Graham Platner Must Go

By now we should all be aware of the horrifying rape allegation made against Maine’s U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, made by a woman who had already gone on record to accuse him of “unsettling” and violent behaviour.

And just minutes before I sat down to write these very words, yet another story about Graham Platner’s troubling history of violent misogyny dropped, from another of his previous accusers, who alleged that he frequently, nonconsensually removed his condom during sex. This, too, is a form of rape.

The latest allegations, extensively corroborated by the accusers’ friends and loved ones, and contemporaneous texts and documentation, come after an earlier round of revelations that showed Platner as a man with a history of aggression, violence, and entitlement towards women, stretching back for over a decade—and unnervingly close to the present. The most recent rape allegation dates back to 2021. 

Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo by itself should’ve disqualified him from becoming one of this country’s hundred most powerful people; the bizarre, conflicting stories he told about its origin inspired no confidence. Meanwhile, his social media posts were distant sirens in the night that warned of coming danger—one where he said rape victims needed to “just need to take some responsibility for themselves” feels like a case in point now. Such attitudes are rarely, if ever, completely disconnected from behaviour.

In the wake of the rape allegations, it is abundantly clear that this man cannot represent himself let alone the state of Maine, nor help the Democratic Party recover the spirit of Reconstruction that our nation so desperately requires. Such a spirit is necessarily pluralist, necessarily liberal in the best sense—of inclusion, equality, shared dignity. He must withdraw from the Senate race and allow the Democratic Party of Maine to determine a path forward. Without him.

Platner and his bunker-mates, huddling amidst the ruins of his campaign, are now brazenly demanding to have a say in who might replace him on the ticket, according to some reports. He should have none; his entire campaign has been defined by his entitlement to unearned honours, surrounded by a chorus of enablers talking about “redemption” and “second chances” on behalf of a man who loudly and frequently insists he has done nothing he needs to atone for, for whom apology is a foreign concept in an alien tongue, and who is ever ready to blame someone else for his woes.

He must go, and he must go now.

But it is not merely because he allegedly committed these crimes, it is because the entire mythology built up around him represents a danger to the small-d democratic movement. We will not defeat fascism by propping up the men who act as its mercenaries and collect their payment in entitlement over the lives and bodies of others. We need a diverse coalition; it will be messy, conflicted, and made of imperfect people with imperfect histories or imperfect politics; but there must, in the final analysis, be a line drawn on who we give power to. We can welcome the vote of Graham Platner the citizen, in the privacy of the ballot box, without arguing he is entitled to become one of the world’s most powerful lawmakers. In a nation of some 340 million people, we can surely do better.

Last month, I wrote at great length about Platner’s defenders and why his vibe was so attractive to them—not just in spite of his alleged behaviour but often because of it. The reactions to the New York Times report on him were, to say the least, astonishing. When we finally went to press with the piece, Platner’s victory in the Maine Democratic primaries was a rout, and even as I was writing it looked like it would be a coronation. As furious as I was that the man had come so far, that he had earned a chorus of enablers from across the left-of-centre spectrum, I was resigned to the fact that the contest was essentially over at this point. We had no choice—it was him, or Collins.

Towards the end of a long essay where I’d slated Platner and his loudest, Extremely Online supporters, I said that we’d been forced into the dismal hope that Platner would, at last, redeem himself and could, if nothing else, vote the right way in the Senate in a way Susan Collins (or any other Republican) never would. 

I stand by calling Collins a vote for concentration camps. But I was wrong to foreclose other options besides Platner. That was written in a despairing compromise unworthy of our times, and so I should correct that by saying what I should’ve said then: this moment we are faced with, one where Platner stands credibly accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend, was inevitable. We needed to find an alternative because the choice would be made for us. Lo and behold, here we are.

We were never going to get to Election Day 2026 with this man’s reputation intact. I felt that in my bones and yet I hesitated on saying so publicly. 

