What the National Media is Missing About Maine's Senate Primary

And why I don't give a shite whether you've summered in Maine.

Graham Platner at a Town Hall in Damariscotta on Monday, October. 27.

Last Thursday afternoon, I got a call from Michelle Goldberg at the NY Times to get my take on what the hell is happening in the US Senate primary in Maine. At the time, revelations about progressive Senate Candidate Graham Platner’s old Reddit posts and his skull head tattoo resembling a Totenkopf, a symbol associated with the Nazi SS, were making national and international headlines. You can read Goldberg’s story here.

But in the middle of the media firestorm, the University of New Hampshire Survey Center dropped a shocking poll of likely Democratic primary voters, largely conducted before the Reddit scandal broke. It had Platner up by a whopping 58 percent while Mills was at just 24 percent. It also showed that he had a pretty amazing 85 percent name recognition among voters polled. Even more surprising was that 55 percent of Maine residents disapprove of Mills’ job performance and just 43 percent approve. Goldberg asked if I had seen the National Republican Senatorial Committee poll taken right in the middle of the controversy that had Graham up over Mills, 46 to 25 percent. I hadn’t.

“I think the national media is missing something,” she said.

Ya think? These scandals would have destroyed any other candidate in a different time. But they don’t appear to be having a significant impact on Platner’s support here in Maine. As a lifelong Mainer who has probably spent way too much time writing about and participating in Maine politics, I think I know why.

The media circus started two weeks ago and it was one punch after another as reporters and partisans mined Platner’s twelve years of posts for anything offensive. On the day he was set to give a speech in the southern Maine beach town of Ogunquit, the LGBTQ news outlet the Advocate published a story about some of Platner’s homophobic language and rhetoric that “mocked or demeaned LGBTQ+ people” in subreddits several years ago.

Platner owned up to the posts, apologized and called his remarks “indefensible.” Without defending his posts, I want to point out that the Advocate left out a lot of nuance and context. For instance, the article states that in August, 2018, Platner used a homophobic slur while arguing with another user: “Betcha not a single downvoter is a real combat vet. Feel free to back it up with facts, fags.” What the story doesn’t mention is that Platner was ironically responding to homophobes who were down voting his supportive post to a gay Marine. Here’s some the full post:

The other post the Advocate cited recounted a “an old fashioned gay off” between Marines and British sailors in Bahrain:

“Pull into Bahrain in ’07 on a MEU, a Royal Navy submarine happens to be in port at the same time. … Before we even realize what’s going on, the other weird bastard just leans down and licks the damn thing from the bottom of the ballsack all the way up to the top of the dick. Stands up, looks dead at us and yells ‘BEAT THAT!’ … I proudly withdrew our team on the grounds that one cannot play gay chicken if one is actually gay.”

Personally, I think Platner made the right decision in pulling his troops out of an impossible quagmire. I’m also not sure if that story was meant to “denigrate gay men,” as the reporter writes, but I’m certainly not in a place to tell gay men what they should and shouldn’t be offended by. However, I have good friends who are gay and, like guys tend to do, we make a lot of jokes about sex, including gay sex. For the record, I’ve never participated in a game of gay chicken.

Since we’re clearing the air, I admit that I have also used anti-gay slurs before at other straight guys and used the word “gay” pejoratively. I’m not proud of it, but as the one liberal on a work crew of right-wing conservatives during the Bush administration, I may have dropped some language I regret in defending my position on the Iraq War. As Platner mentions in his Reddit posts, he was also the resident liberal in his squad. I think many, many men would own up to have talked like this in the past if they are honest.

The total lack of context in the Advocate story leads me to wonder if the reporter either didn’t have access to the full archive of posts or if he just wasn’t interested in providing an accurate portrayal of Platner’s views on gay men. The article focused solely on the homophonic words Platner used, but not his actual views on gays in the military, which were very progressive. In 2012, he responded to an article about the military’s disgraceful treatment of same-sex spouses this way:

“That is pretty goddamn disgusting. Who fallen soldiers chose to love is their business, and the services should recognize that whether they be male or female, or straight. Benefits should be bestowed upon all spouses, or none. It’s all in… The fact there is a law on the books that makes this shit a requirement is a fucking travesty.

