Why Graham Platner's "Scandals" Actually Helped Him with Voters
By Sandeep Kaushik
I have been increasingly fascinated by Graham Platner, the lefty Dem Senate candidate in Maine, who keeps courting scandals and controversies (he has a Nazi-style tattoo, he’s expressed some socially unacceptable opinions on social media, he was sexting with multiple other women after he got married, some of his former girlfriends say he behaved caddishly).
Yet I think, after his resounding success in the Maine primary on Tuesday, there’s a pretty good chance he wins in November (recent head to head polls show the race tied or Platner slightly ahead). And the interesting thing to me is that if he does I suspect it will be at least as much because of, as in spite of, his “scandals.”
It’s been obvious since Trump won in ‘16 that the old norms that defined appropriate public behavior from candidates and elected officials – norms that were zealously policed by the once powerful gatekeepers of the traditional media and widely accepted by the broader public – have shifted radically (as some conservatives pointed out to me on X, this process really started with Clinton’s public popularity surviving Lewinsky and impeachment).
The old media gatekeepers are still with us, but they are rapidly losing a desperately quixotic battle to preserve their boundary-defining influence. The public may still pay lip service to the old public morality, but it’s increasingly evident that the voters are actually judging candidates according to a new, private morality and alternate code of conduct.
https://www.postalley.org/2026/06/11/why-graham-platners-scandals-actually-helped-him-with-voters/
= new reply since forum marked as read
The public is not lowering their standards with some "new, private morality and alternate code of conduct." That is self-serving drivel.
The simple truth is that what has been called "scandals" is much like what these same MFers referred to as Biden's "gaffes". Sometimes Biden was not eloquent, but he had very few cases where he just said something completely stupid. The "Platner scandals" are manufactured outrage by people with agendas, and the public -- at least Mainers who voted last week -- see right through that nonsense.
Trump rapes children and accepts bribes to pardon notorious criminals. Platner is accused if getting a tattoo that was a skull and crossbones, which is a widely used graphic (do a Google search for "international symbol for poison"
. The only "scandal" there is that he didn't know that there was also an association with some Nazi units long before he was born. What kind of idiot tries to make some moral equivalence between Trump and Platner on that basis?
Trump stole top secret documents and gave them to foreign nationals -- refusing to return the ones he had not already monetized. Platner is accused of holding a woman's arm too firmly, and then we find that she is actually a long-time Republican operative. That's not a "scandal". That's a setup.
Platner never claimed to be perfect. He has owned all of the mistakes that are matters of fact. The Democrats of Maine decided they prefer an imperfect person who is honest about it, over people who claim to be sent here by God. That is the essence of democracy. It is time for all Dems to sit down and shut the F up about Platner, or (gasp) actually work to get him elected over Collins, who has enabled much greater damage than Platner has ever done.