The Wrong Lessons of the Platner Controversy

Regardless of Graham Platner's future, Democrats still need more candidates across the country who don't always fit the script and focus their campaigns on the working class.

After the briefest intermission courtesy of the No Kings demonstrations, the internecine dispute within the Democratic coalition over the party’s direction has resumed with fervor. The latest controversy concerns Graham Platner, the embattled populist vying with Maine Governor and recent entrant to the race Janet Mills to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins. In late summer, Platner, an oysterman and former Marine, went viral overnight with an impassioned anti-establishment message. In the vein of Bernie Sanders, vintage Jesse Jackson, and left-Jacksonian prairie populists like the late Senator Fred Harris, Platner trained his sights on challenging monopoly power and the foreign policy blob. Platner’s prospects, however, have dimmed following a deluge of negative press over crude social media posts he once made as well as his nearly two-decade-old chest tattoo from his military stint (since covered) that is widely acknowledged to be a Nazi symbol.

Politics in the second Trump era is getting stranger by the day, so it’s unclear exactly how this will all play out. But it’s possible Platner’s candidacy is in mortal danger. Chuck Schumer endorsed Mills after the controversy erupted, and many Democrats want an ironclad campaign laser-focused on Trump’s authoritarianism and Collins’ submission to MAGA. Platner, in a rather self-effacing manner, has tried to account for the tattoo and the distasteful comments across several interviews and campaign appearances, cracking he has gone from “being a communist to a Nazi” in just a few days. The effort hasn’t quelled the feeding frenzy. Although a fresh poll from the University of New Hampshire shows Platner with a lopsided lead over Mills, both partisan Resistance types and influential leftists normally critical of the Democratic establishment have already declared he has no path forward. Admittedly, this does not bode well for an untested candidate whose ability to court independents and soft Trump supporters will depend heavily on grassroots energy and small donations from committed progressives.

Yet despite the uproar, it’s possible Platner’s critics and rivals are prematurely writing his political obituary. Over the last decade Trump has thoroughly trashed political decorum and basic decency (most recently with an AI video in which he dumps excrement from a fighter jet on protestors), while fanning the flames of bigotry whenever it suits him. Whatever else might be said of his otherworldly defiance of political gravity, Trump’s sheer disregard for the old standards has single-handedly changed the rules of the game. That, in turn, has made it difficult for Beltway sages (or anyone else for that matter) to discern what personal flaws and skeletons might force a given candidate from the field—especially if it is an insurgent like Platner, who seems determined to reach blue-collar Americans fed up with the system. By all appearances a man of ardent conviction, Platner may persevere to prove he won’t be cowed.

Of course, it is too early to tell if Platner can actually weather the storm. The media scrutiny has been incessant, and although he has generated a lot of excitement at his town halls, his meteoric rise may end up a cautionary tale about the need to vet charismatic insurgents in critical swing states. But whether or not Platner ends up a footnote of the midterm cycle, the episode is bound to impact how the Democratic Party navigates the national electorate heading into 2028. And for those who are attracted to Platner and his unsparing attacks on business-as-usual, Democrats are currently at risk of drawing the wrong lessons.

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The most central lesson is this: a fragmenting political coalition that has become notorious for imposing petty purity tests can’t advance if it sandbags candidates who resemble the voters they absolutely need to win back. Platner, if he is true to his word, is a combat veteran who suffered from PTSD and has been humbled by his passage through dark times. He found purpose in returning home and starting a small business. He has spoken of his desire to start a family and the extraordinary expenses faced by couples who want to have children. This is a story of personal evolution—one that just might resonate with voters who have been forced to make the best out of a difficult hand.

Platner’s detractors insist he is peddling a political fantasy—that he has, at minimum, a record of sloppy judgment unsuitable for a potential U.S. Senator, and that there are inevitably more damaging revelations to come. They are right on this point: a candidate’s pattern of personal judgment and conduct can and should be taken as evidence of their capacity to lead. That’s a principle worth upholding in the face of Trump’s gleeful amorality. Still, regardless of whether Platner is the real deal, damaged goods, or something in-between, he is channeling a deep longing for happy warriors in a party starved of them. The stampede to disqualify him has only magnified how miserable this deficit has become. And it underscores what many disgruntled supporters have suspected in the Trump era: the “pro-democracy” party, which has seen its geographic reach steadily recede for most of this century, is terrified of what voters might actually think and what they want out of candidates for office.

