Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) denied claims he was supporting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in Maine’s Senate race after backlash to his opposition to Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner’s bid.
Auchincloss, who is Jewish, said Monday during an interview with CNN that he found Platner’s controversial tattoo, which resembled a Nazi symbol before he had it covered, and his commentary about it to be “personally disqualifying.”
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His comment sparked outcry from some Democrats, who felt his opposition to Platner, the presumed Democratic nominee after Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) dropped out of the race, meant he was supporting Collins’s reelection bid.
In a Tuesday statement, Auchincloss rejected accusations that he was working against Democratic efforts to retake the Senate in November, and disavowed Collins, whom he called a “rubber stamp for the worst admin in history.”
“Claims that I would endorse her, implicitly or otherwise, ignore my track record supporting Democrats to take back both chambers,” Auchincloss wrote.
However, the Massachusetts Democrat dug his heels in to oppose Planter’s bid, saying if it were him, “I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary.”
“As I said months ago, I find Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his commentary about it personally disqualifying,” Auchincloss said. “Regardless of what happens in Maine, Democrats need to take back the Senate and I’ll keep working hard to make it happen.”
A spokesperson for Collins’s campaign said in a statement, “It’s clear that Congressman Auchincloss is getting pummeled by the far-Left for stating the obvious — they shouldn’t support someone who wore a Nazi tattoo for eighteen years and only covered it up when he decided to run for Senate.”
The Washington Examiner has reached out to Graham for comment.
Auchincloss’s Monday statement opposing Platner sparked backlash from some Democrats, with political strategist Rob Flaherty saying a Republican-controlled Senate is “outside the realm of acceptability” for a Democrat to support.
“I’m all for Democratic Heterodoxy™️ but I generally think ‘there should be a republican-controlled senate’ is outside the realm of acceptability,” Flaherty, an alum of both former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns, said in a post to X.
In a subsequent post, Flaherty called it “odd” for Auchincloss, the chairman of the Majority Democrats political action committee, to “endorse against both Democrats and a Majority.”
Helen Brosnan, the national political director for the United Auto Workers, similarly rejected Auchincloss’s comments, writing in an X post that the Democrat hated a “pro-labor, anti-establishment candidate so much” that he was rooting “for a Republican to win and ensure we lose the Senate.”
Jason Poulos, who is running to unseat Auchincloss in the Democratic primary on Sept. 1, denounced the incumbent’s opposition to Platner in a statement to the Washington Examiner and referred to the Majority Democrats PAC as a “billionaire-funded group built to steer the party away from talking about taxing the rich, regulating corporations, and worker power.”
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“When a Democrat wins by running against the donor class, the chair of Majority Democrats shows up on cable news to declare that Democrat disqualified,” he wrote. “You cannot complain about the influence of money in politics while running a party-within-the-party funded by that donor class, and then tell Democratic primary voters in another state which of their nominees is allowed to win.”
He continued, “The voters of MA-4 deserve a representative focused on building a Democratic majority, not one carrying water for the donors trying to handpick it.”
