By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Maine’s Democratic Senate primary is a caricature of the
party’s larger political dilemma. The electable center-left establishmentarian
is ancient and uninspiring and the inspiring young progressive upstart is gonzo
and (probably) unelectable.
The establishmentarian is Janet Mills, the twice-elected
governor. On paper, Mills is an ideal challenger to Republican Sen. Susan
Collins—experienced, well-known, politically “safe.” In a blue state, in a
national environment that should turbo-charge Democratic turnout and tilt swing
voters to the left, she’s a low-risk play to take out Collins.
She’s also 77, five years older than the incumbent, and
would be the oldest first-term senator in American history if elected.
Incredibly, the party is poised to double down on gerontocracy after Joe Biden,
Dianne Feinstein, and a number of congressional
Democrats deteriorated in office in public view.
The upstart is newbie Graham Platner, all of 41 years old
and fragrant with populist charm. Platner served in the Marines before becoming
an oysterman; he talks mostly about kitchen-table issues, particularly health
care. The left has been traumatized by watching working-class voters drift away
to Donald Trump’s party over the past decade and is ravenous for candidates who
might plausibly turn that tide. Platner is just the sort of salt-o’-the-earth
avatar they’ve been waiting for.
Why, he even has a Nazi tattoo on his chest, like some
other salt-o’-the-earth Americans do.
The tattoo is the latest skeleton to come tumbling out of
his closet since—coincidentally—Mills entered the race. Last week CNN
dredged up some old Reddit posts in which Platner described himself as a
communist, called cops “bastards,” and insisted that rural white Americans
really are as racist and stupid as the president seems to believe. Other
posts saw him wondering why blacks tip so little at bars and advising women
who worry about rape not to get drunk around strangers.
Platner responded by posting a direct-to-camera
video in which he blamed the Reddit posts on PTSD and depression caused by
his military service. Democrats who’d spent the last few months fangirling over
his populist authenticity (which is less
authentic than you might think) watched it and fell more in love than
ever.
Then came Tattoo-gate. On Tuesday Platner got ahead of
the next oppo dump by admitting he had a skull and crossbones insignia on his
chest that bears a distinct resemblance to a Nazi SS death’s head, i.e. Totenkopf.
He claimed in an interview that he got the tattoo as a Marine, on a lark when
he was drunk, and didn’t know its historical pedigree.
But if so, it seems he discovered it at some point and
kept it anyway. An old acquaintance told Jewish
Insider that Platner referred to the marking explicitly as a Totenkopf
years ago, and his campaign’s former political director claims he told her at
some point last month that some of his ink might
be “problematic.”
Today Platner posed shirtless for the cameras to prove
that he’s (finally!) gotten a new
tattoo to cover up the death’s head. “I am not a secret Nazi,” he insists,
in what must be the second-most surreal
soundbite by a U.S. Senate candidate in modern political history.
Totenkopfs are unusual in Democratic primaries,
but leftists getting irrationally excited about charismatic young progressive
candidates is not, Politico’s Jonathan
Martin noted. The playbook goes like this: “Political outsider or mostly
new name mounts statewide campaign with online video that leans heavily on
compelling biography or powerful oratory, out-of-state liberal hobbyists
quickly fall in love and fork over money, and journalists rush to profile the
latest heartthrob before inevitable disappointment when the candidate loses or,
well, becomes John Fetterman.”
Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke each ended up rolling in
dough, media coverage, and progressive adulation by following that playbook,
and each ended up in early retirement. Granted, they ran as leftists in reddish
states, whereas Platner is running in a bluish one, but neither Abrams nor
O’Rourke was guilty of “problematic” behavior that risked alienating swing
voters out of the gate. And neither faced an opponent as formidable as Collins,
who’s seeking her sixth term in the Senate.
Platner’s candidacy is an interesting test of how
Democrats might or might not be devolving in their statewide candidates’
respect for “norms.” How scummy should left-wing nominees be allowed to be in a
party that’s desperate to broaden its appeal to an increasingly scummy America?
Relatability.
Cleverly, Platner is trying to spin his old Reddit posts
and Tattoo-gate as political assets.
Democrats are “out of touch,” right? They’re no longer
relatable to the average voter, especially the average male. Well, what better
way to connect with that constituency than by sh-tposting incessantly and
getting trashy nationalist ink?
“How do you expect to win young people?” Platner asked Semafor
when pressed on his indiscretions. “How do you expect to win back men when you
go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh
my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’ Good luck with that.
