I always understood Graham Platner’s political appeal, but I wish more people would admit how much aesthetics played a role. The Maine Democrat’s press photo—his ruddy, sun-splashed face, tousled dirty-blonde hair, matching beard, and pecs bursting underneath a fitted black Henley—could easily be confused with the cover of a romance novel. But no, this youngish, handsome, salt-of-the-earth oysterman and military veteran was running for political office. What’s more, he said all the right things on the campaign trail. His unstudied, gravel-voiced speeches made him sound like the working-class champion the Democrats needed to unseat longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins in their bid to take back the Senate. That Platner’s only obstacle to the Democratic nomination was the centrist 71-year-old governor, Janet Mills, made his appeal even stronger.
So I understood the hype, but I never thought he was a great candidate. The political class who backed him—overwhelmingly white, male progressives—should have been more discerning, especially as one scandal after another emerged. The fact that his sketchy past, like his troubling Reddit posts and Nazi tattoo and “unsettling” behavior toward women didn’t imperil his campaign until a woman came forward with rape allegations on Monday shows how toxic some reaches of the left can be, as willing as the right to dismiss misogyny and other disqualifying offenses when it’s politically inconvenient. In fact, Platner’s checkered history may have been part of his appeal, as some on the left romanticize the working class and think we should cling to an outdated masculine ideal to win them back.
For starters, Platner’s working-class bona fides were questionable. His grandfather was an architect, and his father was an attorney in Ellsworth, Maine. He attended private schools as a teenager. His father lent him $200,000 to buy his house, which he pays about $950 a month toward, and his mother owns a restaurant that buys his oysters. In an interview with NPR’s Leila Fadel, in June, Platner rebutted charges that he was “cosplaying” by effectively broadening his definition of working class. “If the bulk of the money that you get to live comes from wages, comes from working, and you are not just sitting on an immense amount of hoarded wealth, which generates income for you, then you work for a living,” he said.
While I’m sympathetic to that broader definition, the bulk of working-class folks who don’t have some amount of family privilege to fall back on might quibble with it. Much of Platner’s adolescence and early adulthood—being expelled from school, working odd jobs, eschewing college, serving in the Marines in Iraq before his mother helped get him into oyster farming—speaks to the kind of privilege someone with a solid middle-class upbringing knows they can rely on, not the kind of panicked effort to find solid ground I witnessed in my working-class upbringing in Arkansas.
Platner has attributed his alcohol abuse and other troubles in adulthood to PTSD related to his military deployments (he also served in Afghanistan with the National Guard). That is useful context for some of his problems but not all of them—and it’s certainly not cause enough for wholesale forgiveness. Yet, despite these setbacks, Platner continued to get extra chances to make it in society. It’s hard to imagine someone who grew up with less money and fewer connections (or anyone but a white man, for that matter) bouncing back from his checkered history and lack of professional experience to run, not just for any political office, but for a U.S. Senate seat held by a five-term incumbent—and then somehow successfully convincing voters to back him in the primary over the sitting (woman) governor.
As a candidate seeking the je ne sais quoi of authenticity, Platner conveniently eschewed his family history and instead implored voters to consider his experiences as a working-class adult. But at the same time, we were asked to discount some of his other experiences and actions in adulthood. When it was revealed that he had a Totenkopf tattoo, he said he was drunk when he got it and didn’t know its history. I can maybe buy that. But are we also meant to believe that in the intervening 20 years he never learned—from, say, a World War II documentary, a book, or a friend—the truth about his tattoo? That is harder to believe.
When Platner’s questionable treatment of women first surfaced, he hardly needed to defend himself because other people were happy to do it for him. It wasn’t just that his fans dismissed these accusations, but that they had nothing but contempt for the people who did worry about them. In fact, when he clinched the Democratic nomination in the June 9 primary, his fans doubled down. Journalist Ken Klippenstein called it the end of “smoothgroin” politics, comparing certain politicians to real-life Ken dolls. “People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” he wrote, and went on to describe politicians he thought fit that mold. “In the real world, it seems everyone and anyone can have dark present and past,” he wrote.
Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly journalist, declared it the end of “Dem HR lady politics.” After some backlash, he tried to claim he was making the case against “authoritarian corporate officers.” But it was hard not to envision what he meant in his first post. You can make any case against corporations you want, but the fact is that in most workplaces sexual harassment claims are handled by H.R. offices—often populated by middle-class women, by the way—and to the extent they still exist, most of us encounter H.R. officers as the person who makes sure you get your vacation time and sign up for your health insurance and 401(k). Stoller wants us to believe that lurking behind H.R. is a corporate machine that protects itself from liability by being unfair to men. (The #MeToo movement showed how wrong that is because it took outrageously horrendous examples of sexual assault to bring down powerful men—and even then many of them got a second or even third chance.)
For some of Platner’s male supporters, or perhaps many of them, his violent edge was always part of his appeal. He seemed like he could punch someone, and people are angry and want a fighter. But that is not what it means to be working-class—and working-class voters in Maine apparently sensed that Platner was a phony. While it’s still early in this midterm election year, with most voters still tuned out, a recent New York Times poll showed that Collins led him by 30 points among white men without college degrees. She’s a known quantity in the state with a lot of name recognition, and a newcomer like Platner had some campaign work to do. But most of his support was coming from those with bachelor’s degrees, 66 percent of whom backed him over Collins.
That may seem surprising given how Platner portrayed himself on the campaign trail. But it’s less surprising when you consider that his loudest supporters online were that same demographic. They, at least, were fooled: To lefty college graduates who pay close attention to politics no matter the month or year, Platner did indeed appear authentically middle-class—or at least close enough not to question it, given that he adopted all of the progressive positions that this online cohort supports. Perhaps Platner’s press photo was modeled on a romance novel, after all, because these people swooned over him.
As Platner appears poised to drop out of the race, many progressives are pushing for the Maine Democratic Party to tap Troy Jackson, a former president of the state Senate, to take on Collins. It’s easy to see why. He’s a staunch union supporter with a history of fighting for strong labor protections, but he’s also a middle-aged white guy with working-class bona fides: He’s a fifth-generation logger. Let’s hope he’s been a better man than Platner has been.
