Working-Class Hero

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, June 01, 2026

 

Among his many other talents, our friend David French might have the gift of clairvoyance. “Against [Ken] Paxton. Against [Graham] Platner. LFG,” he declared—on Thursday, two days before the latest scandal involving Maine’s presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate emerged.

 

A cynic would say that was less a case of clairvoyance than of David hearing whispers around the watercooler of what his colleagues at the New York Times were about to publish. But my guess is that neither theory is true: There are so many skeletons in Platner’s closet that, purely by chance, any public criticism of him is likely to coincide with another tumbling out.

 

On Saturday the Times and the Wall Street Journal separately reported that, in addition to everything else, Platner has a (virtual) zipper problem. According to his former campaign manager, his wife told aides last year that she had caught him “exchanging sexual messages with as many as a dozen women.” Not true, a current campaign official indignantly countered: “Up to” six women had been involved.

 

The “sexting” supposedly stopped before the candidate launched his campaign. But, per the Journal, “Platner also has an active account on Kik, a popular, private messaging app. Platner’s profile shows a mirror selfie of him shirtless with a towel wrapped around his waist. Many of his tattoos are clearly visible in the picture.” So they are.

 

Team Platner’s damage-control efforts afterward were pitiful. First the campaign posted a nearly five-minute video of his wife calling it “shameful” that the press would spread “gossip” before admitting in the same clip that the couple is in marriage counseling for unspecified reasons. It’s an old and sleazy political tactic to have a wronged wife vouch for the candidate-husband who betrayed her; Platner, the fresh young insurgent progressive, is a traditionalist in this regard.

 

Later he spoke to a reporter (with Mrs. Platner by his side, of course) to echo his wife’s disgust at the coverage. “The Wall Street Journal and New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer,” Platner complained. “I’m sorry, that’s, frankly, journalistic malpractice.” Presumably no one on his staff told him that someone on the campaign had already confirmed to the Times that “sexting” went on.

 

It’s clear at this point that Graham Platner is a chud. Opinions differ only with respect to the genesis of his chuddery. Is he a toxic narcissist? Is he a “man-child” suffering from poor impulse control and “light misogyny”? Is he a “failson” who’s secretly ashamed of his downward mobility? Is he a Nazi, as many Republicans insist?

 

I’m skeptical of that last one, as it’d be strange for a populist who’s deep into white tribalism to gravitate toward Democrats when there’s another party that caters to that niche. (If Platner had to face a degenerate Republican primary electorate, the scandal around his infamous tattoo would be that he bowed to “wokeness” by having it effaced.) But it’s also true that the evidence that he’s soft on antisemites extends beyond the Totenkopf on his chest.

 

Any way you slice it, he’s unfit for office. In that sense, “against Paxton, against Platner” is as morally unassailable as most of David French’s political opinions are.

 

But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. There are two arguments for why “against Platner” isn’t as easy a call as it might seem. One alleges that his moral flaws aren’t political flaws, the other concedes that they are but insists they’re the lesser of two evils.

 

The populist argument.

 

The essence of the 41-year-old Platner’s appeal is authenticity. He’s poised to crush geriatric establishmentarian Janet Mills in the Democratic primary and will most likely take on an almost-as-elderly five-term Republican incumbent in the general election. He’s young and new to politics, he’s a Marine and oysterman by trade, and he talks endlessly about the rising cost of living that’s grinding down voters in his state and beyond.

 

He looks, sounds, and acts like the average person far more than either of his two opponents in this campaign do. And in a democracy, shouldn’t the people be represented by those who look, sound, and act like them?

 

For better and, sometimes inevitably, for worse?

 

The Democratic Party desperately needs to rebuild credibility with working-class voters, especially the kind of white working-class voter who voted for a fascist in the last three presidential elections. Now they’ve got a guy in Platner who connects with that cohort—so much so, it turns out, that he reflects many of the average joe’s own petty vices. He sh-tposts obnoxiously online. He gets ill-considered tattoos. He slides into the DMs of random women despite the fact that he’s in a relationship.

 

It’s not that any of these things are “good” politically, rather that they’re a matter of taking the bitter with the sweet. If you want an authentically blue-collar senator, you’re going to get authentically blue-collar behavior, and not always in a commendable way. And voters understand that. The candidate’s support hasn’t budged despite his many scandals, River Page argues today at The Free Press, “because Platner’s flaws are familiar and forgivable to many of the middle- and working-class Mainers who make up most of the electorate.”