Good luck winning over those demographics.”
It does seem unfair that we can make a boorish
gasbag with questionable
tats secretary of defense yet, according to Platner’s critics, we can’t
have someone like that in the U.S. Senate. Frankly, it’s too bad that he’s
married: If he had some incel cred, he would have perfectly mirrored America’s
sizable “awkward young dude radicalized by social alienation” constituency.
Except for the fact that he’s a socialist rather than a
fascist, I mean. And the fact that, unlike him, a lot of those young dudes
haven’t repented of their illiberalism and might never do so.
Platner’s defense is clever because it capitalizes on
Democrats’ anxiety about how “wokeness” has damaged
the party in the age of Trump. Progressives would have forgiven him his
cultural sins no matter what, as they’re forever desperate to find and promote
the next Bernie Sanders, but even normie libs who’d rather nominate Mills have
a reason not to pummel him too brutally. The working-class exodus from the
party was partly a cultural reaction to left-wing thought-policing; if centrist
Dems want to show that they’re, er, defunding those police, accepting Platner’s
contrition and letting him slide would be a splashy way of doing it.
Simply put, if you want the biggest possible tent in
America 2025, you need to make room for guys
with Totenkopf tattoos.
Another factor working in Platner’s favor is the elephant
in the room: Many Democrats would feel like chumps for disqualifying a
candidate for impropriety while the sleaziest president in U.S. history goes
about torching
every ethical norm in government. This lousy country elected a
coup-plotting convicted criminal last fall; its people plainly don’t care
anymore about rectitude in public officials. At a certain point, in a dystopia
like ours, insisting on pretending that there are still standards in politics
begins to look less like virtue and more like denial.
That logic probably helps explain why Jay Jones, the
Democrats’ repulsive
candidate for attorney general in Virginia, wasn’t driven from the race
after his old texts wishing death on a Republican colleague and his children
emerged. Jones isn’t fit for office—yet everyone understands, and even takes
for granted, that Trump’s supporters would have no qualms backing a member of
the GOP who’d been caught speaking that way about Democrats. The president
himself talks openly about “hating”
the other party and treating them as “enemies,”
even in remarks to
the military. Platner’s nastiness barely rises to the level of a
Republican group chat.
If anything, his Nazi tattoo qualifies him to lead
one of Trump’s agencies.
Americans can and should hold their own side to a higher
standard than that of the other’s worst actors, but there are a lot of things
Americans “should” do in politics that they no longer do. Imagine, then, being
a progressive who’s exasperated with your party’s leadership and infuriated by
Trump steamrolling the constitutional checks on his power, suddenly stumbling
upon exciting new guy Graham Platner—and being told by party elders that some
old Reddit posts he’s since renounced make him unviable. You’d lose your mind.
This is populism in microcosm. Once the public decides
that “authenticity” is more important than propriety, any impropriety that
might be justified as a form of authenticity becomes defensible and
non-disqualifying. Platner got a Totenkopf because, you see, he’s just
an earnest young bro who makes mistakes like anyone else; Trump is fleecing
the U.S. Treasury because he’s sincerely mad about the 2020
election-rigging conspiracy that exists in his, and millions of Republicans’,
muddled heads.
If we can tolerate President Trump, how can we not
tolerate Sen. Platner?
Electability.
The political dilemma here for Democrats is that they’ve
been maneuvered, mostly unwillingly, into being the party that cares (or
pretends to care) about norms.
That’s why, I assume, the bottom has
fallen out in Jay Jones’ polling in bluish Virginia since the news about
his texts broke. It’s not that Democratic voters are inherently better people
than Republicans, although that’s an easy bar to clear anymore. It’s probably a
function of the Democratic “brand” nowadays attracting a certain type of voter
who cares about civic norms. When it turns out that the Democratic nominee in a
particular race is himself more of a menace to those norms than his Republican
opponent, those voters head for the hills.
If I’m right about that then Graham Platner has some
rough sledding ahead against Susan Collins, certainly more so than Janet Mills
would have.
And that’s another thing that makes his candidacy
interesting. To some extent, it’s a referendum on how much Democrats care about
electability in 2025.
