Can Graham Platner survive another controversy? | NPR’s Newsmakers
6/1/202648 min
Anti-establishment candidate Graham Platner seemingly came out of nowhere to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Senate seat in Maine. But his campaign has been dogged by controversies.
There were the old, deleted Reddit posts in which he made racist comments and blamed sexual assault on victims. There was a now-covered tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. And most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women early in his marriage.
Taken together, they raise a big question. Does he have too much baggage to carry on? Or can his anti-establishment political message — that has generated SO much enthusiasm among the democratic base — carry him through?
In this episode of NPR’s Newsmakers, Platner addresses earlier controversies, the failures of his own party and calls Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “insecure.” Platner says he aspires to a version of masculinity different from the one embodied by Hegseth. “This idea that you're supposed to use your strengths to use power over other people or to offend people, be mean to people — that somehow that's manly. That's not masculinity,” he says. “That's the act of a coward.”
Platner sat down with host Leila Fadel before news broke of the explicit sexual messages.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
[gentle music] Hi, it's Leila Fadel here with a special episode, a conversation from our sister show, NPR's Newsmakers, where we interview some of the most influential people of our time. Today, Graham Platner, Democratic Senate candidate from Maine. You can hear more interviews like this one on Newsmakers. Follow or subscribe to the show on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you watch or listen. You can also find it in the NPR app. And now, here's our episode with Graham Platner. [gentle music] The path to turning the Senate blue runs in part through the state of Maine, and that hinges on the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Platner. But Platner's controversial past keeps catching up with him. On May 30th, reports emerged that Platner exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women early in his marriage. His wife, Amy Gertner, defended him in a video posted on X.
Amy Gertner· Soundbite1:01
I think it's shameful behavior to spend time and energy and resources on negative ads and negative stories on Graham when all he's trying to do is im- improve the lives of people who work for a living.
Speaker 01:18
The controversies around Platner don't end there, and they raise a big question: Does he have too much baggage to carry on, or can his anti-establishment political message that has generated so much