 

Which should remind us of another successful populist, no? Donald Trump and Ken Paxton have succeeded in Republican primaries because of, not despite, their many vices: Populist voters who yearn to overthrow “the system” (however they define that) are drawn to candidates who behave transgressively, viewing their personal norm-breaking as a proxy for how willing they’ll be to barrel through political norms once in office. Platnermania may be a left-wing version of that attitude emerging after years of relatively scandal-free leadership by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

And so when David French hollers “against Platner!,” a progressive might reply by asking him which is morally worse—a senator who sexts other women but votes against “selling out the working class” or one who behaves with perfect rectitude while enabling it? How can one compare Platner, who has an actual policy agenda that many find virtuous, to a slug like Ken Paxton, who’ll rubber-stamp any nonsense his mafia-boss master places in front of him?

 

Character is destiny.

 

The populist argument for Platner appeals to my cynical heart in this sense: It shows real contempt for the average American voter, a feeling in which I luxuriate every day.

 

Tell me that we should expect an “authentic” man of the people in 2026 to have a Nazi death’s-head tattoo, to act like a 15-year-old edgelord online, and to cheat profligately (or at least try to) on his partner, and I’ll tell you, “Yep, that sounds like ‘the people,’ all right.” No Democrat makes the moral case against populism, or the civic case for repealing the 17^th Amendment, as eloquently as Graham Platner does.

 

But there are problems with treating personal flaws as, if not political virtues, mere imperfections that are redeemed by one’s policies. For one thing, doing so would theoretically rationalize any amount of chud behavior by a candidate provided that his agenda is virtuous enough. Character isn’t everything in leadership, but it ain’t nothing. When we excuse moral flaws in our lawmakers, we normalize those flaws and remove a deterrent to further vicious behavior.

 

That’s Trumpism in one sentence. In 2015 you reassured yourself that it’s fine that your favorite candidate dislikes John McCain for having been a POW because that candidate is promising to build a wall on the border. Eleven years later, you’re stuck explaining to skeptical friends why using taxpayer money to make January 6 gangsters rich is fine.

 

When leftists tweet things like “Platner could’ve sexted my mom and I’d still vote for him,” it should remind all of us that we’ve seen this movie before. Character is destiny, certainly personally and often politically.

 

The other problem with the populist argument is that Graham Platner actually isn’t very authentically populist.

 

His military service is his one impeccable salt-of-the-earth credential. Beyond that, he’s a prep-school kid with affluent parents who helped him pay for his home and whose mother’s restaurant is the biggest customer of the oyster farm he runs. He’s a child of privilege. But he “looks working-class, talks working-class, and has, at least at some points in his life, worked blue-collar jobs,” Page writes in his Free Press piece, explaining why blue-collar voters relate to him. Like John Fetterman in 2022, Platner’s working-class cred is largely vibes-based.

 

If that’s so, though, his scandals are less an unwelcome side effect of his working-class identity than a basis of it. He doesn’t behave like a chud because he’s a bona fide average joe, subject to the same vices; he was a well-off kid who happens to have the same vices as average joes, and therefore many voters infer that he must be one himself.

 

Graham Platner is not as morally repulsive as Ken Paxton. (Few politicians in America outside the West Wing are.) But if we’re now measuring populist authenticity by how much low-rent behavior a candidate engages in rather than by his or her life experience, David French’s Paxton-Platner comparison is more apt than any Democrat should like to think.

 

The moral argument.

 

A better argument for Platner, and one I struggle with, is this: What if not voting for the deeply flawed candidate this time leads to a worse outcome for the country?

 

What’s a conscientious person to do when one candidate on the ballot behaves immorally but also seems more likely than his opponent to restrain immoral behavior by the government if elected?

 

Texas voters don’t need to worry about that dilemma. Between Paxton and Democrat James Talarico, there’s no conflict between who the worse person is and who’s more likely in office to facilitate rampant lawbreaking by the Trump administration.

 

But Maine voters have a conundrum. I’m stumped to recall even one case in her 30 years in the Senate in which Susan Collins has embarrassed her constituents with personal misbehavior, yet I’m also stumped to recall one case where she cast a vote that thwarted the president in something terrible he wanted to do.

 

She deserves credit for having voted against Trump at his second impeachment trial, of course. But she’s also the only one of the seven Republicans who voted that way to represent a blue state, which is to say that she was the only one who arguably improved her electoral position by doing so. And she cast her vote knowing that the Senate had nowhere near the 67 votes needed to convict the president, assuring that her ballot would do him no real harm.