For a moment, the Advocate story looked like a total knock out punch. As it noted, Ogunquit, population 1,600, is “a seaside resort long known as one of New England’s most prominent LGBTQ+ destinations, featuring a thriving gay community and Pride celebrations that draw visitors from across the region.” The social media networks X and BlueSky were ablaze with national liberal influencers writing Graham’s obituary and hammering him as a secret Nazi who would sink Democrats’ chances of winning the midterms.

Then something unexpected happened. When Platner and his mom showed up at the old theater in Ogunquit he thought that might be the end of his campaign. But as my friend and collaborator Nathan Bernard reported for Dropsite News, the mother and son were greeted by a standing room crowd of 600 people.

“It’s been a helluva week,” Platner said when he took the stage. “I went from being a Communist on Thursday to a Nazi by Monday.”

CNN followed up the tattoo story alleging that Platner knew what his skull tattoo meant years ago because he was defending Marines with Punisher skulls and lightning bolt tattoos in a Reddit chat in which someone mentioned the Totenkopf. But the CNN reporter cited no evidence that Platner had engaged in a conversation about that particular symbol on his chest. And like the original Jewish Insider piece that broke the story, CNN cited an anonymous source claiming Platner knew what the tattoo meant several years ago. I don’t think anyone has definitively proven whether or not he knew that the skull tattoo was an SS symbol for all these years. He would have to a psychopath to knowingly expose that tattoo to his Jewish sister-in-law and her family while lip synching to “Wreckball” at her wedding. I don’t see it.

The tattoo was also concealed on his chest so it’s not like it would have been a regular topic of conversation unless he was shirtless at the beach or something. I also have a skull tattoo (Blackbeard’s flag) on my upper arm that no one ever asks about because I don’t wear tank tops or walk around shirtless.

People get tattoos of symbols they don’t know the significance of all the time. My wife, who is a native Chinese speaker, loves to point out dumb Chinese character tattoos in the wild. We’ve seen men and women around here in midcoast Maine with Chinese words tattooed on their body that say “whore,” “arrogant,” and “testicles.”

Without belaboring the point, as Platner’s Reddit archive clearly shows, he is, and always has been, a Dead Kennedys-loving, Nazi-hating antifascist and anyone who knows him knows this is a ridiculous smear. On the same day the tattoo story broke, the right-wing Maine Wire ran a story about Platner teaching a “defensive gun course” to radical lefties. The story featured a bunch of gun toting socialists holding a big pride banner with an Antifa symbol on it and the words “Anti-Fascism, Anti-Homophobia.”

65-year old Justin Michaels told Dropsite News at the Ogunquit rally, “As a gay man, I’ve worn pink triangles. That was considered a Nazi symbol. It’s about the intent. I have to believe he did not know what his tattoo resembled.” Michaels said he was a “policy voter” interested in hearing from a candidate who takes “no corporate funding or money from AIPAC.”

At Platner’s next town hall in Damariscotta, 700 people packed the house to see him and 70 more were turned away. Midcoast Villager reporter Alex Seitz-Wald reported that he had tried very hard and couldn’t find a single former Platner supporter who had fully abandoned him, even though a few were wavering. Speaking on MSBC, Seitz-Wald described the difference between national media coverage of the campaign and what he was seeing on the ground here in Maine as “one of the biggest disconnects that I’ve seen.” If you follow the national media, he said, you would think “this campaign is over, it’s in chaos, but on the ground here it really feels like the rumors of Graham Platner’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Seitz-Wald later provided an update that he had finally found a former Graham-head who dropped his support for the progressive candidate over the recent controversies. The person asked not to have their name used because “I want to tell him and his mom first.” Yep, that’s how small our community is up here. And to be clear, I do know people who supported Platner who are no longer backing him because of these controversies. Some think this makes Platner unelectable and I definitely know some Jewish voters who are very upset about the tattoo. I know a woman who took down her Platner sign because her partner is Jewish, but she says she’ll still probably support him. Still, if the polls are any indication, Platner has some cushion to lose some votes. There was a low-quality poll that had Platner losing to Mills, but I believe that one was an outlier.

In a Sunday afternoon organizing call, Platner got emotional as he recounted the past week to his 1,200 volunteers on Zoom.

“The outpouring of support this week, I gotta say, I had a dark…it was dark this week. I had a dark Wednesday and I was terrified that I was gonna go to a town hall that night and that the room would be empty and that I would have had my life ripped apart all for nothing. And I went [and] there were 700 people there and everybody was overwhelmingly supportive,” he said, choking up. “It means a lot. So thank you all very much for still being here.”

