Opinion Columnist, reporting from Damariscotta, Maine

From afar, the past week and a half looked so disastrous for Graham Platner, the upstart Maine Senate candidate, that I contemplated canceling plans to see him campaign in person. It would be pointless to make the trip, I thought, if the whole enterprise was on the verge of collapse.

Platner is the oyster farmer and former Marine with a baritone voice and a Bernie Sanders endorsement who this fall came seemingly out of nowhere to capture progressive hearts nationwide. Recently, a barrage of ugly revelations made it look like perhaps all the hope invested in him had been misplaced.

First came the stories about his years of posts on Reddit message boards, which ranged from impolitic — in one, he called himself a communist — to offensive, and which led to the resignation of his political director, Genevieve McDonald. Then it emerged that Platner had a skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi Totenkopf. He said that he and his buddies had chosen the image off a wall while drunk on shore leave in Croatia, which one of them confirmed to The Washington Post. What was harder to explain was why he’d kept it for 18 years, getting it covered up only last week.

Republicans, who’ve had unending scandals about apparent Nazi sympathizers and unrepentant racists in their own ranks, delighted in the opportunity to talk about a Democrat with a Nazi tattoo. And nationally, many progressives were ready to write Platner off. On the left-leaning social media site BlueSky, the debate about Platner now seems mostly about who’s to blame for the whole debacle.

But people in Maine kept telling me that on the ground, the Platner campaign still looked very much alive. Sure, some people had decided he’s unacceptable or unelectable. But many in the grass roots resented what they saw as an attempt by Democratic leadership to take down Platner and thus boost Janet Mills, the state’s 77-year-old governor, who announced her Senate campaign two weeks ago.

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”

These voters understood that Platner had made mistakes, but they saw him as a fighter. “Five years ago, he would have been dead in the water, I think,” said O’Brien, who now works with the labor movement. “But this is such an unprecedented time. I think a lot of people really believe that we need somebody who can effectively fight against fascism.”

Maine is an overwhelmingly white state, but it’s not just white guys who feel this way. “We’re sticking by him,” said Safiya Khalid, a Somali American activist and former member of the Lewiston City Council. The more money national Democrats poured in on Mills’s behalf, she said, the more ardent that support would get: “I think it’s a sort of defiance.”

So I decided to go to Maine to see the Platner campaign for myself. Not long after I landed in Bangor on Monday, news broke that his campaign manager, Kevin Brown, was leaving after only days on the job, ostensibly because he’d learned his wife was pregnant. I worried that the trip had been a mistake.

By the end of the day, I knew it wasn’t. I have no idea whether Platner will win the primary, or if he can beat the incumbent senator, Susan Collins. But he’s nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online. And the crowds he’s bringing out — some of the largest in Maine, I heard repeatedly, since Barack Obama ran for president — are testament to a roiling discontent among Democrats that seems bound, one way or another, to transform the party.

A decade ago, Republican voters, furious with their leaders after back-to-back presidential losses, tossed out all conventional notions of presidential fitness to coalesce behind Donald Trump. Platner is still a contender because a similar alienation is building among Democrats, and party elites seem to have no idea what to do about it.

I met Platner Monday afternoon at a coffee shop in Ellsworth, not far from where he lives. He was wearing a Dropkick Murphys hoodie, a reminder of the antifascist punk scene he grew up in, which still shapes his worldview.

During the 1970s, some punks had deployed Nazi imagery for shock value, but in the 1980s white supremacists started infiltrating the subculture in earnest. The bands Platner loved — Dropkick Murphys, the Dead Kennedys — positioned themselves squarely in opposition to these fascist interlopers. He recalled going to hardcore shows in Bangor in the late 1990s and early 2000s at a time when there were still regular fights between antiracist punks and neo-Nazis. Ever since then, he told me, antifascism has been at the core of his politics.