They’ve cared about it a hell of a lot more in recent
years than Republicans have. Bernie Sanders was far more charismatic than his
chief opponents in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but he
lost both races because the base prefers neoliberal dinosaurs who won’t scare
swing voters the way a socialist dinosaur would. Meanwhile, at the state level,
the GOP continues to nominate insurgent firebrands like Kari Lake and Doug
Mastriano while Democrats counter with professional pols like Ruben Gallego and
Josh Shapiro. The safe bet usually works out for Team Blue.
The more desperate they get to stop Trump, the more they should
care about electability. The odds that they’ll retake either chamber of
Congress next fall are getting longer in the House as redistricting proceeds,
and the odds are already dauntingly long in the Senate. Collins’ seat is the
easiest pick-up opportunity Democrats will have; logically, they should prefer
a candidate like Mills whom the state’s voters already know and trust to a wild
card like Platner.
But maybe that era of prioritizing electability is over.
As America comes apart at the seams and the left
radicalizes in response, sticking with boring electable choices rather than
potentially game-changing loose cannons will require real discipline. Political
data analyst Lakshya
Jain sees an ominous parallel in Platner’s ascension, in fact: Democratic
voters appear to be following the same arc that the Tea Party right did circa
2010, turning bitterly against their own leadership and the wider political
establishment following a demoralizing presidential defeat. That arc led to
Republicans losing numerous winnable Senate races by insisting on nominating
kooky unelectable populist “outsiders,” Jain noted—and now here liberals are,
getting excited about Graham “Totenkopf” Platner.
You can imagine how progressives might reply to that: The
“loose cannon” strategy has worked out pretty well for the GOP since 2015. Donald
Trump and his party are on the verge of converting America into an autocracy,
are they not? Passionate right-wing kookery has succeeded like gangbusters.
Perhaps left-wing kookery is the antidote.
But here’s where Jain’s parallel breaks down: Democrats
don’t have the same margin for error that Republicans did in 2010. The House
GOP was on its way that year to the sort of wave election that no longer seems
possible in a polarized, ruthlessly gerrymandered America. Republicans could
leave seats on the table in the upper chamber knowing that they were on a glide
path to flipping the lower one and paralyzing Barack Obama’s political program.
Liberals won’t have that reassurance next year.
And the stakes are higher now, needless to say. Blowing
the Senate in 2010 meant that Obama would have a Democratic Senate to approve
his nominees for the rest of his first term. Blowing the Senate in 2026 means
that Donald Trump gets to continue consolidating autocratic power unchecked and
installing postliberal
henchmen on the federal bench with the approval of John Thune’s quisling
Republican conference.
Democrats need to behave as though next year is the last
chance they’ll have to break the GOP’s stranglehold on government because, in
an increasingly scummy America, it might be.
Ultimately, then, the argument for nominating Platner
will take two somewhat contradictory forms. One is that focusing on
electability has led the party and the country to the brink of extinction;
Democrats need to stop obsessing about it and try something radically
different. Platner, a candidate of the leftist id, is different. Youth,
passion, and bold progressive colors, not pale neoliberal pastels, are what the
moment calls for.
The other argument will be that Platner is the
most electable candidate in the race, Mills’ statewide successes
notwithstanding. Zohran Mamdani’s looming victory in New York City’s mayoral
race over establishmentarian Andrew Cuomo will strengthen that case a little
(although Maine isn’t Manhattan, needless to say), but inevitably the more
common comparison—rather awkwardly—will be to John Fetterman. Fetterman was the
progressive choice in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Senate primary and therefore was
supposed to be a riskier nominee than his more centrist opponent, Conor Lamb.
He smoked Lamb anyway and then won the general election, shining proof that a
Platner-esque populist mix of progressive economic policy and conservative
cultural “vibes” is the secret recipe for success.
Three years later, Fetterman is the sort of “progressive”
who avidly supports Israel, applauds
Trump’s trade war, and has begun egging on the
Senate GOP to nuke the filibuster in order to reopen the government. Platner
is the new Fetterman will be an … uncomfortable argument for leftists
backing the oysterman from Maine.
But they’ll have no choice except to make it.
Electability will be more important for Democratic candidates, and for the
country, next year than at any previous point in American history, especially
in races for an institution like the Senate that holds a veto over Trump’s
future nominees. Unless a credible case can be made that a guy with a Nazi
tattoo is the more electable choice in Maine, it would be a dereliction of
civic and patriotic duty to nominate Platner over Mills.
And if that case can be made, let’s have it. We’ve done
worse than him in choosing our public officials, and will yet do even worse in
the future.
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