So why do I think the national media smears aren’t working? Here’s are some thoughts:

1.) Democratic voters are fed up with do-nothing establishment politics.

One thing that is clear from attending several Platner events is that people are hungry for a no-bullshit candidate with some good old fashioned working class politics. When Platner talks about how he couldn’t afford to buy a home in his own hometown without help from the VA, it resonates with so many Mainers. Not just young people who are stuck in their parents’ homes because they can’t afford the cost of housing, but also their parents who see the opportunities they had completely foreclosed upon for their children. I also couldn’t afford to buy a house in my own hometown. I managed to find one 25 minutes away, but now I probably couldn’t afford to buy a house here either.

When Platner unapologetically calls for Medicare for All, he gets big applause because people know our health care system is a disaster. I know a family of four who get health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and they’re still paying $30,000 a year for health care. And that’s before their rates are set to double with the expiration of ACA tax credits at the end of the year. That’s why people like my friends are electrified when Platner points out that our for-profit health care system is designed to extract wealth from working class people. They don’t want another lame Democratic attempt to come in with some chewing gum and duct tape to prop up a rotten system. They want it completely overhauled or replaced. By far some of the most rapturous applause Platner gets is when he calls for end to the genocide in Gaza. Mainers on all political stripes are repulsed by what the Israeli government is doing over there. Mills has not taken a firm stand against the slaughter.

Over the past year, I have never seen so many normie liberals and even moderates become radicalized. Maine is the oldest state in the nation by median age, but it’s our elders that seem the most ready to smash the barricades. As my 81-year old mother says, “That’s because we remember a time when our government wasn’t totally corrupt and evil. We used to be proud of being Americans and now we’re just pissed off.” This isn’t a family blog, but I still can’t repeat some of the stuff I hear senior citizens saying about Trump at our weekly anti-Trump rallies in Rockland. Christ, a former moderate Republican coworker, 70, has even started sending me articles from the left-wing magazine Jacobin!

In an interview with Steve Bannon, Steve Robinson of the right-wing agitprop site the Maine Wire, speculated that Platner’s resiliency could be attributed to radicalized “coastal boomer wine moms.” I would advise Steve to go up to the former blue collar Democratic stronghold of Madawaska. There are a lot of working class rural people who dig Platner’s politics too. As one mill worker told me last week, “I think Graham will do better in Madawaska than Portland.”

People who have never been terribly political are organizing and attending rallies for the first time. There is a strong belief among us that economic populism is the only way forward. After Trump clobbered a candidate whom we believed was so much smarter, decent and more qualified than him, liberals went through a long period of shock and mourning. How could all of these Americans, especially young men, vote for such a fascist scumbag? After the 2016 disaster, a lot of liberals just wrote off half the country as hopelessly sexist and racist. Many refused to admit that Bernie may have been right about needing a stronger progressive economic message.

But after this past election, a lot of people have realized how desperate the times are and that we need a strong economic populist movement to bring people together. We must address the underlying economic conditions that brought us Trump and business as usual is not the solution. We must be open to new ideas that will widen our tent. We need to bring in more working class voters by fighting for policies that will materially improve our lives.

When I served in the Maine Legislature, I used to be afraid that if I was too progressive, moderate voters would throw me out the next election. The House Democratic Office communications director would often try to sanitize my newspaper columns so I didn’t sound too radical. I used to believe that establishment Democrats were the experts and their only concern was electability. Now I realize that they are awash in corporate cash that they either will not or cannot change. They like their exclusive club and don’t want to let in the rabble.

Earlier this week, I was interviewed by a Boston Globe reporter with a group of Rockland Democrats at my State Rep. Valli Geiger’s house. We talked about how we liked 2020 Democratic Senate candidate Sara Gideon and thought she did a great job as House Speaker. But none of us could figure out what the hell her positions as a US Senate candidate were. And I canvassed for her! Once Schumer’s Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) got a hold her, they gave her a script to follow and it was all lame, centrist mush. Instead of actual solutions, we got vapid ads like this one boasting about how she had made Republicans and Democrats sit together in the Legislature. These D.C. consultants thought Mainers wanted a Martha Stewart to come in and teach Congress proper dining room etiquette. It was horribly offensive and an insult to our intelligence. It made me want to actually vote against her for agreeing to be in such a garbage political ad.