I believed this because it was abundantly clear that Platner was not vetted, and each new revelation felt like the compounding of moral interest; each building up to newer, darker revelations that required more of the investigation that his earliest supporters clearly failed to do. 

In the wake of a thumping primary victory, it felt like we were out of options for replacing Platner. But we have them now: a narrow window of a chance to replace a man that, even in the coldest analysis possible, already seemed to be faltering precisely because the very working-class voters he was supposed to reach were finding him to be morally questionable.

In the end, the Devil cheated the Democrats out of his end of the bargain. Platner is not even the working-class whisperer he presented himself as, and all they’ve done is collectively debase themselves with indulgent apologia for a violent misogynist.

Some of his erstwhile defenders have, at last, given up the fight. Leftist journalist Ryan Grim has admitted it is when, not if, Platner drops out. But others are determined to be Platner’s Hiroo Onoda. Ken “Smoothgroin” Klippenstein has put out a last ditch, characteristically tasteless apologia for his previous defences of Platner. From Hell’s heart he must still stab at the many women—the evil “HR Ladies”—he thinks are ruining left-wing politics. 

It is a stark reminder of the mentality that will stalk us long after Platner is gone, so let’s take an unserious argument a little seriously before condemning the Man Who Would be Senator to the life of private atonement he deserves.

Klippenstein seems to be distancing himself from Platner now while also criticising several commentators for their apologies about their previous support, saying “it’s unclear to me what exactly they’re apologizing for other than not being clairvoyants able to foresee this week’s accusation before it happened.”

As I noted earlier, however, this was eminently predictable, and the New York Times report from less than a month ago pointed to the very real possibility that assault and rape were lurking behind the allegations of aggression, physical violence, and entitlement—especially given the man’s history of misogynistic statements online. 

Klippenstein tries to defend all of this as merely “lesser flaws,” and argues that feminist critics like myself yearn for “smoothgroin,” “squeaky-clean, McKinsey consultant politicians.” 

But it is profoundly insulting to armies of working-class Americans who have not committed rape, domestic violence, gotten Nazi tattoos, or posted bigoted screeds online, to suggest that such things define their class—and that acceptance of them is the only path that will connect them to high office. If nothing else, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is proof positive that we need not tolerate such abuses in order to get politicians with working-class backgrounds that stay in touch with their roots. 

There is also the elementary truth that Platner is but one man among millions; we are no more condemned to him than we are to Susan Collins. Neither has a right to rule; that is what democracy means. To say that we should have standards for those who govern us, and hold them to higher ones than we may hold a private citizen, is not elitism. It is a bulwark against everything we’re now fighting against—who can deny that Trump’s dictatorial streak is downstream of his violent entitlement, personal bigotry, and utter lack of moral restraint? His solipsism is a cataclysmic personal flaw, and has proven fatal when applied to the mighty instruments of American power. His personal flaws have a body count that may already number in the millions.

We cannot win by becoming MAGA, a loose movement defined by little other than the violent satisfaction of appetites, by the discarding of morality and virtue as mere hypocrisies. If we are making the argument that the only way to stop a bad rapist is with a good rapist, then we are already conceding much of MAGA’s amoral universe and forfeiting the idea of a more just world. We are merely reduced to pursuing power for its own sake, rather than for a higher moral purpose.

Some might object here that it is not Trump’s character that matters as much as what he believes and how he acts on it, and there is some truth to the fact that some of his opponents linger on Trump’s aesthetics, his lack of politesse, his gauche behaviour, rather than what is substantially evil about him. It doesn’t matter that he likes his steaks well done; it matters that he has ordered dozens of extrajudicial deaths in the Caribbean. But his more serious character flaws, chief among them his solipsism, are the wellspring of his deeds. And it speaks to a kind of entitlement that cannot, ultimately, be bent towards just ends. It will instead converge on reactionary politics. It is no coincidence that Platner is attracting loads of antisemites to his campaign, for instance. Even now, some of his last ditch defenders, like Cenk Uygur or Michael Tracey, are claiming the invisible hand of AIPAC in Platner’s demise.

