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Maine Kampf

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Liz Wolfe | 6.10.2026 9:30 AM

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(Graham Platner/Facebook)

Apparently neither party has any standards: Graham Platner, a Democrat, won his primary for Senate up in Maine and will now face sitting Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, this November.

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Platner has tried to paint himself as an everyman oyster farmer and Marine combat veteran (both technically true), but he is perhaps better described as a "low-conscientiousness loser," in the words of Very Serious writer Josh Barro.

It would be one thing if Platner's nascent political career had been plagued by just one scandal. Or just two scandals. You might take issue with his Nazi tattoo—a skull-and-crossbones design called a Totenkopf, that he got with other Marines in Croatia back in 2007, that he has repeatedly claimed he didn't know the significance of. (His former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, begs to differ, saying Platner used to frequently joke about his Nazi tattoo.) Or maybe the fact that he has a history of roughing up his girlfriends a bit. Or cheating on his wife by sexting other women. Or his weird Reddit comments, ("You don't have much experience with Latin American hookers, do you?") per The Wall Street Journal. Or the fact that he was a Redditor at all.

"Graham Platner doesn't work for a living," notes Barro. "As The New York Times reports, the bulk of his........

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