2) People love a redemption story.

People love a good redemption story and are willing to show grace if they believe someone has really changed. Platner comes across as someone who is honest, earnest and truly sorry for his actions. He has shown growth and he’s matured a lot, as we all have. A lot of people appreciate his honesty in owning up to his mistakes. He hasn’t dodged the media and has taken every opportunity to address the controversies. He has made videos talking about the arc of his life, his depression and PTSD, his treatment and recovery. He’s talked about his feelings of isolation and loneliness after being in the military. People can identify with him because they too have said stupid shit on the internet and have done dumb crap when they were younger.

While Trump is posting AI videos of himself in a fighter jet dropping piles of shit on protestors and young Republicans are celebrating the holocaust and promoting Nazism, to see a politician open his heart about his past, talk about his mistakes and apologize for any hurt he caused, is incredibly refreshing. None of of these ghouls ever apologize for anything, much less talk about their vulnerabilities. They consider that a weakness.

3) They just don’t believe Platner is a bigot.

I do know some voters who don’t accept Platner’s apology or believe that he has changed. A left-wing activist friend called defenses of Platner “fucking himpathy for a cis white guy from a privileged background who even in 2021 was using anti-gay slurs and anti-gay comments, working for blackwater, misogynist rape comments…” People’s pain around issues like rape and homophobia are visceral and they are real. I absolutely don’t want to downplay that.

However, some of the worst takes on Graham on his alleged misogyny have come from left-wing sources like Current Affairs, a magazine I use to subscribe to. In a recent article titled “Graham Platner and the Left’s Masculinity Crisis,” Yasmin Nair writes that people only support Graham because we did the white male working class aesthetic. We’re willing to put aside his tattoo and bad posts, she argues, because we’re all just so enthralled by this big ol’ sexy, macho Marine. I don’t even recognize the knuckle scraping troglodyte she depicts in her essay. I don’t know if Nair has ever set foot in Maine, but she certainly doesn’t know any Graham supporters here.

Tressie McMillan Cottom of the NY Times wrote a similar column arguing that Platner’s ascendance was another example of “working class” being code for “white men” — “fantasy white men from 1934 wearing hard hats and carrying lunch buckets, stingy-hearted white men who imagine their own thriving can only be built atop others’ deprivation, too often fancy rhetoric to justify pandering to the most prejudiced by throwing anyone and everyone else under the bus.”

Cottom is accurate that too often we conflate “working class” with white men, which erases women, immigrants, people of color and others. But Maine is the whitest state in the nation, so it’s unfortunately the reality that we don’t get many Black candidates outside of Portland and Lewiston. When I was in the Legislature there were no Black lawmakers. Now there are five Black members out of 186, which is major progress.

I’ve noticed several centrist Black influencers on X declaring that Platner is the enemy of Black people. But no one seems to be talking to actual Black voters in Maine to get their opinions. They might be surprised what they hear. There are a number of prominent Black Mainers who back Platner’s campaign because, unlike Mills, he has pledged to fight for racial justice, hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza, stop the mass deportations and push for progressive economic policies to lift up everybody. Community activist and organizer Safiya Khalid, who made history as the first Somali-American woman ever elected to Lewiston’s City Council, has been outspoken in her support for Platner.

There are also some influential establishment Democrats in Maine who backed Hillary Clinton and are now firmly in the Mills camp. These folks have a narrower list of priorities that Mills happens to be strong on: reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights and the environment. Some of these more affluent voters are Chamber of Commerce Dems, but not all of them. They don’t necessarily oppose tax fairness, strengthening the social safety net, racial justice and workers’ rights, but her vetoes of these bills aren’t a deal breaker for them either. They simply just don’t have a class analysis or much appreciation for movement politics.

There are also some in Mills’ inner circle who support US-Israel policy, but I don’t think they talk about it publicly about it because it’s not a winning issue in Maine. Former legislator and State Treasurer Henry Beck, an outspoken Mills supporter, used to post about AIPAC events he attended from his official State Treasurer X account until I questioned why he was promoting AIPAC. He deleted the account shortly after.

Some national trans influencers like Ari Drennan of Media Matters fixate on Platner’s past mistakes but not the man he is today or how many trans people in Maine feel about him. In a powerful video from his town hall in Damariscotta, a trans woman named Sami stood up.

