Graham Platner’s Team Keeps Insulting Our Intelligence

The Senate hopeful’s crew keeps telling us his scandals don’t matter. They keep piling up.

Graham Platner is pictured in a blue shirt. — Graeme Sloan/Getty Images

Is there anyone you know who has never gotten a Nazi tattoo? Someone who’s never posted sexist and homophobic drivel on internet message forums? A person who, in spite of the inevitable temptations that come with inhabiting a human body in a monogamous relationship, has never engaged in secret extramarital sexting?

I bet you know quite a few of these people. I do, too. None of them are saints, and they’re not necessarily Goody Two-shoes. It’s just not that uncommon or difficult to go through life without engaging in these kinds of morally suspect behaviors.

Graham Platner would have us believe otherwise. Every time the Senate candidate from Maine has been called to account for past offenses and personal indiscretions that have come to light, the Platner campaign has brushed them off as low-stakes mistakes that have no bearing on his qualifications for political office.

Platner said he didn’t realize for nearly two decades, until the middle of his Senate run, that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol. “I don’t look at this as a liability,” he shrugged. The crude Reddit posts were from “a time in my life where I was struggling deeply,” he explained, and part of a “whole journey that got me here.”

The most recent Platner scandal arose this weekend, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, disclosed to a campaign aide in 2025 that she had found sexually explicit text messages to other women on his phone. The sexting to between 6 and 12 women reportedly ended before the campaign began, and the couple worked through the betrayal in counseling.

In response, Platner and Gertner have raged at media outlets for publishing the story and at the two campaign staffers, one former and one current, who spoke to reporters. Platner called it “journalistic malpractice” and refused to confirm the story, only allowing that he and his wife “went through something hard—because of me.” In a video statement released by the campaign, Gertner said she found it “really shameful that there’s a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip.” Implying that Platner’s behavior was nothing out of the ordinary in marital life, she went on, “No marriage is perfect, and I don’t want a perfect marriage.”

Various Democrats and leftists have jumped to Platner’s defense. On Face the Nation, Sen. Chris Murphy noted that Platner served the country in the military, and “he’s also made mistakes and he has admitted that.” Morris Katz, a rising-star Democratic strategist who is working with the Platner campaign after helping Zohran Mamdani to victory, wrote on X that “it’s no one’s fucking business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”

I see no room for purity tests in an era of encroaching authoritarianism; to have any hope of grinding the MAGA movement into the dust, left-leaning Americans must embrace a big-tent approach. All people should be allowed to grow and change their minds, as Platner says he has done since his Reddit-posting days. On the scale of destructive personal choices, extramarital sexting sits a long distance from the exploits of other recent American political leaders, who have been found liable for sexual assault, drawn multiple allegations of rape, and had sex with an intern in the White House.

But it is insulting to be told that a candidate’s private conduct is irrelevant to his political ambitions. In a candidate’s personal life, beneath the curated character he presents to the public, we see a clearer picture of who he is, which holds clues to how he’ll act in office. Is he guided by consistent principles, or by the whims of the moment? Is he willing to make sacrifices for the long-term good, or is he susceptible to the pull of short-term gratification? Is he honest, dependable, hardworking, compassionate, prudent? If he is voted into office, will he embarrass himself with some new offense right before his next election, putting the fate of his party—and, more importantly, its policy aims—in jeopardy?

When they’re not blinded by political loyalty and electoral dreams, people instinctively grasp the importance of a politician’s personal history. Campaign strategists love to tout a military record, a blue-collar résumé, small-business ownership, and a life of family and faith, in part because they suggest qualities that bode well for a political leader. There’s a reason why, before the Trump era, socially stigmatized behaviors were—and occasionally still are—a barrier to public office. As the second-wave feminist movement succinctly put it, the personal is political; the way we behave toward the people around us betrays our political values. If we don’t tip service employees, it calls into question our respect for the working class and our commitment to decent, well-paid work. If we call the cops on teens violating a city curfew, it suggests a cavalier attitude toward the perils of the justice system. If we treat the women in our lives with disrespect and deceit, we aren’t exactly the picture of a feminist ally.

Democrats have hung their hopes for defeating longtime incumbent Susan Collins and retaking the Senate on Platner, which makes his candidacy essential to blocking Trump’s agenda for the rest of his term. It is now far too late in the election cycle for Dems to field another candidate. For these reasons, and for all my aforementioned principles about allowing people to repent for their mistakes, I don’t think Platner should drop out of the race. Nor would I suggest Maine voters send Collins back to the Senate to rubber-stamp more of Trump’s appointees and legislative priorities. But there is a middle ground between championing Platner’s opponent and dismissing his pattern of ill-considered behavior as insignificant. If this had been the first indication that Platner had a reckless streak, I would have been more inclined to brush it off. Likewise, any future transgressions will build on the picture of his character that is coming into view.

Platner and his supporters are trying to deny that his conduct says anything about who he is and what he might do as a senator. But the steady stream of bad choices emerging from Platner’s record goes beyond what voters might excuse as normal human fallibility. Though many politicians share a certain egocentric, megalomaniacal quality that leads them to misbehave with no expectation of accountability, it’s not hard to find aspirants to political office who have a better record than Platner on self-control. (See: The vast majority of women lawmakers.) This is a guy who is prone to rash decisionmaking and poor judgment, whose empathy for others, including those closest to him, may have a limit. Though his Nazi tattoo and Reddit posts were from a slightly further-off past, the sexts with up to a dozen women were from the last few years, plenty pertinent to the person he is today. He has actually been consistent on this point: In a 2019 Reddit post, the Journal reported, Platner wrote that he had “a pretty flexible moral compass” when it came to cheating on one’s wife.

Just as a candidate’s past can offer hints on how he’ll serve in office, it is also telling to watch how he reacts to revelations of wrongdoing. Platner has responded by attacking the journalists who reported the facts. It’s a troubling instinct, especially as Trump fuels mistrust of the media and presides over assaults on the First Amendment, when the reporters stayed perfectly within the bounds of responsible journalism.

At an event in April, months before his sexting habit was revealed, Platner assured a worried supporter that any potentially damaging stories had already been “dragged up.” After the Reddit posts and the Nazi tattoo, he said, he had no “big, dark secret” left to conceal. Obviously, that was a lie. For those who hope to see Collins ousted so that Democrats might stage a robust opposition to Trump, that’s the most infuriating part of this latest Platner scandal: There is no reason to believe it’ll be the last.