Inside Graham Platner’s Controversial Rise

Graham Platner is sitting down for a bite between campaign events in his dining room overlooking Frenchman Bay, the scenic Down East waterway where he once farmed oysters, and more recently takes reporters on boat rides to talk about his unexpected political ascent. Sun streams into the room, which is decorated with family photos and wooden Easter eggs painted pastel shades. Suddenly Platner’s black Lab, Zevon (named after rock star Warren), lunges at the tinfoil-wrapped breakfast sandwich on the table. Platner sticks his hand into the dog’s mouth to wrestle it away.

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“Hey! That’s not great for you, you f-cking idiot,” Platner says. His hand is bleeding, but he doesn’t stop talking. “Very few people get an opportunity in life to do something really big about things they really, really care about,” he tells me. “And for some weird accident of history, that opportunity arose, and here I am.

Platner’s story feels a lot like a pat movie plot: With Democratic voters yearning for outsiders to shake up the system, along comes a rough-hewn, gravelly voiced Marine Corps veteran from Sullivan, Maine—pop. 1,300—as their new national star. He barnstorms the state with a pugilistic brand of economic populism, building a following so quickly that he forces his central-casting opponent, the two-term Democratic governor, Janet Mills, out of the race before voters can cast a ballot. Even in this antiestablishment, unabashedly ageist political moment, Platner’s rise has been remarkable. Yes, Mills is 78. She’s also a lifelong Mainer who served as a state attorney general and DA, went toe-to-toe with President Donald Trump, and was the handpicked Senate recruit of national Democratic leaders. Platner, 41, is a newcomer carrying enough baggage to sink an oyster boat: a Nazi tattoo, a DUI from a post-military period of heavy drinking, and a trove of Reddit posts that spewed hostility in almost every direction. Working-class candidates are having a moment—but surely, many Democrats lament, the party could have found one who hadn’t, for example, defended peeing on dead Taliban fighters, or joked about the Virgin Mary being a “skank.”

—Photograph by Greta Rybus for TIME

Voters gravitated toward Platner anyway. After decades of nominating buttoned-up technocrats with glittering résumés, many Democrats want candidates with flaws, faded ink, and redemption arcs that resemble their own. Platner’s past, in other words, may actually be his path. “Platner’s rise fits a moment where many Democrats feel the traditional playbook hasn’t worked, either politically or personally,” says admaker Jim Margolis, who advised Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. “Democrats are willing to bet on someone who may have a few warts but feels fresh, unscripted, and tuned in. His ‘difference’ may well be his secret sauce.”

The test will come in November, when Platner squares off against the five-term Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, with control of the Senate on the line and his controversies dominating the airwaves. A victory could change the kinds of candidates Democrats recruit for public office for years to come, especially as millennials with problematic online footprints hit middle age. Platner’s candidacy is forcing the party to come to terms with what it’s willing to risk in exchange for a fighter. “People don’t want cowards who are, like, trying to find this moderate message, to find this mythical center,” Platner says as we ride in his truck to a town hall in Orono. “We are in a form of class war. And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”

On a blue-sky morning in April, Platner arrives at the Ellsworth Public Library, a quaint white-columned colonial 15 minutes from his home. Across Maine, he has been working rooms 10 times this size. But as he greets the group of wrinkled and familiar faces, he is overtaken by emotion. 

“It’s really important to me that I come from this community,” Platner tells them, his voice faltering. The crowd gives him a moment to collect himself before a thick Maine accent breaks the silence: “Get a hankie, Graham!” a woman calls out. 

“F-ck off,” he says tenderly. 

Platner hosts a campaign event at the public library in Ellsworth —Greta Rybus for TIME

Platner was raised and rebuilt his life nearby, taking over a family friend’s small oyster farm in 2019 and later joining the Sullivan planning board and becoming harbormaster of the bay. He lives in a modest two-story house, paid for by a loan from his father, its porch stacked with fishing equipment, just three doors down from his childhood home. “A lot of friends of mine, their dads were fishermen or independent contractors, clam-diggers, people just figuring it out,” Platner tells me. “But they made it work, and they grew up in decent houses. They raised families, and their kids went to college. Today, those kids who are now my age can’t afford a home in this part of the state.”

