A Blood-Red Line in Maine

www.americanthinker.com

The eyes of the nation are on the 2026 U.S. Senate race in Maine, since a peculiar Marxist won the Democrat party nomination this past June.

In an explosive Politico report released Monday, July 6, it was alleged that Democrat nominee Graham Platner sexually assaulted his former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot in 2021.

The nominee categorically denies the charge.

They apparently agree that their relationship was “on again, off again,” having met on Bumble in 2019, which makes it somewhat murky, but of course if she said no at the time, that’s rape. She reports that she ended the relationship permanently after this 2021 incident.

Several prominent Democrats have begun retracting their endorsements of the nominee, apparently in the hope that he will drop out of the race in time to meet Maine’s July 13 deadline for the party to be allowed a two-week window in which to select a replacement.

Incumbent senator Susan Collins (R) has been a resilient political icon in Maine for decades. As a moderate Republican, she has comfortably won, consistently, in a state that Democrats always expect to capture. Would the Democrats have won this time, with Platner? It’s difficult to imagine. But the party continued to at least pay lip service to their confidence in Platner until this latest story broke.

We shouldn’t move on to discuss this issue without addressing the elephant in the room, from the perspective of the criminal justice system: If this happened five years ago, why didn’t the victim come forward before this?

The victim claims that she didn’t come forward about it earlier because she was conflicted; Being a leftist like him, she was hesitant to hurt his campaign. But Platner wasn’t a politician five years ago, when the alleged assault occurred. There was no political reason to protect him at the time.

Society has statutes of limitations for two primary reasons.

First, we want a prosecution to be fair to everyone involved — both suspect and victim — so we want to move on it while the evidence is fresh, witnesses’ memories are at their most reliable, and we have the best odds of getting it right.

The second reason is arguably even more important from a public policy perspective: We want to remove criminals from society as soon as possible, in order to protect potential future victims. The longer a crime goes unreported or unprosecuted, the longer the criminal is out loose in public, able to victimize other innocents.

Statutes of limitations vary, both from state to state and from crime to crime. As it happens, it would still be legal for Ms. Racicot to press charges today, if she wanted, because Maine has no statute of limitations for rape. But as of the reports available at press time, she has not filed charges with the state — only with the press.

One wonders why.

Society is at its best when there are as few crimes as possible. You accomplish that goal by removing guilty criminals from society as soon as their predatory behavior is known. Regardless of statutes of limitations, victims should always file charges right away, not after discussing it friends or therapists for years and years.

It is widely theorized that Democrat machers have been watching this campaign with fear, seeing their hopes of knocking out Susan Collins diminish as embarrassments and allegations about Platner mount.

He has been accused of abuse against women (Ms. Racicot is hardly the first), and of countless misogynist statements online, and of racist views, and of Nazi sympathies, all of which he blames on PTSD and other personal problems, but all of which he naturally wholeheartedly “regrets.”

We’ve had politicians with tattoos before, but Graham Platner is the first U.S. Senate candidate to sport a Nazi concentration camp guard tattoo on his chest. Is saying “I’m sorry” enough?

As his polling suffered from greater public awareness of his flaws, without causing him to drop out, some suspect that it was members of his own party who went looking for more allegations, just so they could force his hand while there might still be time to salvage their chances against Senator Collins.

So when this young lady showed up out of the blue, in recent weeks, choosing at long last to come forward, just under the wire, how did she know whom to call to ensure maximum impact?

Why did she reach out to Politico rather than the local police, as normal assault victims do?

Even if the allegation is 100 percent accurate, this is as clear a political hit as you can get, and it is just as clearly friendly fire.

When Platner is almost inevitably forced out of the race this week, the Democrats will proudly attempt to claim the moral high ground for doing the right thing and replacing their deeply flawed candidate.

But should they be able to get away with that?

The Democrats, after all, nominated this guy in an open primary. Democrat voters selected him over more “normal,” relatively inoffensive mainstream Democrats just three months ago, when virtually all his many shortcomings were already known to their Maine primary voters.

There is no difference on the issues, after all, between Platner and the less obviously reprehensible Democrat candidates he defeated. They all agree on everything from confiscatory taxation to rabid overregulation, from their lockstep disdain for human life to the open borders policies that the intersectionality of Democrats require every modern progressive to champion, no matter how much damage such policies do to their constituents, their country, and their world.

The only difference between them is that Mr. Platner made his offensiveness too visible, through a tattoo, some published posts, and a few cases of past behavior. If it were about issues, the primary voters could have chosen any of the others, but they consciously chose the most blatantly repulsive one of the group.

If he had continued to be just as reprehensible a candidate as the rest of his fellow Democrat candidates, but had the sense to keep it more of a secret, he would enjoy the full support of the Democrat party going into the general election.

Platner had his Nazi tattoo covered up. He had his social media scrubbed. He apologized for past behavior and said he was a new person. Until this latest allegation arrived on the scene, the Democrats hoped that simply repudiating all his past writings, his past actions, and his past tattoos would be sufficient to coast to victory.

But this raises yet another question: What is the election process for, if not to evaluate the full life experiences of the candidates and choose among them?

If, in district after district, state after state, we allow Democrat nominees to evade responsibility for past positions, behaviors, and beliefs, holding Republicans’ feet to the fire for every past indiscretion while forgiving a mountain of Democrat sins, what is the point of holding elections at all?

It’s time the American public stopped letting candidates get away with any of these alleged rebirths. “You got a Nazi tattoo, you shook down a car dealer, you used drugs, you dated a Chinese spy, you forced the closure of a business, you destroyed our health care system? Well, that’s what we’re judging you on, against your opponent’s equally real résumé.”

If you wouldn’t deserve the support of your desired constituents once your real identity got exposed, you shouldn’t have run in the first place.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade compliance trainer, public speaker, and consultant at The Trade Compliance Coach. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his biting political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his collection of essays on public policy in the 2020s, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, and his brand new book about the lives and times of our Founding Fathers, The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.

Image via Needpix.