“I would love to be out protesting. I would love to be out knocking on doors. But I’ll be honest, a person like me could get killed right now in this country,” she said, her voice filling with emotion. “I believe in you and I believe that you are a better man than you once were in the past because I am a better person than I was in the past… If I stand with you, will you fight with me? Will you stand up for me?”

Platner responded, “I firmly believe that every American has the right to live in their own body as they see fit. I also fully recognize that as a cis, white male with a bunch of tattoos and a long combat record that I get to put myself out there in ways that other people don’t…. I know that I can knock on doors in places that a lot of people … won’t feel safe in. That is a responsibility that I feel and that is why I’m doing this. And I just want to say thank you, because I know how hard this is. I just want to say that yes, I will absolutely stand next to you and if we ever have to go knock doors together, I’m happy to stand by your side.”

The candidate and voter then hugged. Sami told Alex Seitz-Wald after the exchange that while she was very grateful for Governor Mills’ support for trans people and that she voted for her, she didn’t believe Mills “has ability to make change.” She added that “If there’s anybody who could go against Trump, it’s Graham.” Sami signed up as a volunteer after that. I don’t know Sami personally, but she’s a friend of a friend.

I do hope we can continue to engage in a conversation with women and LGBTQ voters who have been turned off by Graham over his past statements. I really do think he represents a positive masculinity that emphasizes responsibility and sticking up for people who are being bullied and oppressed. In speaking about his past homophobic and misogynistic remarks, Platner describes how he had evolved after spending so much time in the hyper-masculine world of an all-male Marine infantry unit. He went to college, became close friends with gay people and straight women. He learned how most of his women friends had survived some form of sexual abuse. On Sunday, he said that it’s been annoying to see comments he made thirteen years ago being taken out of context, but it has also given him the opportunity to show young men “a version of masculinity” that is “built around compassion and empathy.”

Platner believes that the more men are shamed for holding insensitive views, the more they double down and are embraced by the far right. And while he believes people should be held accountable for saying “sexist horrific stuff,” he hopes his story can be an example for young men so they can see that there is another pathway forward by developing relationships with people with different experiences.

“The more people you know, the more open you allow yourself to be, the more honest you are with other people. And then the more you allow other people to be honest with you, that’s when you get to learn and that’s when you get to grow as a human being,” he said to his audience of 1,200 volunteers.

Platner reminds me of male friends I grew up with who would stand up for people being picked on. Sadly, I’m not friends with many of those guys anymore because they have become so bitter, resentful and reactionary. I am very concerned that corporate Democrats are going to once again exploit gender divisions in this primary like they did in the 2016 primary. This is an extremely destructive tactic and while it may be effective for Schumer et al in the near term, it is toxic to party unity and I believe a major reason why so many men can’t stand liberals and have moved rightward.

These two campaigns represent dramatically different visions for the Democratic Party. As Platner has explained many times, it is a “movement project.” He is taking lessons from the civil rights and labor movements to build a mass popular movement to defeat fascism. Schumer and his allies are running the same top-down campaign that will focus on spending shitloads of money on bland ads like the ones Sara Gideon ran on. Schumer and his ilk disdain populism because they can’t control it and they want to treat Congress like an exclusive club that keeps out working class voices.

4) Maine is a small town and we all kind of know each other.

Years ago, my wife and I made a viral cartoon called “Meat Recall” about my experience working at a Hannaford call center. We were taking calls from people all over the eastern seaboard in the corporate conglomerate’s grocery empire to find out if they needed to throw out the meat in their refrigerators. Often, when I’d get a Mainer on the phone, they wanted to chit chat. Once they determined I wasn’t working a phone from India or Texas and I told them I was in Scarborough, Maine, they wanted to know if I knew their cousin who was a longtime coach at the local high school. And I wanted to know if they knew an old classmate who lived in Rumford. And before we knew it, we were making a plan to “do some ice fishin’, smoke some big ol’ j-bones and drink whatevah!”

Platner wasn’t famous, but people in activist circles knew him through his work with Acadia Action. In March, he organized a protest against Trump in Ellsworth where 200 people showed up. I met Graham Platner when running for US Senate was the furthest thing from his mind. It was in the middle of the winter and we were at a little get together of progressive activists at the Lincolnville Library. It was the kind of event we all look forward to in the dead of winter in Maine when we’re feeling the cabin fever and want to get out of the house on a dreary Saturday afternoon. There were the usual suspects, old sixties-era radicals who never lost their idealism, crunchy back-to-the-landers and young rabble rousers.

