GIVING PLATNER THE BUM’S RUSH. Graham Platner won the Maine Democratic Senate primary in a landslide. Platner received 71.9% of the vote, while his closest competitor, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, had 19.3%. In the actual vote number, 154,058 Maine Democrats and independents voted to make Platner their Senate nominee, while 41,301 voted for Mills. A number of minor candidates received a combined 18,923 votes.
The primary took place on June 9. At that time, primary voters were aware of, and had heard substantial discussion of, Platner’s Nazi tattoo; his ugly Reddit posts; his mistreatment of women he was involved with; his sexting of women not his wife; and his lack of a substantial career. (Platner lives on a 100% disability payment, about $60,000 a year, from the Veterans Administration related to his military service in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus a little additional income selling oysters to his mother’s restaurant.)
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Whatever you might think about those aspects of Platner’s life, the Democratic voters of Maine knew about them when, just a month ago, they overwhelmingly chose Platner to be their Senate nominee.
Now Platner is out of the race, forced out after party elites panicked over an article in Politico that reported in late 2021, a drunken Platner forced a girlfriend to have sex after she made clear that she did not consent. High-profile Democratic supporters, like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, who stuck with Platner even after all the scandals listed above had become known, quickly abandoned him after the rape allegation hit the internet.
For its part, the Maine Democratic Party went to war with its own Senate nominee. Two hours after the Politico report’s appearance, the party called on Platner to withdraw from the race. Then, when Platner was still mulling over what to do, the party accused him and his advisers of trying to “put their thumb on the scale” of the process to find a new nominee. “We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like,” said Devon Murphy-Anderson, the executive director of Maine Democrats.
The party was under pressure from all directions, not the least of which was the schedule laid out in Maine law, which dictates that if a nominee withdraws before 5:00 p.m. on Monday, July 13, the party has the right to hold a two-week process to find a replacement, who will then appear on November’s ballot. But if the nominee does not withdraw by that time, he will either remain the nominee until the election or, if he withdraws later, the party cannot put a replacement candidate on the ballot.
Clearly, for the Maine Democratic Party, Platner had to quit, and he had to quit by 5:00 p.m. next Monday. That schedule was behind the extraordinary sequence of events in which a party publicly dumped all over its own nominee for federal office.
Now Platner is out. We have heard from the party leadership, from famous supporters, from Democratic media commentators, and other political types, all of whom wanted him gone ASAP.
But what about those 154,058 Maine Democrats who voted for him? Did they want him to quit in the next few days? Beginning with the publication of the Politico article at 3:18 p.m. on Monday, July 6, events moved very, very quickly. The pressure on Platner multiplied from that moment until he posted a video announcing his withdrawal at 8:10 p.m. Wednesday.
The whole time, Platner denied that he had forced his then-girlfriend, Jenny Racicot, into having sex back in late 2021. It was difficult to know exactly what went on between the two at the time of the alleged rape. Politico reported, “That night in late 2021, she said she had exchanged text messages with him and told him not to come over, saying she wasn’t in the mood for company.” According to Politico, “Racicot said she later deleted all her texts and social media correspondence with Platner as she tried to move on from the assault.”
At midday Wednesday, a news outlet called DropSiteNews reported that, “Before publication, a Politico reporter told the Platner campaign that Jenny Racicot, on the night in question, had been “texting [Platner] about needing her glute massaged.” Politico did not include that detail in its report. DropSiteNews’s Ryan Grim continued: “Racicot told Jake Tapper during her CNN interview that Platner had ‘taken something that I said as an invitation’ before she subsequently texted him not to come over.”
Now, there is evidence to support Racicot’s story. Racicot saved emails she had exchanged with her therapist about it. She said she told a man she dated later about it, and he confirmed that she had. Racicot also “shared with Politico a series of private messages she exchanged with an acquaintance in 2023” about the incident. Nevertheless, Racicot’s deletion of her messages with Platner, plus the not-originally-reported “glute massaged” text, could give some voters pause about the frantic rush to force Platner to withdraw after the Politico story.
But it’s done now. The lopsided, decisive primary result — democracy! — has been negated. All those votes no longer count. On Wednesday, waiting for Platner’s announcement, the Washington Examiner’s Guy Benson noted, “From Biden to Platner, it’s been astounding to discover how many officials within the self-appointed ‘Party of Democracy’ view their own elections as mere exhibition games — which don’t really count and can simply be nullified once outcomes become politically inconvenient.” Graham Platner now knows quite a bit about that process.
