I’m guessing you have a pretty good idea of what Graham Platner was getting up to last week—fending off yet another round of allegations about his character. But what about Susan Collins, Maine’s incumbent GOP senator and the person almost sure to be Platner’s opponent this November? You probably didn’t hear a word about her. The only significant news story of the week in which she figured (aside from being mentioned in all the Platner stories) is that she cast her 10,000th consecutive vote in the Senate—a milestone, to be sure, but something of a double-edged one as it serves to remind voters that she’s been in the Senate since Christ left Chicago.
This is just how Collins wants things. As long as the subject is Platner’s boozing and his ex-girlfriends, Collins may skate to reelection. So, the key thing Platner has to do, assuming he wins tomorrow’s primary and stays in the race, is to maneuver things such that come October, the topic is Collins’s record, not his past.
We’ll get to that record in a bit, but first, let’s deal with the Platner question. Two big stories came out last week. The first was about his sexting with several women in the early days of his current marriage. He married Amy Gertner in 2023. Early in the campaign, Gertner told an aide who was a friend about the messages, and the friend—now presumably an ex-friend—told a lot of people and shared some screen grabs with The New York Times. Gertner denounced the friend, Genevieve McDonald, and defended her husband and marriage. On that one, I think your average person would say Well, if his wife doesn’t care, why should I?
The second story was potentially more damaging and concerned Platner allegedly twisting the arm of a former girlfriend and slamming a door shut on her; also, that he “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders,” according to The New York Times, which broke the story last Thursday. It’s disturbing, no doubt. It’s worth noting that this woman is, or was at the time, apparently a very committed conservative Republican—the cofounder of “Ladies for Kavanaugh,” which she formed to confront what she termed the “baseless, 11th-hour accusations orchestrated to stop [the justice’s] confirmation.” (One question the Times left on the table but crossed my mind and maybe yours was how Platner could have said “you are literally everything to me” to someone who, according to Newsweek, worked at the Heritage Foundation at the time.)
Two other exes told the Times of similar treatment from Platner. On the other hand, “several” other exes (dude got around!) described him as “a fun and caring partner,” and some remain friends with him to this day. Platner denies all the physical stuff, so someone is lying.
Personally, I don’t know what to make of the guy. I suspect he’s not telling the truth about his Nazi tattoo and I’d bet you that he knew what it meant, but I also don’t think that makes him a Nazi. He has obviously lived a life that we would at the very least call picaresque. Balzac would have had fun with him.
There’s also the question of, as it is often said in politics, what else is out there. Any good campaign—and Susan Collins does run good campaigns—knows to sit on the really bad stuff until after Labor Day, although campaigns can’t always control when things are disclosed, and anyway, all the revelations about Platner seem to be coming from establishment Democrats who are unnerved by his lefty swagger.
There’s a lot we don’t know, and a chance we’ll find out all about it. I do, however, know these two things. One, Platner is almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. Two, short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt. That may seem like a really low bar, and maybe it is. But I’m less interested in his personal life than I am in Collins’s public one, because that’s what really matters here.
So let us now return to the question of Collins’s week. The Senate cast a bunch of votes last week. And Collins did what she always does when she’s up for reelection—she voted with the Democrats on the ones people pay attention to, and as a Republican on the others.
There were a number of votes related to Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund. On most of those, like this one for example, she was one of maybe two or three Republicans (Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy, who are both retiring) voting with the Democrats. On other less highly visible matters, though, she went with her party and with Trump. Last Wednesday, the Senate rejected a resolution that would have overturned Trump’s rollback of Biden-era emissions standards for coal- and oil-fired power. She went party-line on that one. The day before, she voted to confirm a federal judge for Kansas who, at his confirmation hearing, refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election.
Ah, judges: This brings us to where Platner needs to direct attention in this campaign. Maine voters need to be reminded, to the tune of about $40 million worth of TV commercials, of Collins’s support for putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. “He has been an exemplary public servant,” she said at the time. She hoped that Kavanaugh would be a unifying force on the court (riiiiight), and most infamously she accepted his assurances that he saw Roe v. Wade as “settled law.” She was either lying about that or was the only person in America stupid enough to believe him. Platner should ask her, repeatedly, which it was.
Different voting studies place Collins’s record of supporting Trump’s initiatives at anywhere from 70 percent to 95 percent. Whichever the true figure, there’s bound to be material there. Platner needs this race to be about that voting record and all the stands for working-class Mainers that Collins hasn’t taken. I may have done some bad things, Platner might say; but one thing I haven’t done is spend the last 40 years helping pick the pockets of working-class people and transfer trillions of dollars to the very rich. (Collins has voted in favor of virtually every GOP tax cut bill over her career.)
If Platner has Mainers thinking about that in October, and barring truly disqualifying new revelations, he can win. And the Democratic Party needs to stop submarining him. Imperfect as he is, there’s a reason his campaign caught fire. Democrats ought to try to learn from that, not squirm away from it.