During introductions, this burly dude in work clothes and dirty boots speaks up and introduces himself with this deep booming voice as a community organizer and the Harbor Master of Sullivan, a small town nearly two hours up the coast. He was especially interested in joining a proposed labor reading group. At first, I was like, “Who the hell is this guy?” Outside of the labor movement it wasn’t often that you’d see a blue collar fella at these kinds of events. He was clearly very bright and well-read. He was interested in my spiel about how the Lincolnville Socialist Party had met near that very spot where we were meeting. I talked about how it had adopted a platform with many of the planks that we would later take for granted — a minimum wage, a national pension system, improved sanitary conditions in shops and factories, stronger child labor laws, a graduated income tax and more.

Then in August, I was at the Maine AFL-CIO’s Summer Institute, a two-day retreat at the University of Maine where union members and our allies get together to talk about organizing and participate in workshops on how to build power in our movement. At the after party at the Family Dog in Orono, I heard about this guy there who was about to announce a run to take on Susan Collins At the time, we were all very disappointed with our options.

The only candidate who seemed to have any traction was Jordan Wood, a former Democratic operative who was involved in a spammy fundraising PAC called Mothership Strategies that used the kind of pushy, manipulative tactics that drive people bananas. An investigation revealed that of the $678 million the company’s core political action committees raised since 2018, just $11 million went to candidates; $159 million made its way to Mothership Strategies. Yeah, no thanks.

So when I walked up to the picnic table behind the Family Dog and asked who the Senate candidate was, I was thrilled to see that it was Graham. “Hey man,” he said. “I was looking for your email address because I wanted to talk about those Lincolnville Socialist Party notes that you sent me. I read the whole thing!” I was immediately sold on his candidacy. I gave him some more reading material the next day while he was participating in our workshops at Summer Institute.

A few days later, I saw Platner’s video launch and the extraordinary buzz he was getting in the national media. Suddenly this tough-talking Marine combat veteran was all over our screens hauling oysters, lifting kettle bells and talking about Medicare for All to a monster truck soundtrack.

“I’m not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy,” Graham boomed like a left-wing Chuck Norris jumping out of the exploding headquarters of an international crime syndicate. “It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out.”

It was slick, hard hitting and it got people’s attention. I can also see how some more sensitive liberal voters would be confused or turned off this image of a tough, trash talking Marine. But we’re all only like one degree of separation from each other here in Maine. People know people who know Graham, went to school with him or know his family. At one of Labor Day events in Portland, Governor Mills asked Graham how his dad was because she knows him through the legal world. A friend on Facebook was asking about Graham after seeing his launch video. The candidate’s mom Leslie popped up in the comments and said, “Judy, that’s my son!” A bohemian non-binary friend from Southern Maine said Graham was their friend. He trained them how to use firearms for self-defense in his role as a trainer in the Socialist Rifle Association. It’s hard to paint a guy as a homophobic fascist when he’s training LGBTQ activists to defend themselves.

A few weeks later, I was at a campaign event at a local farm for labor-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson and there was Graham Platner standing behind the bar wearing an apron and shucking his oysters. He had been hired several weeks earlier, before he had decided to run for Senate, to cater the event. Of course, everyone also wanted to hear the celebrity oyster shucker and the host allowed him to say a few words.

5.) Mainers hate being told what to do, especially by rich people from away.

Chuck Schumer and national Democrats have been extremely unpopular and Maine primary voters don’t think they know what the fuck they are doing when it comes to running candidates. Mainers want to pick their candidate without interference from national Democrats.

As soon as national oppo consultants dropped the tattoo story last week, we have been inundated by national reporters, pundits and centrist Democratic influencers screaming about a guy we know and like as a racist, misogynistic homophobic Nazi. I actually deleted my X and Bluesky apps on my phone the day the story broke because I was getting swamped by liberal and left accounts accusing me of running cover for a Nazi as soon as posted my last Substack article. And I don’t have many followers! Even Shay Stewart Bouley, an anti-racist educator and author of the popular Black Girl in Maine Blog, has been receiving tons of hate mail by people calling her, a Black female, a Nazi sympathizer and questioning her Blackness. All because she interviewed Graham for a series of stories.