Platner may project the kind of blue collar voice Democrats have rarely nominated of late. But his opponents have sought to highlight his family’s money to discredit this working-class image. His grandfather was a celebrated architect who designed the original Windows on the World restaurant and iconic modernist furniture. His father was a lawyer, and his mother owns a successful restaurant in town. Platner briefly attended the elite Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. “I absolutely hated it, because I was surrounded by, frankly, rich kids,” Platner says. “It was a world I did not understand.” He transferred to a prep school in Bangor, where he captained the wrestling team and acted in community-theater productions. Republican groups have also noted that Platner lives off his disabled veterans’ assistance checks—he gets free health care and $4,800 per month for injuries connected to his service, including herniated discs and posttraumatic stress disorder—and doesn’t collect a salary as an oyster farmer. 

Platner wanted to join the military from a young age. By 3, he was wearing his great-grandfather’s World War I helmet around the house, his mother recalls. As a teenager, he became a World War II buff and a skeptic of U.S. military adventurism. His superlative in his high school yearbook was “Most Likely to Start a Revolution.” In 2002, two years before he’d enlist to fight in the war in Iraq, he protested President George W. Bush’s plans for it during a visit to the local airport. 

Platner went on to serve three tours there as a Marine infantryman, engaging in close combat in Ramadi and Fallujah. “Infantry units have very different versions of value sets and virtues than the regular world,” Platner says. “Literally, it is our job to kill people.” He enrolled at George Washington University in D.C., but struggled to adjust and decided to re-enlist in the Army. On a fourth tour, this time in Afghanistan with the Army National Guard, he led a rifle squad in the Ghorband District, training Afghan police. “I go back to Afghanistan in 2010 firmly believing that I’m part of, like, a new Army, that we’re gonna do it differently. And we did absolutely f-cking nothing differently,” he says. All military brass wanted to know, he recalls, was: “How many foot patrols? How many enemy killed?” 

In 2007, while on leave, Platner and some fellow Marines were drunk in Split, Croatia, when they decided to get matching tattoos, he says. Platner has said they agreed on a skull and crossbones because they thought the image looked tough. It also bore a close resemblance to the totenkopf, an insignia adopted by the Nazi SS that is still associated with white supremacist and neo-Nazi hate groups. 

When Platner knew this is a matter of dispute. An anonymous acquaintance told Jewish Insider that Platner was aware of the tattoo’s meaning years before it became national news; the source alleged that in a 2012 exchange, Platner referred to it as “my totenkopf.” Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald, told the Bangor Daily News last October that Platner had informed her in August that he had a tattoo that could be problematic. (She resigned before it became public.) McDonald declined to speak to TIME, but has said it was far-fetched for someone well-versed in military history to not know the meaning of the symbol. 

Platner was forced to declare that he was “not a secret Nazi.” He maintains he was unaware of the tattoo’s meaning until October 2025, and promptly had it covered up. “I took my shirt off in front of my Jewish family for 17 years,” Platner says. (His sister-in-law and a stepbrother are Jewish.) “If I thought that I had some obvious symbol associated with Nazism, I would not have done that.” He notes that when he went to work on a security team defending the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he had to go through a full-body screening for gang and hate tattoos—implying that military brass missed the connection too. 

But for those worried about the tattoo, Platner—an outspoken critic of Israel—compounded concerns by amplifying a post by a notorious anti-semite on social media and appearing on a podcast with a different antisemitic conspiracy theorist. “I don’t know that means he’s gonna lose,” says Matt Bennett of Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization that backed Mills. “But I do wish we could be talking about something other than what this guy wrote on Reddit and wrote on his body.”

The town landing in Sullivan where Graham Platner launches to go to his oyster farm —Greta Rybus for TIMEMaterials at the Platner Headquarters in Ellsworth —Greta Rybus for TIME

Leslie Harlow, Platner’s mother, recalls picking her son up from his final deployment and being struck by all the families waiting in a North Carolina parking lot without anyone from the government or the military to greet them. “We have delivered these children to you guys. There were no weapons of mass destruction. You are now sending these people home, and we just have to go to Hooters and get a hamburger?” she says. “I found it really symbolic of how we treat families that have sacrificed their children.”

Platner returned to Maine depressed, drinking too much, and suffering from PTSD. It was during this period that he wrote many of the 1,800 posts he authored on Reddit under the alias “P-Hustle.” Many of them are angry and offensive. In 2013, he argued women shouldn’t get too drunk if they were worried about sexual assault. That same year, Platner—who did a stint as a Capitol Hill bartender—asked why Black people “don’t tip.” He used a homo-phobic slur in 2018, agreed cops were “bastards” in 2020, and described himself as a “communist” in 2021. 

When these comments emerged in mid-October, staff members fled; the campaign appeared on the verge of implosion. Instead, Platner’s fundraising improved, more volunteers signed on, and he kept climbing in polls. When I asked Platner’s mom about that surge, she was unsurprised, noting the disconnect between the national backlash and response from Maine voters. “I’m hopeful that Graham’s honesty and his willingness to be so clear about his own struggles can be better understood by the American people,” Harlow says. “I’m also very headstrong about what people here in Maine want.”