Many of Platner’s most controversial Reddit posts stem from this antifascist ethos. In 2018, for example, he responded to a poster worried about how a roommate would respond to the purchase of an AR-15. “Tell them that if they expect to fight fascism without a good semiautomatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” he wrote. In another post he wrote, citing the socialist Eugene Debs, “An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”

Platner, now 41, says that he was spouting off on Reddit during a period of intense disillusionment and even nihilism about the direction of America. He had served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then, having trouble adjusting to civilian life, had returned to Afghanistan as a State Department contractor on the security detail of the American ambassador. He’s described watching diplomats swimming in the embassy pool, with neither fresh ideas nor real understanding of the conflict grinding on outside their fortified gates. He lasted six months, and when he came home, he felt hopeless about a political system that, in his view, had sent him and his friends into pointless wars. Isolated and adrift, he expressed his despair online.

“I wanted to move into the woods and just be left alone,” he told me. “But weirdly enough, it was in moving back to my hometown, getting involved in oyster farming, getting involved in my community, that’s where all my hope came back.” For all his criticisms of our amoral, billionaire-dominated system, he said, “Americans are fundamentally good people. People that I disagree with politically are fundamentally good people. They show up for each other. They care about each other.”

Though Platner, who has had a lot of therapy for PTSD, says he’s changed in recent years, his intemperate writings may well prove fatal in a general election. American politics makes room for violent ideations on the right; Republican politicians regularly pose with semiautomatic weapons and promise to use them to safeguard their notion of freedom. There is much less evidence that voters will tolerate such rhetoric from the left. Republicans, who’ve been painting antifascists as a terrorist threat, would surely relish the chance to run against a man who once — jokingly, he says — referred to himself as an “antifa supersoldier.”

But Platner’s antifa-inflected online history cuts against the idea that he would knowingly sport a Nazi tattoo. As Platner tells it, he first learned that his skull and crossbones had Nazi associations this month, when a journalist called his campaign to ask about it. He said he was shocked; as part of security clearances, he’d had his tattoos screened multiple times for associations with gangs or hate groups. Much of his extended family is Jewish, and he said he’s taken off his shirt in front of them without a second thought. He seemed to be struggling to reconcile who he understands himself to be — “someone who holds, I would say, deeply antifascist ideology” — with the media portrayal of a man who would blithely display a fascist symbol.

Yet both Jewish Insider and CNN have cited an anonymous source suggesting that he’s known what the tattoo represents for longer than he now admits. McDonald, his former political director, wrote on Facebook, “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

In person, I found Platner largely convincing, especially since, aside from a 2013 post asking why Black people tip less than whites, his online history doesn’t suggest he had an interest in race science or reactionary politics. But I also have no reason to doubt the Jewish Insider or CNN reporting. Ultimately, the truth may not matter: Simply having to explain a “Nazi tattoo” is a serious problem. Polls taken right as Platner’s interlinked scandals were breaking showed him way ahead of Mills, but an online survey released last weekend had him trailing Mills by five points, getting 36 percent of the vote to her 41.

If Mills, the sitting governor, is leading Platner by only five points after such a calamitous week, it’s a sign that she’s a weak candidate. But if the survey is accurate, it means that Platner has been damaged. With the election almost 7 months away, plenty of people are wondering why Maine Democrats don’t simply find someone else to run.

To attend one of Platner’s campaign events, however, is to see why he’s not easily replaceable.

On Monday evening, Platner held a town hall in a school auditorium in Damariscotta, a town of about 2,300 people in Maine’s Midcoast region. By the time I arrived, the parking lot was full and the street lined with cars. Volunteers were forced to turn people away. Inside, 200 folding chairs were taken, and hundreds of people stood packed together around the auditorium’s back and sides. A bearded duo, one with a guitar and one with a fiddle, played songs including the old union anthem “Which Side Are You On.”

Crowds like this are unusual in Maine, at least for political events. “It just doesn’t happen,” said Karen Heck, the former mayor of Waterville. Platner started late because he’d been addressing 60 or so people who couldn’t get in and decided to wait outside.

When he took the stage Platner spoke, as he often does, about the economic struggles of Mainers and his disappointment with Democratic Party leadership. The party, he said, needs to rediscover its commitment to the “big, courageous, structural change that got us the best wins we’ve ever had, like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid. If we want our party to be that again, we need to take it back. Nobody is coming to save us.”

