Former Graham Platner staffer calls for Maine voters to reject him

Graham Platner’s former political director, who has become a vocal critic of the insurgent candidate, is urging Maine’s voters to reject him.

Genevieve McDonald, a former Democratic state representative from Stonington, made her last-minute plea in a Monday opinion piece in the Washington Post.

“If America wants a stronger democracy, elevating leaders with integrity is essential. Leaders with sound judgment and ethics. Leaders who embrace and live the ideals the nation stands for,” she wrote.

In that piece, McDonald said she believed Platner shared a common goal with her: to fight for Maine’s working people.

But early after the campaign’s launch last summer, McDonald wrote that she began to feel “growing apprehension” about Platner, although she had been selling his “narrative of redemption.”

Eventually, she wrote, his problems became “impossible to ignore.”

Since Platner stormed onto the political scene last year, he has faced a barrage of criticism over unearthed inflammatory internet posts, including some dismissive about women’s concerns over sexual assault, and revelations that he had a chest tattoo of a skull resembling a symbol adopted by the Nazi SS during World War II.

Platner denied knowing the meaning of the tattoo, which he got in 2007 while deployed abroad with the U.S. Marines. He has since had it covered.

McDonald, who resigned before the tattoo story broke, said she was appalled by what she saw as Platner’s “feigned ignorance” about the tattoo’s symbolism and right-wing connotations.

“Despite being exposed by a series of scandals beginning last October, he kept assuring voters and the Democratic Party that there were no more skeletons in his closet,” she wrote.

Then, ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Platner was hit with back-to-back scandals after the Wall Street Journal, and then later The New York Times, reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had revealed to the campaign back in August that Platner had exchanged sexually explicit texts with other women early in their marriage. That was followed by another report from The Times, which spoke with ex-girlfriends who described “toxic” relationships with him and even physically intimidating behavior.

McDonald, who spoke off the record with the Journal and on the record with The Times for the “sexting” stories, worries that Platner’s popularity and support even after all the controversies is evidence that Democrats “have learned to excuse what we should condemn,” which she called “one of the deepest problems in American politics today.”

“The answer to a broken political culture is not to accept it. Demand better from those entrusted with power or seeking it. Enough is enough,” she wrote.

Platner’s campaign has criticized McDonald as a “disgruntled former candidate.”

Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her U.S. Senate campaign in April and hit Platner hard over his old internet posts in a series of campaign ads, has said that Republicans would make “mincemeat” of Platner if he emerges as the party’s standard-bearer for the November election.

Mills and David Costello also are on Tuesday’s ballot.

Regardless who wins Tuesday, it will be an uphill battle for Democrats to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who officially announced her historic bid for a sixth term in February. While recent polls have given Platner a lead over Maine’s senior senator, the Republican has handily beaten back challengers, including in 2020 when she defied polls and expectations to secure a fifth term in the Senate. But Collins, who has been ranked the country’s most bipartisan senator, has seen her popularity slump since Republican President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House.

If Collins is successful in winning a sixth term, she would be Maine’s longest-serving U.S. senator.