Listen hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear
Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to, immediately.
His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.
As you probably know by now, Politico published a story on Monday about a woman, Jenny Racicot, who says that Platner raped her. According to Racicot, they’d been romantically involved, on and off, for more than two years when he showed up at her house drunk and uninvited one night in 2021, let himself in and forced himself on her.
She confided her ordeal to a man she dated after Platner, as well as to her therapist, and showed Politico text messages she sent in 2023 warning an acquaintance away from him. Her account is completely believable and completely devastating.
Platner denies Racicot’s accusations but seems to realize that his campaign may no longer be viable. In a video posted on social media, he said, “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”
But that time needs to wrap up. According to Maine law, Platner has to drop out by next Monday for Democrats to replace him on the November ballot. The sooner this mess ends, the better.
The Platner campaign represented an electoral insurgency against the Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations against those who launched it. There is plenty of blame to go around.
Most at fault, of course, is Platner himself. He allegedly victimized Racicot, and then his campaign victimized her again, putting her into a situation where she felt she had to go public. He betrayed his supporters by plunging into a campaign while knowing he had a closet full of skeletons and drawing people who believed in him into a doomed enterprise.
Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off. [Continue reading…]