Certainly some of the online outrage was organic. I did have a great time interacting with Maine-splainers touting their Maine cred because they had family here or “summered” in Maine.

The absolute WORST are the DC consultants who grew up in Maine and want to pontificate about what Mainers think or should think. They’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, I say. (Joke!). I also got a kick out of Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss, a left-punching Harvard graduate from a very wealthy family, demanding that Graham drop out of the race. Probably the most effective way to get Graham Platner elected is for some rich Masshole politician to tell Mainers who our candidates should be.

It definitely appears that there was a very coordinated effort by Schumer and his allied Democratic influencers to hammer on the tattoo story. For instance, centrist influencer Olivia Julianna, a lobbyist with the firm Gen-Z for Change who spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, has been fixated on Graham Platner for a few weeks. Julianna was exposed by Wired Magazine for being part of a network of social media influencers that were being paid by a dark money group to launder establishment talking points.

It’s also clear to me that many, many of these anonymous accounts are bots. Who is deploying them? I don’t know. Some of them might have come from MAGA to sow division among Democrats or perhaps from Russian or Israeli troll farms. There’s no question that the AIPAC crowd is behind Mills and despises Graham over his positions on Gaza.

6.) Mainers reject attempts to smear Graham’s military service

This one has not received as much attention, but there is a sense from some veterans in Maine that some of these attacks are coming dangerously close to smearing Graham’s military service. There has been a callous dismissal of his PTSD and 100 percent disability in the years he was posting in military chats and this has not gone unnoticed by veterans and their families.

In response to this media firestorm, veterans, their wives and children in Maine came to Graham’s defense on social media. Many talked about their personal experiences of the damage war inflicts on families long after servicemen and women return home. Maine has sone of the highest per capital populations of military veterans in the nation. But Mills’ supporters seem to be a little oblivious as to how they sound in their criticisms of Graham.

Portland Press Herald columnist Steve Collins, a staunch Platner critic who has called on him to drop out of the race, argued on Facebook that Jared Golden is a combat veteran who hasn’t said “awful things on social media, or anywhere” - that we know of, Steve. Centrist liberal pundit and former Bangor Daily News columnist Amy Fried even questioned whether Graham had actually served in combat, citing some Reddit exchange from several years ago where Graham said that big wars aren’t as enjoyable as small wars.

“A friend of mine who’s a vet says that Platner couldn’t have been close to anyone killed in combat if he was talking about small wars not taking the fun out of fighting,” said Fried on Facebook.

When I asked if she was actually questioning Graham’s combat experience, she denied it, but added, that her friend didn’t think it made sense that war was “enjoyable and fun….if you were close to people who died in combat.” To me this is so ignorant of combat veterans’ experiences. It’s true that Graham did talk about how much he enjoyed combat in the years after he got out of the military, but so did plenty of other veterans in those subreddits. They talked about the intense adrenaline rush, a sense of profound camaraderie and a sense of purpose they don’t necessarily feel in civilian life.Graham’s posts on this subject were made several years ago in military subreddits when he was depressed and feeling disconnected after leaving the service. He told me that it’s impossible to explain that to people who have never served in combat.

House Speaker Ryan Fecteau (D-Biddeford), who had planned to run against Platner if Mills didn’t jump into the race, claimed Graham had proclaimed “fandom for imperialistic wars that occurred decades ago.”

On Saturday morning, former Republican State Representative Lance Harvell of Farmington called to tell me he was furious about how Democratic legislative leaders and other establishment politicos were talking about Graham’s military service. A staunch conservative, Army veteran and former mill worker, Harvell told me, “I probably ain’t gonna vote for him, but I will write an op-ed to defend his service.” From his perspective, the type of people who never served, but sent young men like Platner to war, “now think he is not capable of running for office for a country that he shed blood or went through experiences that none of them can even comprehend.”

“The fact that we are so close to Veteran’s day and they are attacking this veteran about conversations with his fellow veterans, they ought to be ashamed,” he said. “Instead of attacking Graham, why don’t they walk up to him and personally thank him for his service?”

I’ve also seen some random posts making claims that Graham had committed atrocities overseas. It seems very likely that we could see a Swift Boat-style attack on his military service like the one against John Kerry in 2004. I don’t necessarily think that would come from Democrats, but it could from Republicans or some other allied group. And we should be prepared for that.