The irony should not be lost on anyone who recalls that Democrats once fashioned themselves as “the party of compassion.” Indeed, the dilemma over how to “handle” Platner captures why so many Democrats continue to flounder in a populist age. Even before Trump arrived on the scene, a number of veteran strategists warned that the party needed to recruit more candidates who could speak credibly to the frustrations of blue-collar Americans and channel their anger toward a constructive politics of restoring the common good and the dignity of work. Such hypothetical candidates, moreover, had to be part of the local community fabric, men and women who knew the people that kept neighborhood institutions alive and understood the Sisyphean challenge of maintaining cohesion and hope when the good jobs disappeared. These admonitions largely went unheeded through 2024, with disastrous results that have spread beyond Trump’s original base of white industrial workers burned by multiple trade shocks.

Since then, the Democrats’ anxious rank-and-file have been in the midst of a slow-motion reckoning, grasping at the notion that perhaps a few brash, archetypal blue-collar men might aid the party’s revival. At least initially, the outspoken but gregarious Platner struck many as fitting the bill. Yet there was also a lot of pushback to this idea prior to Platner’s emergence, not least from progressive influencers who hold sway with the party’s current power elite. One of the main counterarguments is that critics of identity politics are pressing their own ham-fisted appeals to a Trumpy, “hardhat” identity, when the party should simply back whichever candidates can deliver a disciplined message about checking Trump and tackling “affordability.”

What critics of the blue-collar strategy miss is that it is not chiefly about projecting a hearty “Joe Six-Pack” vibe. The point, rather, is to run nontraditional candidates who have a genuine stake in their local community and can distinguish themselves from a national party that many working families see as either aloof or reproachful. Fundamentally, the party needs fresh voices who have an intimate feel not just for the challenges that afflict hollowed-out towns and cities, but also for the psychic toll that being “left behind” imposes upon multiple generations.

Platner’s fledgling campaign appears to reflect this deeper understanding of the forces that have jolted the party system. Working-class resentment of the establishment is not exclusively rooted in, or even primarily an expression of, sociocultural reaction. Economic pessimism is central to the story. That alone took years for a political elite that conflated all populist passion with hardcore nativism to absorb. But the resentment is also fueled by a sense that the highly credentialed denigrate the unprivileged—not only for where they come from but for the lives they lead or are presumed to lead.

This overlooked aspect of polarization cuts across culture and economics. Blue-collar Americans in distressed locales feel stung by their reputation for erratic employment, addiction, and messy family histories; unlike those with fancy connections and sterling CVs, they can’t buy their way out of terrible luck or a poor life decision. Burdened by hard financial limits, they are effectively trapped. These are 21st-century circumstances that America’s most fortunate can’t quite fathom.

Platner, to his credit, seems to naturally empathize with such Americans and say they matter. That’s because their struggles and hardships aren’t entirely foreign to him. When Platner says that he has had to face his own demons, he is showing he understands the trials of regular people extend beyond the debilitations of mounting debt, a broken-down vehicle, or the dreaded pink slip. Simply put, he relates to the constituencies he wants to represent. Nearly one year into Trump’s vindictive second term, not enough Democrats are doing the same.

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That difference shouldn’t be obscured by whatever happens next. It might be the case, upon further evidence, that Platner has done or said truly unpardonable things for a man running for office—particularly one promising to counter Trumpism. He may turn out to be a loose cannon or a charlatan. It is also conceivable his platform may prove to be “too woke” for rural Mainers or that his rhetoric is too militant for Portland’s affluent suburbs. Still, Platner’s past shouldn’t invalidate his campaign’s main premise. Like other insurgents, he has pledged to give the unheard and counted out a voice, in contrast to a party establishment in denial over its shattered credibility.

Democrats hoping to move their party forward might consider why that trust has been so difficult to regain. In an era when many on the liberal-left have lost touch with what it will take to bridge our country’s divides, top Democrats have telegraphed, in race after race, that they value the experience of a “safe set of hands” above all else. But their narrow view of experience doesn’t make much room for the journeys that constitute all that is poignant and remarkable about the American experience. It discounts that, after years of broken promises, voters might be searching for a quality in their leaders that the experience prized by insiders can’t buy: character.

The depth of this desire may be hard to conceive, given how much Trump and Trumpism have coarsened American life. Nevertheless, Democrats must take to heart that, for most Americans, strenuously avoiding moral error is not the same thing as building character. That character, at root, is instead forged by prevailing over adversity—and by empowering others to do the same.

Platner may or may not have it. We don’t yet know enough about him and what he’s made of. We can only hope these elemental truths about resilience, compassion, and empowerment guide every Democrat who has resolved to save their party.