Graham Platner’s most vocal supporters are doubling down. There was a moment earlier this week — after Maine Gov. Janet Mills announced her candidacy for Senate; after a tranche of old Reddit posts triggered debate over Platner’s views on everything from gun rights to racial stereotypes; and, most crucially, after video emerged of him dancing in his underwear and showing off the solid dark Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest — when it looked like the populist, oyster-shucking, anti-genocide veteran’s attempt to take down Republican Sen. Susan Collins would be over before it had really even started.
Then new polling dropped, and it wasn’t. Even after the blowup over his tattoo and history of Reddit posts, Platner is leagues ahead of Mills, who was already a member of the Maine House of Representatives when Platner, drunk, 23, and on shore leave from the Marines, stumbled into a tattoo shop in Croatia and got an inked symbol whose significance, by his telling, he didn’t grasp for the next 18 years. (Amid a torrent of news this week, he got it covered up.)
Evaluations of Platner’s political viability have raised a bigger question for Democrats looking to capture the kind of energy he’s drawn among voters in Maine. If the problem is that Democrats are too polished, too pro-corporate, and too catered to the elite, the solution just might be the rugged outsider, the edgy everyman — perhaps, even, the provocateur. And if the surge in support Platner saw in the wake of the scandal suggests anything, it’s that voters are so sick of what the Democratic establishment has to offer, they might look past a Nazi tattoo.
But for those on the left who find themselves desperate for a disruption of the party’s uninspiring baseline, it raises the question: Is this the best they can do?
Platner isn’t the first of this style of brash, populist, mixed-bag of a candidate to try to woo the left in recent years. Sen. John Fetterman, several of whose ex-staffers have joined Platner’s team, was once heralded with similar optimism. The bald, gruff giant who wore shorts to the Capitol was at one point in time lauded as the model for the party’s future. Today, he’s one of the least popular Democrats in the Senate — among both voters and staffers leaving his office at a high clip. He’s amassed Republican donors since leaning hard into his pro-Israel tack since October 7. And he’s repeatedly voted against the majority of his party to work hand in hand with President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress.
On some of the left’s key policy issues, the two are almost diametrically opposed. What Fetterman once lacked in substance, Platner makes up for in having experience as a local activist and clear policy stances on issues from Medicare for All to the genocide in Gaza. Fetterman, who once skated by heavier scrutiny of his stance on Israel, has since closely aligned himself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the nation’s leading pro-Israel lobby,