Platner has been heavily influenced by the work of Jane McAlevey, a labor organizer who wrote extensively about building community power. McAlevey was deeply critical of the professionalization of the left. “Advocacy doesn’t involve ordinary people in any real way; lawyers, pollsters, researchers and communications firms are engaged to wage the battle,” she wrote in her 2016 book “No Shortcuts.” The purpose of organizing, as she saw it, was not to mobilize those who are already activists, but to do the difficult, methodical work of bringing new people in. That’s the project Platner tried to enlist the crowd in.

“I am asking you for your time,” he said. “I am asking you for your labor. I am asking you for your discomfort.” To organize effectively, he added, “you have to have conversations with people you know you disagree with, and you need to remain open and compassionate and empathetic.”

Platner believes that by emphasizing class, it’s possible to transcend the culture wars. But he is not, contrary to the fears of progressives outside Maine, proposing a retreat from social liberalism. “There is a difference between finding common ground and giving ground,” Platner told the crowd. “I firmly believe that a politics that is willing to sell anyone out will eventually sell everyone out.”

Before Platner came on, I’d been talking to Corning Townsend, a retired naval architect there with his wife, Michele. She was a big Platner fan who felt he’d handled the “mudslinging” against him “like a champ.” He was less committal, saying only, “We sure want Collins out of here.” As Platner spoke, he tapped me on the shoulder to say that it reminded him of listening to Obama.

Onstage, Platner is magnetic. Like Obama, he seems to promise a politics that is fundamentally progressive while going beyond debased partisan sniping. He shows his audience the respect of at least seeming to level with them. Perhaps most important, he situates his campaign within the context of America’s great social movements and makes people feel they could be a part of one.

A major difference with Obama, though, is that Platner is visibly angry. Not with his own life, for which he regularly expresses deep gratitude, but with, as he put it, “a system that is built to keep us all divided while the ultrarich and powerful stick their hands in our pockets.” That anger resonates with a base that is both terrified and enraged.

During his Damariscotta town hall, Platner was asked only one question about his Reddit posts. The rest were a grab bag — he was asked about funding for education, about the Democrats he’d work with in Washington, and about a ballot initiative that would end absentee voting in Maine. There was a question from a trans woman worried that it would be unsafe for her to knock doors for him, after which he walked to the edge of the stage to embrace her. But perhaps the most telling question came from a woman worried that, with Trump dismantling American democracy, there wouldn’t be an election in 2026 at all.

“I want to know what we do right now,” she said. “You said organize, fight. How?”

He argued that the slow, patient work of talking to one’s neighbors is the only answer. The starting point for both winning an election and fighting fascism were the same, he said: building networks of people in local communities. It would be arduous, Platner warned, and things might well get worse. “None of us asked for this,” he added, “but here we find ourselves. It is up to us to do the work now.”

The feeling in the room, among people desperate for someone to chart a way out of our current disaster, was electric. Before the audience questions even began, Townsend told me Platner had won his vote. Afterward, several other people who went in undecided said they were leaning his way.

Susan Carr, a writer and editor for a health care company, told me she thinks Mills is great, and she’s proud to have her as governor. But after listening to Platner, she said, “I think it’s time for a new generation of Democratic Party leadership to step up and be out there saying the things that need to be said. And we need to have a little courage as individuals to stand with people who are willing to speak truth to power.” Like others in the audience, she was done taking advice about electability from a party that has so consistently failed to elect people.

“People are mad at the Democrats for rolling over and playing dead for the last nine months,” said Heck, the Waterville mayor. “And Graham tapped into that.”

If national Democrats take nothing else from his campaign, they should understand the depth of Democratic disaffection. Online, there’s a perception that Platner’s fans appreciate him because they think his biography and aesthetic might appeal to Trump voters. I’m sure that’s true for some, but others are flocking to him because he’s one of the few candidates saying what they believe about the scale of America’s crisis.

There’s precedent, of course, for primary voters opting for a seemingly unelectable, scandal-ridden candidate because he gave voice to their fury and their fear. Platner has very little in common with 2015-era Trump, except this: His movement represents a voter insurgency that those atop his party seem unable to address or even fully grasp.

“What is motivating Mainers is people are disgusted with the current state of American politics,” said Platner, “and they want it to be something different.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5791922&forum_id=2],#49389809)