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Senate Dem Leaders Are Trying to Sink Graham Platner. Voters Aren’t Convinced.

Despite his high-profile controversies, Platner is still popular with Mainers. But leadership isn’t budging from its centrist pick.

Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.”

Maine oysterman-turned-politician Graham Platner has been drawing consistently packed crowds across the rural state for months as he aims to take on longtime incumbent Republican Susan Collins in this year’s Senate race. He’s regularly outpolling his only other viable competitor for the Democratic nomination, Gov. Janet Mills. At 41, he could hold a seat for decades that Democrats have long had their eyes on. 

Since Mills joined the race last fall (Platner announced he was running that August), her support has stagnated and even slipped in some polls as Platner’s numbers continue to rise. Collins and Mills are in a statistical dead heat, with Collins having the edge, while Platner has a few points difference ahead of the incumbent. 

For Maine voters concerned with electability, those polls lend credibility to Platner’s campaign. He’s in position to take on an entrenched Republican whose feigned objections to Donald Trump’s excesses — usually expressed as “concern” — have long driven liberal Mainers insane. So why is he still facing resistance from Senate Democratic leadership?

Platner’s town hall tour of Maine is further raising his profile, even after a number of controversies, most notably a Nazi tattoo, threatened his campaign. The more voters get to know him, the more they like him; he’s gone from underdog to favorite in the race. And despite establishment antipathy, he’s finding some friends in other corners of the party. 

Three Democratic senators — Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, Arizona’s Ruben Gallego, and New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich — have endorsed Platner. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., is backing him, as are individual members of the progressive wing, like Robert Reich and David Hogg, and groups like Our Revolution and the Maine People’s Alliance. Platner also has the ear of the Pod Save America crew, a group of influential Democrats aligned with the Obama wing of the party. 

Dem in Maine House Primary Funneled PAC Money to Republicans

But the Democratic establishment is trying to draw a line in the sand on the future of the party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, both Democrats from New York, are actively working to elect Mills. There is speculation that the governor, who has pledged to only serve one term in Washington, is Senate leadership’s preferred candidate because she would be a more pliable member of the delegation, while Platner is seen as more independent and willing to take populist, further left stands.

The race bears similarities to the 2016 Democratic primary for president, when Sanders went up against Hillary Clinton and offered a progressive alternative. As in this contest, the machine politician was pitched by the party’s establishment as the more deserving candidate, while the populist candidate to her left ran an insurgent campaign. 

It’s another chapter in the intraparty civil war that has been simmering and often boiling over for decades. The Clinton wing, the Obama wing, the Sanders wing, and every other part of the sprawling political coalition that is the Democratic Party are all still vying for dominance. In 2008, the main dividing line was Iraq; in 2016, the failure of the Obama presidency; in 2020, Trump and Covid. 

In 2026, the party is still reeling from defeat at the ballot box just two years ago, one that was driven by a perception that the party was out of touch with voters on economic issues as well as, reportedly, its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The latter issue has become a flashpoint for conflict between the base and the establishment, especially with Schumer — who has described one of his roles in leadership as ensuring Israel gets “all the aid” it needs from the U.S.

For centrist Democrats, Mills is their pick for Maine. Seniority means a lot to a certain kind of centrist Democrat. According to Platner, he was told in no uncertain terms that he was expected to stand down — “I was skipping the line,” he told Slate earlier this month — when he notified Democratic Senate leadership that he was considering running for the seat; the response he received came with a threat to turn his life inside out.

“They essentially said, if we do this, they’re going to come after me,” Platner said. “They’re going to rip my life apart.”

It’s not hard to see what’s off-putting about Platner to the moderate wing of the party. He’s running an anti-war, economically populist campaign with rhetoric aimed at the elites who fund the DSCC and the party’s corporatist wing. He’s come out forcefully for trans rights at a time when Democratic centrist think tanks, friendly to the party’s donor class, are all but arguing the party should throw marginalized groups under the bus. He’s also been forthright in calling Israel’s genocide in Gaza what it is. 

Unfortunately for the party establishment, the issues Platner is running on are popular with voters — especially the Democratic base. The party has been shifting left since Trump’s first term and Platner, like Sanders and members of the Squad, among others, is taking advantage of those rising tides of progressivism. 

The Left Put Its Faith in Graham Platner. Will He Break Its Heart?

This isn’t to say that Platner doesn’t have his own significant challenges. His posts on Reddit, which span a decade, included some language seen as misogynistic, prejudicial, and insulting to Mainers, though clearly antifascist in general and anti-Nazi in particular. Most notably, a scandal last fall became a national news story over his tattoo of a Totenkopf — a skull-and-bones symbol commonly associated with the Nazis — which led him to publicly apologize and have it inked over. Platner has claimed he got the tattoo in a drunken haze while on leave in 2007 when he was a Marine and that he didn’t know its ties to the Nazis until last October.

The tattoo has dogged him ever since, with media outlets bringing it up whenever Platner makes the news, and the controversy hasn’t stopped there. Recently, Platner was criticized for appearing on a right-wing podcast hosted by a fellow veteran, Nate Cornacchia, who has endorsed conspiracy theories like far-right streamer Nick Shirley’s attacks on Somalis in Minnesota and tying Israel to the murder of Charlie Kirk. 

But the governor has her own baggage. Mills is already 78, and if elected, she would be 85 at the end of her six years in office. It’s a hard sell to Democrats in Maine, who, like their counterparts around the country, are still smarting from the humiliation of watching a visibly declining Joe Biden spend his presidency hidden from the public and the media and, when he did appear, fumbling answers onstage or staring off into space. 

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Plus, after more than 30 years in Maine politics, which also includes serving in the statehouse and as attorney general, Mills is compromised in this race in specific ways that Platner is not. As governor, Mills has had to work with Collins to get things done for the state. There’s nothing unique about that, but it has provided soundbites of Mills praising Collins — one of which, “I appreciate all that she is doing,” the incumbent already used in an ad last fall. 

Maine voters will make the final decision on who the Democratic nominee will be. Right now, that looks like Platner — so much so that local labor leaders are urging Schumer to withdraw his support for Mills. 

If he wins the primary, Democrats in leadership will have a simple decision to make: Do they want to flip the Senate with a left-leaning veteran whose message resonates, even if it’s not how they wanted to do it? Or do they want to ride out another six years of even more razor-thin margins in either direction in the chamber and bet on 2032? Let’s hope they don’t think another six years of Susan Collins is better than winning with a candidate that outran their candidate from the left.

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. 

This is not hyperbole.

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.

Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” 

The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.

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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

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