Platner greets voters after his town hall in Augusta —Greta Rybus for TIME

At a town hall on the University of Maine campus, I watched Platner give his stump speech to a packed audience before taking questions. A female veteran and social worker told Platner she was a supporter, but works with sexual assault victims who remain skeptical given his past comments. She asked him how he would convince voters on the fence. Platner called himself a “moron” with “blinders on” who didn’t previously understand the epidemic of sexual assault. “To those who are still worrying, I get it,” he said. He promised to push for better protections against sexual abuse in the military if he’s elected. Then he got to what has become the thesis of his campaign: “If you believe in transformational politics, which I do,” he said, “you have to believe in the ability of people to transform.” The crowd gave him the loudest response of the evening; several dozen stood to applaud.

Platner is sitting on a tree stump in a field adjacent to his house, posing for photos, when a campaign staffer named Ryan Barto notices the pin on his lapel. “What is that?” Barto asks. 

Platner doesn’t respond at first. “It’s an Easter lily,” he explains, a little reluctantly, anticipating what’s coming. “These are all over Boston right now.” 

The flower, often worn during Easter, is a symbol of remembrance for Irish republican combatants who died in the 1916 Easter Rising. In Northern Ireland, it’s a more divisive symbol of support for the provisional IRA, which quickly becomes clear to the staffers furiously googling. Barto suggests Platner lose the pin for the pictures. “Let’s elect you first, then we can work on Irish independence,” he jokes. 

“I’m not taking it off,” Platner replies. “A discussion of whether there should be a free and independent Ireland is absolutely a discussion I’d have.” When he covered up the totenkopf, he chose a Celtic knot.

If you believe in transformational politics, which I do, you have to believe in the ability of people to transform.

—Graham Platner

Platner’s campaign has been, at times, a tussle between the candidate and the tacticians trying to package him. One morning last July, Daniel Moraff, a progressive strategist who recruited the mechanic and U.S. Navy veteran Dan Osborn to run for Senate in Nebraska, drove to Platner’s house unannounced. Moraff had seen video of Platner rallying against a proposed Norwegian salmon farm in Frenchman Bay, arguing that it would devastate the local ecosystem. He wanted to pitch Platner on running for Senate. 

Platner says he was ambivalent at first. He’d been working as an organizer for several years with the grassroots Democratic group Acadia Action, protesting the Trump Administration and helping the homeless. He says he had considered running for state legislature someday. The Senate wasn’t on his radar. But when Moraff came back to him with a fundraising plan and an idea for a first ad, Platner decided to go for it. “Not a lot of U.S. Senate candidates set out to run their campaigns like community organizing projects,” Moraff says. When I joined Platner for three days in April, he was doing three or four events a day, from a crowd of 1,000 to coffee with a Trump supporter—a conversation the campaign would clip into a social media video. Platner says he writes his own speeches, which pinball from the New Deal to Apocalypse Now. In interviews he sounds blunt and unrehearsed. But what stands out to his supporters is a fluency for the anxieties of the moment and his ability to connect with the hurt underneath them. When Platner talks about higher wages and better health care, he frames them as ways to give people more time for family, for community, for the things that make life feel fuller. He talks about isolation and loneliness and how they allow divisions to harden.

Platner meets with a Republican voter at the Dunbar Store —Greta Rybus for TIME

In a middle-school cafetorium in Augusta, I watched Platner move 55-year-old Eric Stevens, a Democrat who works at a car dealership, to tears as he spoke about the need for connection. Alex Poliakoff, an 82-year-old retired Air Force pilot, called him authentic: “He appeals to the Maine population who say, ‘We want to change, and we’ll take a chance.’” In Orono, Jim Pardilla, a dishwasher from Old Town, called Platner “crotchety, old Down East”—and meant it as a compliment. Bobby O’Brien, a 77-year-old event planner in Ellsworth, praised his focus on the next generation: “What chance are they going to have?”

Instead of dwelling on Trump, Platner speaks about the billionaires dominating the political system. He has a relationship with Senator Bernie Sanders and wants to bolster the chamber’s populist bloc. He argues that if Democrats don’t pass policies that improve people’s lives, they could lose working-class voters forever. “My biggest fear is if Democrats ride a wave of anti-Trump sentiment back into power, but do it with people who don’t have an interest in showing up for a fight and making change,” he says. “They may never give us another chance, and the next wave of right-wing fascism could be far worse.” 

