Identity Crisis

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, July 07, 2026

 

Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy can be understood as a sort of experiment to see which vices Democrats won’t casually impute to the entire white working class.

 

Nazi tattoos, boorish online commentary, rampant (virtual) adultery, rough behavior with girlfriends: There was much chin-pulling among the left as each new red flag was hoisted, but in the end they were willing to overlook all of it in the belief that Platner’s scumminess was, quite simply, the price of authenticity. Or pseudo-authenticity, rather.

 

If you want a salt-of-the-earth blue-collar joe as your champion, you must accept that he’s going to be uncouth at best and a minor degenerate at worst.

 

But major degeneracy? It turns out that’s where they draw the line.

 

The Platner experiment unofficially ended Monday when the latest red flag was unfurled. At last, an allegation has been made that Democrats aren’t willing to chalk up to white-guy wage slaves being white-guy wage slaves—namely, actual rape.

 

A former girlfriend told Politico that Platner “entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop.” She said she recalled him “grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me” and realized at one point that “this is no longer my choice.”

 

She confided in a former boyfriend about the incident in 2023, long before Platner entered politics, and warned a female acquaintance that year in Facebook messages not to get involved with the future candidate because she had a “bad experience” with him in which he was “consensually careless.” In an interview yesterday with CNN, she claimed Platner was sufficiently aware of what he was doing during the assault that he paused at times to apologize to her before resuming.

 

By dinnertime on Monday, practically every prominent Democrat in America had called on him to quit the race in Maine. That included progressive stars like Sen. Ruben Gallego and Rep. Ro Khanna, both of whom had endorsed him. It included Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who vowed not to spend in Maine if Platner remained on the ballot. It included Maine’s own state Democratic Party leadership, whose members had only recently chosen him as their Senate nominee.

 

It even included some of the leading chuds in left-wing infotainment, until now the candidate’s most reliable cheering section.

 

Platner posted a video late in the day in which he denied the allegations but promised “to reflect on the best path forward.” There is no path forward. Unseating Susan Collins would be hard for a good candidate; for a credibly accused rapist whose polling was already headed south before the latest news, it’s a pipe dream.

 

He has six days to withdraw from the race before his party is barred by law from replacing him as nominee, which made yesterday’s bombshell fortuitously timed. For once, he’s likely to do the right thing.

 

What can we learn from this Frankenstein-tier experiment gone wrong?

 

The benefit of the doubt.

 

Despite all the hype about new blood and “outsider” energy, Platnermania ended up incorporating elements of two of the most notorious Democratic campaign disasters of the past 20 years.

 

One is John Edwards’ presidential run in 2007, which saw Edwards mount a challenge from the left to frontrunners Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The candidate spoke movingly on the trail about his wife’s breast cancer; meanwhile, he was secretly engaged in a long-running affair and had already fathered a child with his mistress.

 

Edwards recklessly placed his own ambition ahead of his party’s welfare, knowing that the skeletons in his closet could have wrecked Democrats’ chances at the presidency if they had tumbled out after he won the nomination. By letting progressives get excited about a candidacy that was all but certain to end in disgrace, he played the left for chumps. That’s Platner all over.

 

The other is Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, of course. For many months during that cycle, influential Democrats ignored the evidence of their own eyes and ears—and lots and lots of data—that the then-president had a liability that would render him unelectable. They downplayed it, rationalized it, and made excuses for it … until Biden’s catastrophic debate performance left no doubt that the party would lose unless it very belatedly removed him as nominee.

 

That too is Platner all over. The man had more red flags than China, yet not until something emerged to convince the left that his campaign was well and truly doomed did they very belatedly turn on him. They were okay with electing an unfit cretin to the Senate this year, just as they were okay with nominating an unfit, senescent eightysomething for another four-year term in the White House. What they weren’t okay with was losing.

 

Here’s the difference between Platner, Edwards, and Biden, though. Two were known quantities in politics, figures whom Democratic voters were familiar with and whom they might be forgiven for (foolishly) granting the benefit of the doubt as to their fitness. The third was a black box, reportedly deemed Senate material after a single brief conversation with a strategist, and whose views on policy could be fairly summarized as a noun, a verb, and “oligarchs” or “Israel.” How did someone like that earn the benefit of the doubt until Monday afternoon?

 

You know how. I’ve discussed it here before, but New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg put it well in a piece this morning. “Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics,” she wrote. “Many progressives want to believe that with a sufficiently populist message and style, they can win over voters alienated from the Democratic Party, obviating the need for ideological concessions.”

 

Precisely. Graham Platner was a rare case of Democrats playing identity politics with white people.

 

Not in the strong-form sense of framing whites’ preference between candidates as a litmus test of racial authenticity. But certainly in the weak-form sense of asking white working-class voters to lay aside their qualms about Democratic policies and embrace their nominee because he looks, sounds, and acts more like them than the Republican does. The entire theory of the case with Platner was that downscale whites in Maine will recoil from Medicare for All when a young “foreign” politician like Abdul El-Sayed or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pitches it but not when a gruff bearded white guy in flannel does.

 

There’s nothing wrong with our policies. All we need to win is to find the right “messenger.” That’s how I summarized the progressive theory driving Platnermania last month. And it might help explain why the party was so quick to turn on him yesterday: Per the most recent data, that theory was looking like a total bust.

 

Working-class zero.

 

Insofar as Platner’s candidacy was also an experiment to see whether Trumpy constituencies might be more receptive to left-wing ideas when they’re offered by Trumpier leftists, the experiment failed resoundingly.

