiments, when our current administration is using language from old Nazi propaganda to advertise for ICE. If he wanted to win an election and wield power while holding those beliefs, there is already a party that turns a blind eye to racism and scandal, and where his veteran status and working-class persona would be welcomed. He got the tattoo covered up, which to me was a sign of good faith.

As of yesterday, a new scandal has arisen that bothered me on a far more visceral level. A former staffer leaked to the media that Platner had sent explicit text messages to multiple women (the lowest number I have seen is six) who were not his wife. Now, it seems the way this information reached the public involved a deep betrayal, as Platner’s wife shared it with the staffer because she was worried it could hurt the campaign. It was dubbed a “private matter” that the couple had worked through in counseling.

When I read this news, I audibly groaned and loudly stated to my partner, “Why are so many men like this???” because while the bar is in the seventh circle of hell and I am forced to appreciate that these women were presumably of age and there was no coercion involved, a man who is sexting with multiple women when he has been married for a year evokes a deep disgust in me. He didn't even have a proper affair, like a Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. He was a newlywed! There should be no lingering boredom because you got married after being high school sweethearts, and always wondered if there was someone who was a better fit; you haven’t been bogged down by years of raising children and passing like ships in the night, or simply feeling like colleagues who run a very chaotic daycare center together. I am not someone who thinks all cheating is the same or that there can never be any nuance (highly recommend reading Esther Perel’s A State of Affairs), but sexting multiple women when you are a newlywed sets off alarm bells for me.

The defense of him that I see from fellow Democrats is that this is a “private matter” that doesn’t have to do with the real issues we face as a nation. John Favreu of Pod Save America had this to say:

I am going to say what I said in 2015 when I was still a registered Republican and Donald Trump was on the ballot: It matters deeply to me that our leaders have integrity and strength of character. James Dobson of Focus on the Family was one of my least favorite people, and in the mid 1990s he penned a letter that was both true and he recanted once Trump got to office. He said, “As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can't run a family, let alone a country, without it.” Republicans dismissed character in favor of a “outsider” who “wasn’t perfect” and it has brought our country to the brink of losing democracy and rotted many of their souls as they continue to excuse horrendous behavior in hopes of wanted policy change.

A man in his 40s who is seeking validation through sexting other women within the first year of his marriage is a red flag. I am not in his relationship and am open to missing some Big Thing, but I do not think it’s too much to ask for our leaders to not cheat on their wives or visit Epstein Island. Barack Obama didn’t cheat on Michelle, nor did George W. on Laura, or Joe Biden on Jill. This is not an impossible standard, and we should demand that politicians do more to earn our respect besides agree with our policy points. I also found it very poor form to have his wife, Amy, make the formal statement for their campaign. She is the aggrieved party. She is not the one running for office. She did not do anything wrong, and yet she is the one placed front and center to defend the person whose actions caused her so much pain and to convince all of us to forgive him, too.

I think we should allow our candidates to be flawed humans who make mistakes. I also think that if a candidate is showing a recent problematic pattern of behavior that could compromise how they would make decisions for their constituents, we should call it out and not tolerate it. We have had a real problem on the Left with not allowing people to grow and change and ousting folks at the first sign of imperfection, but we should not overcorrect and become loyal to people who we do not actually know and defending whatever atrocious behavior because they also want to raise taxes on corporations.

Ultimately, I am only a Mainer for a week in the summer, so it’s not my decision anyway. My personal belief is that finding a progressive politician who presents as more traditonally masculine does not have to come with philandering and a hidden Kik account. But if voters accept this as inevitable, it will continue to be.