In June, just before Maine’s primary and the day after the New York Times reported Graham Platner had behaved abominably with two former romantic partners, the beleaguered Senate candidate held a town hall in Bar Harbor at which he received a lengthy standing ovation. Reading reports of a crowd roaring with applause for a man alleged to have referred to women as “hatchet wounds” felt like a bellyful of poison.

But contrary to the gloating perception in some quarters of social media, these voters were not necessarily celebrating what leftist Matt Stoller called “a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.” At a town hall two days later, girded for Graham bros, I was instead surrounded by white-haired ladies cheering their hearts out, adding their names to a homemade sign reading WE ARE YOUR GRAHAMILY. On television, Platner can look skeezy, like he has a pornstache, but in the dozens of rooms I’ve seen him in this year, he comes off as an apple-cheeked kid who might remind white resistance moms of their very good boys — a young man who hates war, supports Gaza, and wants to build a future that includes health care and housing.

The national narrative has offered a simplistic view of this crucial Senate race, pitting the oysterman Platner, working-class cosplayer and dirtbaggy avatar of the male left, against a hidebound Establishment. Now that his campaign has been suspended, the question of where women fit into that cartoonish proxy war has been less discussed and even less understood.

Platner certainly is a burly white guy, but a Times–Portland Press Herald–Siena poll taken in June — after the Times story about his former romantic partners but before Politico reported in July that he’d allegedly raped one of them, which Platner denies — showed him performing better with women (winning 52 percent) than with men (45 percent) and having no firm hold on the guys he was supposed to look like, with only 36 percent support from men without a college degree. By many measures, Platner was in fact the women’s candidate in the race.

This was true even when he ran for the Democratic nomination against Janet Mills, the 78-year-old........

© Daily Intelligencer