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Graham Platner Tests the Power of Anti-Establishment Anger in Maine

The oysterman’s scandals have given some voters pause. Others dismiss them as meddling from a power structure fearful of a political maverick.

Mainers are heading to the polls Tuesday in the final day of a bruising primary fight for the Democratic Senate nomination that has seen Graham Platner, a political newcomer, rise as the presumptive choice to take on Republican Susan Collins — but not without taking heavy damage from stories delving into his past.

Plainspoken populism won the oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran support among fed-up Maine voters that appeared unshaken despite months of negative press stemming from Platner’s inflammatory comments on Reddit and an ill-advised tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. But a recent series of damaging stories in national media, including revelations in the Wall Street Journal about extramarital sexting and allegations in the New York Times of abusive behavior in past relationships, have given some voters and political observers pause. Others say that in Maine, a fiercely independent state where residents nurse a healthy suspicion of influence “from away,” Platner supporters have dismissed those stories as meddling from an establishment fearful of a political maverick.

“From what I can tell, I don’t think the Times piece moved the needle much,” said Shay Stewart-Bouley, a longtime Maine resident who has written both critically and supportively of Platner on her blog, Black Girl in Maine. “I heard some women say it made them uneasy, but I haven’t heard anyone say it changed how they’re going to vote.”

In other cases, the coverage appears to have cemented Platner’s status as an outsider to an establishment embodied by Collins, who has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997. Like many incumbents nationwide, the Republican senator will have to run amid a shrinking job market and rising costs, points that Platner has seized on throughout his campaign. And Collins’s association with the establishment could prove a major liability, even among onetime supporters of President Donald Trump, according to Charles Pray, a former state senator and veteran figure in Maine Democratic politics.

“Part of Trump’s rise was a total frustration with incumbents and people in power, and a lot of people who were Trump supporters who hoped he was going to address rising grocery prices and stuff now see him saying that affordability........

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