By John McCormack
Monday, June 08, 2026
Evidence continues to pour in that Graham Platner, the
likely Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, is a man of deplorable character.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner had an active account—with a
shirtless profile photo—on the private
messaging app Kik and that he was sending sexually explicit texts to at
least six women after he married his wife three short years ago.
Then on Thursday, the New York Times published an article in which Lyndsey Fifield, an
ex-girlfriend of Platner’s, said that he had been physically abusive: He
grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, yanked her out of a
taxi by her wrist, and once twisted her arm behind her back and shoved her in a
room and kept her trapped inside.
Fifield also told the Times that Platner had
always known his Nazi tattoo was in fact a Nazi tattoo, not something he
discovered after 18 years of sporting it, as he has claimed. He had long
referred to the S.S. skull-and-crossbones tattoo as “my totenkopf,” she told
the Times. Platner denied
the allegations: “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging I knew what
my tattoo was, these are the statements of somebody politically motivated.”
While Fifield is a conservative, another Platner ex-girlfriend, Maine Democrat
Jennifer Racicot, told the Times she found Platner’s behavior to be
“reckless” and “unsettling.”
Meanwhile, many progressives and Democrats have been busy
trying to convince themselves and others that Maine voters must vote for
Platner because the consequences of which party controls the Senate are simply
too great.
Living as we do in a country where voters backed Donald Trump and Bill
Clinton, it’s a little hard to blame them: It’s clear that most voters in
both parties are simply consequentialists when it comes to voting. They are
willing to overlook enormous character defects in order to vote for the
candidate more likely to implement their preferred policy preferences.
But character still counts for a significant slice of
voters who think there is at least some point at which their preferred
candidate’s character could be so bad that they’d either cast a third-party
protest vote or vote for the opposing party. In 2017, Republicans lost a
deep-red Alabama Senate seat after GOP nominee Roy Moore was credibly accused
by Leigh Corfman of abusing her when she was 14 and Moore was in his 30s (dueling defamation suits were later dismissed). In that
race, 1.7 percent of voters cast write-in votes; Moore lost by 1.5 points.
For those voters who care about candidate character and
the political consequences of elections, these questions exist on a sliding
scale. They weigh just how bad a candidate’s character defects are against just
how bad the political consequences would be of his defeat.
While the drip, drip, drip of news continues to inform us
of how bad Platner’s character is, it’s worth taking a moment to think
concretely about what the real-world consequences would be if control of the
Senate comes down to Maine.
What exactly would be the difference between a 51-49
Democratic Senate with Graham Platner in it versus a 50-50 Republican Senate
with Susan Collins in it? In the latter scenario, Republicans would have
already lost three seats elsewhere—probably North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. A
world in which Republicans have lost two seats in states that Trump carried by double digits is a world in which Democrats have taken control of
the House. “There is no universe where Democrats are winning Senate seats in
Iowa, Ohio, but losing the House,” Sean Trende, senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics,
told The Dispatch. With control of the House, Democrats would have
the power to check Trump with investigations and impeachment. They would also
have put an end to any GOP-only legislation passed by the reconciliation
process.
What difference does it make if Democrats gain a Senate
majority in addition to the House? The two obvious gains are the power to block
judicial nominees and the power to block Cabinet nominees. “Who gets confirmed
for lifetime judicial seats? Who gets confirmed to lead federal agencies and be
our ambassadors overseas? And what do we spend in support of our core national
mission?” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware told The Dispatch in
the Capitol when asked about the stakes of Senate control. Pressed specifically
on the difference between a Senate in which Platner or Collins is the deciding
voting, Coons said: “I've worked on a number of things with Sen. Murkowski,
Sen. Collins … over the years, but when you have a president who is this far
out of his appropriate role in the mainstream, I think the best check is a
Democratic majority.”
When it comes to judicial nominees, some of Collins’
critics (including my Dispatch colleague Nick Catoggio) point
to her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as evidence that she would vote to
confirm a lackey as Supreme Court justice. But Kavanaugh was eminently
qualified, and Collins, like then-Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, carefully weighed the thin case against him and voted to confirm. There is strong
evidence that Collins would not vote to confirm an unqualified nominee—her vote
against Trump’s appellate court nominee Emil Bove. If Trump is going to try to
put a thuggish
lackey on the court, Bove would probably be at the top of his list, having
already been confirmed 50-49 to the appeals court.
But Bove was confirmed without the votes of Collins and
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. In a 50-50 Senate, Republicans would need both of
them to confirm any new Supreme Court justice. (Murkowski voted against
Kavanaugh, while Collins voted against Amy Coney Barrett.) More to the point:
Replacing Justice Thomas or Justice Alito with a Kavanaugh protégé is not going
to tip the balance on the Supreme Court, which has already held Trump in check
in some respects by overturning his unconstitutional tariffs and halting his deportations to a brutal Salvadoran prison
without any due process.
When it comes to Cabinet nominees, Collins has a mixed
record on Trump’s most controversial picks. She voted against Pete Hegseth to
serve as Pentagon chief but voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr as health
secretary and Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence. It’s
possible Collins could take a stronger line against lame-duck Trump than she
did at the start of his second term, but it’s also true that there’s little the
Senate can do if Trump is content to rely on “acting” secretaries for his worst
picks from here on out. The reason he named Bill Pulte acting director of
national intelligence is because he knows the current GOP-controlled Senate
would not confirm him.
So, if one’s top priority in the midterms is to implement
a check on Donald Trump, are those consequences on judicial and executive
branch appointments worth the cost of backing a candidate with as low of a
character as Platner?
After news about Platner’s extramarital sexting came out
but before allegations of physical abuse, I asked Massachusetts Democratic Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, who
backs Platner, if Democrats overlooking Platner’s character defects were
doing the same thing as Republicans overlooking the character defects of Texas
GOP senate candidate Ken Paxton, who cheated on his wife and was impeached by
the Texas House for corruption.
“I think that people back home who know these folks are
the ones who can best judge them,” Warren replied, declining to address whether
she saw a difference between the character of Paxton and Platner.
In 2025, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine grilled Pete
Hegseth during his confirmation hearings on Hegseth’s long, sordid history
of marital infidelity. Last week in the Capitol—after the Platner sexting
scandal emerged but before the allegations of physical abuse—I asked Kaine if
Maine Democrats should overlook Platner’s infidelity. “I’m not giving Maine
Democrats advice. I generally don’t like national Democrats going into
primaries and telling their voters here's what you should do,” Kaine replied.
Maine’s Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is still on the ballot in Tuesday’s
election despite suspending her primary campaign against Platner in April, but
Kaine insisted, “I don’t get involved in primaries outside of my own state.”
“You saw in my questioning of Hegseth the values that I
bring to the table and the concerns that I have,” Kaine added. “Whether those
are the concerns of Maine voters or not, I don’t know.”
Democratic primary voters are still perfectly free to
reject Platner on Tuesday in favor of their own Democratic governor. If they
don’t, those tempted by consequentialist arguments to vote for a creep
in November should first weigh the actual consequences—for Congress, as
well as their own credibility and conscience.
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