 

Over the last 16 months she’s voted to confirm 22 of 23 Trump Cabinet nominees, opposing only Pete Hegseth and doing no real harm in that case either. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, among others, got the Susan Collins seal of approval.

 

You’ll frequently find her expressing her “concern” to reporters about the president’s latest insane behavior when they buttonhole her in a Capitol hallway. And she continues to take occasional strategic votes against the White House in matters where she knows the public is emphatically on Democrats’ side. But she’s never betrayed any sense of real alarm about the branch in which she serves being reduced to a Duma as Trump carves off chunks of its constitutional authority for himself.

 

There is little doubt that if Samuel Alito resigns from the Supreme Court tomorrow and Trump puts forth Aileen Cannon to replace him, Susan Collins will not cast the vote that sinks that nomination. If it comes down to her, as it essentially did with the (vastly more qualified) Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, she’ll be a good soldier for her party as usual.

 

“The most urgent priority in American governance, not just at this moment but in my lifetime, is checking Donald Trump’s monarchical pretensions before they grow more ambitious,” I wrote last week. “And one cannot do that by continuing to elect Republicans.” There’s a chance that Maine will decide whether Democrats have the seats they need in the Senate next year to check those pretensions, which means voting against Graham Platner could mean two more years of a bigger, more dangerous chud running roughshod over Article I.

 

“Against Paxton, against Platner” is a fine statement of civic principle. So is “against Paxton, against autocracy.”

 

The Flight 93 election.

 

That’s the case for holding one’s nose and choosing the sexter with the Nazi tattoo over Susan Collins. But it’s an uncomfortable one: After all, this too is the logic of Trumpism.

 

The moral argument for Platner is simply “The Flight 93 Election” warmed over. Our side has a deeply flawed candidate—but it doesn’t matter, you see, because the other side will destroy the country if it prevails. Michael Anton’s loathsome 2016 essay remains the supreme statement of negative partisanship in modern American politics, a playbook Republicans have since followed to rationalize every form of depravity the president can muster. Nothing that our candidate has done or will do is so terrible, the thinking goes, that it would justify empowering the other party to carry out its existential threat against America.

 

That’s functionally the same case that I just made for the man with the Totenkopf ink in Maine. “Trump’s vulgarity is in fact a godsend to the conservatives,” Anton wrote of the president’s Reaganite critics 10 years ago. “It allows them to hang their public opposition on his obvious shortcomings and to ignore or downplay his far greater strengths, which should be even more obvious but in corrupt times can be deliberately obscured by constant references to his faults.” Many progressives would say the same, verbatim, about Platner. The right obsesses about his tattoo because they can’t answer his arguments on Medicare for All.

 

As the campaign wears on, we’re destined to see both parties embrace the logic of the “Flight 93 election,” I think. Democrats will point back to it to remind Republicans that Platner voters are merely playing by the rules that Anton articulated and MAGA embraced in 2016. The right has spent a decade granting moral carte blanche to the miscreants in its ranks in the name of advancing its agenda; now liberals in Maine will give them a taste of their own medicine.

 

Republicans, meanwhile, will point to Platner’s abiding support as evidence that Democrats are no better than they are. The left caterwauled for 10 years about GOP voters abandoning their morals, but once they found a charismatic populist preaching radical change of their own to swoon over, they decided that Anton was correct about there being more important things than character. Vindication for right-wing sociopaths at last.

 

If I lived in Maine, I would take the weasel’s way out and look for every possible excuse not to cast a ballot in the Senate race. Maybe it will turn into a blowout for one candidate or the other (this surely isn’t the last Platner scandal we’ll hear of) or maybe control of the Senate will look like a fait accompli by Election Day regardless of what happens in Maine. Either would be a good excuse to avoid voting.

 

But if the election were tight locally and nationally, I would feel pulled morally to vote for the Democrat. The difference between Anton’s “Flight 93” fantasy and our present reality is that the lunatic at the controls really is willing to crash this plane, especially as his senescence deepens. He’s trying to put his face on the money. He’s turning the 250^th anniversary of independence into a political rally. He treats trade policy as a royal prerogative, declares major wars without congressional input, has deputized the Justice Department to persecute his enemies, and impugns any election result that reflects badly on him as illegitimate.

 

Six years of Graham Platner in the Senate would be mortifying, but two more years of unified GOP control in Washington would be full-tilt banana republicanism for the United States. Not all chuds are created equal.