Platner supports packing the Supreme Court, scrapping the filibuster, enacting Medicare for All, and banning congressional stock trading. He gets in the weeds on issues he cares about, like commercial fishing regulations. Platner deviates from his party on guns—he owns AR-15s and opposes a federal assault-weapons ban—and has little regard for Democratic leaders. He wants to jettison Chuck Schumer, 75, as the top Senate Democrat and floats four possible replacements: Senators Chris Van Hollen, Mark Kelly, Chris Murphy, or Brian Schatz. He boasts he would bring a savvy the caucus lacks. “I was a bartender on Capitol Hill. I got these people drunk for years. It’s fascinating to realize just how bad at politics people actually are,” he says. “A lesson of this that has been terrifying but also reassuring: We can beat them, and we understand politics better than they do.” 

But there’s a reason Collins, the last Republican Senator from New England, is a five-term incumbent. Democrats have had her on the ropes before: Democrat Sara Gideon was up on Collins in several polls in 2020, only to lose by 9 points. While Platner leads in some early surveys, to close the deal he will need to explain how he’ll fill the shoes of someone who has time and again delivered funds for Maine as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. 

Wary Democrats whisper that Platner’s past could hold more controversies. Adam Lee, a Mills supporter who owns a chain of car dealerships in Maine, says he will vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee reluctantly. “He has electrified people,” Lee admits. But “there are things he said that are really not OK.” 

Platner's dog Gryffin, with Zevon out of frame —Greta Rybus for TIME

Platner is trying to make amends. He has told people across Maine how ashamed he is of past comments. He held a Passover seder with supporters this spring. He also contends there’s hypocrisy embedded in the criticism. “We have a society that very much glorifies military service. But then the moment we have to talk about the realities of it, everybody’s like, ‘That’s offensive,’” he complains. “I mean, I get f-cking asked about the tattoo every single time.”

Amy Gertner, Platner’s wife, was sitting on her small back deck in mid-April, passing out treats to her dogs. A former middle-school art teacher, Gertner was five weeks pregnant. She and her husband have been open about their difficult path to start a family, sharing that they journeyed to Norway because IVF was cheaper there than in the U.S. The couple has done two embryo transfers this year while juggling a Senate campaign, part of which has focused on a promise to improve access to health care and fertility treatments.  

All campaigns are a bundle of unknowns. For Gertner, this one also involves added hormones, medical appointments, and the national spotlight. “I have teenage moments where I kick and scream and yell and I say that this is unfair, and then I get it out of my system,” says Gertner, 40. “We knew that he needed to do this.” 

A few days after we spoke, Gertner miscarried. Platner raced home from a town hall to be with her. They spent a few days binge-watching TV and learning guitar. They also put out a short statement about their loss. “I never planned on talking about any of this,” Gertner tells me in a recent phone call. “But from the time we started sharing, people were telling us that our public story was offering hope. It’s really isolating going through the health care system in general, and then it’s extra isolating going through it as a woman trying to conceive.” The raw vulnerability is a sharp departure from the sanitized way politics has long been practiced.

A lesson of this that has been terrifying but also reassuring: We can beat them, and we understand politics better than they do.

—Graham Platner

Gertner gets frustrated with the portrayals of her husband. “I wouldn’t have married Graham if he hadn’t gone to therapy. I wouldn’t have married him if he didn’t learn from his mistakes,” she says. She describes him as an optimist who sings sea chanteys to the oysters as he’s pulling them up in the nets, and jokes that as the campaign takes time away from work on the water and at the gym, he’s lost the calluses on his hands.

The election this fall may come down to which version of Platner voters think is real: the man with the tattoo and Reddit posts, or the one who channeled his frustrations into a vision for change. At the town hall in Orono last month, a middle-aged man took the mic during the Q&A and confessed to Platner that he was torn. His dilemma wasn’t about Platner’s past comments but his fears for the future. Would Platner become another John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Senator who rode a wave of progressive promises to Washington and then tacked to the center, disappointing the Democrats who sent him there? 

“I want to believe you so hard. But I feel so cynical about politics right now. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this Mr. Smith Goes to Washington thing,” the man said. “Why are you different?”

Platner swept a hand across his auburn beard and launched into his pitch: He doesn’t want to join the Senate to be part of a system. He wants to rip that system apart and build a better one. But that, he acknowledges, requires a leap of faith for voters to believe that he won’t betray their values and has truly transformed. “There’s also an element of this,” Platner admits, “Where I really have to say: ‘Just trust me, bro.’”

Platner arriving at a town hall in Orono —Greta Rybus for TIME

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