Such little devils would not be banished by Platner’s electoral victories, but empowered by them, leeching off any Reconstruction-like movement we hope to build after Trump and rebuilding not constitutional democracy or the pluralism that it is meant to nurture, but new forms of reactionary politics wearing lefty clothes and slogans.

It is telling that men like Klippenstein once again beat the drum of atonement: “Giving people a chance means that sometimes they won’t live up to it. No one should apologize for that. I’m not.” But the problem with arguments like this is that they necessarily breeze over specifics. A credible allegation of rape made Klippenstein inch away while still hurling imprecations at his critics, but everything that all but foretold that accusation is merely a bunch of “lesser flaws.” Let’s be clear that those “flaws” include a Nazi tattoo—Klippenstein breezes over this by saying “drunk tattoos and sexting-out-of-wedlock struck me as the most Marine shit ever.” 

But we should be specific that the Totenkopf is a Nazi symbol and, among other things, the New York Times expose made it clear that Platner knew it was at the time, contrary to his dissembling public statements. Redemption would require Platner to have been honest. It would require that he actually owned up to his history truthfully and openly, with a real accounting of where he went wrong and what he was doing to be better. But demanding that he be sent to the Senate, and that we should trust he’ll use that enormous power wisely—after every single major sin of his had to be dragged from the shadows into the light—does not feel redemptive. His campaign sent a man, Morris Katz, to the phones to threaten retaliation against the woman who shared those out-of-wedlock sexts with the media. What redemption were we meant to fawn over here? 

Here is the larger issue, darker still than any of Platner’s alleged crimes and indiscretions: if he won, he would’ve been used as a template to be imitated. Despite the wild success of a diverse array of progressives, liberals, and democratic socialists who won big without seeming like Orcish misogynist throwbacks, it is Platner who would be cast by many in the media and the consultant class as a template to be mass-produced because it would vindicate their own latent misogyny, validating it as a victorious strategy and not mere private entitlement.

They want desperately to believe that the burly white man cosplaying as a working class Ron Swanson, a bit rude, crude, and something of a bad boy, is the formula for winning back America, because it validates everything they prefer to be true. As I argued last month, they want to kill the HR Lady in their heads (and, just perhaps, in their lives). Platner offered a blue-tinted, ideologically acceptable variation on old misogynistic themes with something for everyone: anti-Israel leftists, liberals looking for the next charisma god, feminists desperate to get Collins out, DSA types who wanted a big strong man to take on the “Epstein class,” and so on. 

For many of the men here, Platner’s behaviour was either not a deal breaker, or something they yearned to validate in their own lives. Consider (with a leadsuit) Michael Tracey going on about how even the DSA has become “the screechiest Dem HR ladies” now that they’ve made inroads into the Democratic Party. To disagree with him is not merely wrong, it is something worse, more vile still: it is feminine, and the man who acted like he’d been shot when an elderly congresswoman brushed past him certainly knows about the dangers of femininity.

To elevate Platner further, to keep him in the race, would be to empower people like this: men who give the shape of a woman to all the world’s evils. It merely introduces poison into the bloodstream of our democratic movement. And the apologism and lack of reflection from the Ken Klippensteins of the world show why we need to keep fighting against these dark temptations, dismantling the palace of readymade excuses that greet any misogynistic man who claims entitlement to power over our lives.

There are many compromises that we will have to make on the long road back to power. Supporting a man like Platner is not one of them.

Our movement must be a broad church, yes. But in order to achieve this catholic congress of democratic footsoldiers, we cannot ask over half the population to bear rulership from a man like Platner. We cannot short circuit our commitment to pluralism before we have even won. We cannot sow the seeds for the next generation of political reaction.

For so many reasons, for his sins, for what he would do to the movement for democracy, for who he empowers, Graham Platner must go.

Featured image is "Platner Headshot," CC BY-SA 4.0 MAINEiac4434 2025