If Graham Platner Won’t Quit, Democrats Need to Quit Him  

If you are a Democrat, the logic of “Vote Blue No Matter Who” is close to impeccable. Any Democratic candidate for President or Senate, even if not especially charismatic or competent, at the very least wouldn’t nominate or approve right-wing judges hellbent on rolling back constitutional rights.  

But there are exceptions to any rule. And being credibly accused of rape is one of them.  

This is what happened on Monday when Jennifer Racicot, an ex-girlfriend of Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate nominee from Maine, told Politico that five years ago he had nonconsensual intercourse with her. A subsequent boyfriend of Racicot’s, in whom she confided three years ago, corroborated her allegations. Racicot also shared private Facebook messages from 2023 in which she warned an acquaintance, “I will just very politely call him consensually careless at times,” adding, “when drunk.” 

While Platner called the allegations “categorically false” in a social media video, he implicitly opened the door to withdrawing from the race when he said, “we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.” He doesn’t have much time to reflect if he is going to be kept off the ballot; the deadline for him to withdraw is Monday, July 13th. Then the Maine Democratic Party would have until July 27th to replace him.  

If Democrats are going to retain any credibility as the party of women’s rights and the party that adheres to the rule of law, Platner cannot be supported. If Platner makes the stubborn decision to stay on the ballot, principled Democratic operatives and volunteers on his campaign team should quit, and principled Democratic donors should demand refunds and refuse to donate further.  

Would that mean Democrats need to cross party lines and support the incumbent Republican Susan Collins? Absolutely not. Maine’s election laws allow for write-in candidates to run who file before August 25th. If Platner does not allow the Maine Democratic Party to supplant him on the ballot, party leaders should renounce support for him and rally behind an agreed upon write-in candidate. Obviously that would present a difficult path to defeating Collins, but Democrats would need to have faith that upholding core principles in Maine—regardless of how the Senate race turns out—would put them in a better position to take control of the House and Senate, than allowing Platner to exemplify a grotesque hypocrisy that would strip Democrats of any moral authority and drag down candidates across the country. 

It’s not just party establishment types that need to worry about how Platner could corrode their standing, but also the socialist and left-populist activists that made him a national political star. So committed they were to the notion that typical Democratic politicians were insufficiently progressive and barriers to their political objectives, they argued that outsider candidates with proverbial red flags should not only be acceptable but desirable.  

Dan Moraff, the political consultant who cut his teeth in Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and directly recruited Platner into the race in July of 2025, told the Wall Street Journal, “I think that if what the voters wanted were people that were grown in vats and had never done or said anything that they might regret their entire lives, we’d have a very different country. Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings, and they want people who do not look and sound like the vat grown people who’ve been leading this country off a cliff for the last century. And that was Graham.” 

Moraff has not been alone on the left in promoting this theory of campaigns and political change. As I noted last month, Ken Klippenstein defended Platner by declaring “people are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life Barbies with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” And Matt Stoller shared that “I like that he’s messy” since “The rule following perfect resume ladder climbing Harvard law grads are the … lizard people creeps.” Many Platner voters in Maine voiced similar, if less gross, versions of these arguments.  

Not all that concerned about red flags, Moraff’s team paid for a hasty and limited background check, concluded that what they learned about his social media posts wasn’t worrisome, and launched the campaign mere days later in mid-August. Soon after Platner’s campaign team learned from Platner’s wife about recent extramarital sexting and that didn’t prompt anyone to abandon ship, though his first political director quit in October after news reports of his social media posts. His campaign not only waved off allegations that Platner mistreated women, including allegations of physical abuse, they had the audacity to cast Platner in ads as the enemy of “The Epstein Class.”

Moraff has a point. Few people live flawless lives and if all candidates are to be viciously demonized for any minor transgression they have ever committed, we will lose potential exemplary public servants who didn’t want to subject themselves and their families to modern day witch trials. But some flags are brighter red than others, and Platner waved far too many of them.  

Moreover, as I suggested last year, before running for major positions like U.S. Senator, people interested in public service can first run for local offices or provide other volunteer community service so voters can assess their character and competence. Plucking someone out of obscurity and rushing him into a Senate campaign in a month’s time—just because they look the part and spout your preferred political rhetoric—is a recipe for the political disaster Democratic voters in Maine brought upon themselves today.  

Another ingredient was the assumption among some on the left that progressive incumbents trying their best to enact change within the political system deserve the same scorn as moderates and conservatives. This has already led to three Democratic House members with solid progressive records to be unceremoniously dumped in primaries this year, in two cases with candidates who have made some troubling comments in the past. The belief that experienced progressives who don’t meet every purity test need to be put out to pasture so urgently that it’s worth recruiting people with light resumes without much regard to what baggage they may have is going to lead to more Graham Platners.  

Acknowledging Platner was a colossal mistake doesn’t mean supporting his populist agenda was a mistake. But it may mean taking some time to reflect on the best way to advance that agenda.  

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