 

Two respected polls conducted in June found a tight race between him and Collins, but not because the Democrat was peeling off the blue-collar whites he was supposed to appeal to. Just the opposite. In surveys from the New York Times and Fox News, it was college-educated whites who handed Platner lopsided margins—56-41 in the Fox poll and 68-31(!) in the Times’ data.

 

Among his target demographic of whites without a degree, he was getting obliterated. Fox had Collins ahead 57-41 in that cohort while the Times saw her up 59-36.

 

Why that’s so is hard to say. We can safely rule out dazzling charisma and unimpeachable blue-collar cred as key factors in Collins’ advantage. I think we can also rule out some sort of cultural quirkiness that might make working-class whites in Maine meaningfully different in their preferences from working-class whites elsewhere. Remember, this is a state that twice elected Paul “Trump before Trump” LePage governor during the previous decade. A rough-around-the-edges populist Democrat should have been right up their alley, especially given Maine’s left-ish lean overall.

 

On the other hand, we shouldn’t err too far in the opposite direction from leftists whose low opinion of the white working class led them to believe Platner’s vices might make him relatable. It sure would be nice to believe that blue-collar white people are too decent at heart, too savvy in sniffing out poor character, and too civic-minded to support a bum like the soon-to-be former candidate in Maine.

 

But let’s be serious. They’re the same people who broke for Donald Trump by 37 points in 2016, by 35 points in 2020, and by 34 points in 2024. “The white working class loves angry, erratic sociopaths!” was not an insane thing for a Democratic strategist to believe under the circumstances.

 

The Platner experiment with blue-collar whites failed, I suspect, not because of Platner himself but because of ideological inertia. “The idea that … just because he looks a little scruffy and talks a little tough, he’s suddenly going to attract this group that’s been trending Republican for more than 10 years now—that’s just kind of fantasyland,” as political reporter Natalie Jackson put it. A cohort that’s spent the past decade identifying as Republican for culture-war reasons wasn’t going to turn on a dime because of identity politics, and to believe otherwise was condescending.

 

The gender splits in the Maine polls illustrate the problem. If ever there were a Democrat whom you might think men would take a shine to, it’s a foulmouthed Marine who works with his hands. And if ever there were a Republican whom you would think women might prefer, it’s a soft-spoken centrist who comports herself with unusual dignity by the standards of her party.

 

But you’d be wrong. Men favored Susan Collins by 7 points in the Times poll and by 10 in the Fox survey, while women favored Platner by 8 and 5 points, respectively. (Although not for long after yesterday’s news, another reason his candidacy is doomed.) Men as a group have leaned right for years while women have leaned left, and here again Platner’s identity politics wasn’t compelling enough to put them off those preferences.

 

When Trump whines about American Jews dependably voting Democratic, he at least tends to frame his complaints in terms of policy. (“But I’ve done so much for Israel!”) The Platner experiment in Maine wasn’t even that sophisticated. He wasn’t offering the right-leaning white working class much in terms of policy and cultural concessions, as Jackson went on to note in her comments. All he was offering was progressivism with a pale face.

 

There’s no One Neat Trick to winning back whites without a college degree, it turns out. Leftists can either meet them halfway on policy or try to win without them, but they’re not going to “identity” their way out of the problem.

 

The difference between the parties.

 

There isn’t much to say in Democrats’ favor about the Platner experiment.

 

It’s embarrassing that they nominated him in spite of everything that came before Monday’s rape allegation. It’s despicable that many sought to discredit claims by another ex-girlfriend of Platner’s, conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield, about how he mistreated her. And it’s depressing to know that the collective imagination of the “party of norms” could be captured by a populist demagogue whose main political talent was being angry.

 

There are many lawmakers in Washington whose default mode is anger, and I can’t think of one among them whom Americans are lucky to have working for them. A less facile people than ours would eventually wise up to the fact that thoughtful policymaking is a skill, and performing anger convincingly is not strongly correlated with that skill.

 

The best I can do to find a silver lining in Democrats’ conduct is this: Unlike certain other parties, they were willing to belatedly draw some sort of line here.

 

“The one thing I know about Republicans, when we had a very bad candidate and found out, we didn’t vote for that person,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy said last night of Platner, somehow without bursting into flames. “When Matt Gaetz came forward, we got rid of him.”

 

My dude: Matt Gaetz was still winning reelection to the House by landslide margins years after allegations of him having sex with an underage girl went public. If Donald Trump had his way, Gaetz would be the attorney general of the United States right now, and most Republican voters would be perfectly happy about it.

 

Pete Hegseth was accused of sexual assault and was nominated and confirmed as secretary of defense. Ken Paxton has been accused of virtually every form of corruption there is, and was even impeached for it in one case by the GOP-controlled Texas House of Representatives. Two months ago, he pantsed longtime incumbent John Cornyn in a Republican Senate primary. And of course the human red flag in the Oval Office easily dispatched all challengers in the 2024 GOP presidential contest despite four criminal indictments, a coup attempt, and years of daily petty reminders of how lousy his character is.

 

There’s no clearer lesson of the Trump era than that right-wingers will not only vote for terrible people for office, they actively prefer them. As early as the first weeks of his candidacy in 2015, the president was bending over backward to demonstrate what a scumbag he is, and Republican voters ate it up. And after January 6, the very worst thing our very bad leader has ever done, who was it who visited him at Mar-a-Lago to try to rehabilitate him on behalf of the GOP establishment?

 

It was Kevin McCarthy, of course.

 

Democrats are willing to consider electing sociopaths to office, but Republicans are downright enthusiastic about it: That’s the difference between the two parties in the greatest country in the world, and that’s why being accused of sexual assault is a problem in a left-wing primary but not a right-wing one. If a guy with Graham Platner’s background wanted a career in politics, he should have joined the GOP.