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Chapter 1: What were the key moments of Graham Platner's victory in the Maine Democratic primary?
After winning Maine's Democratic Senate primary last night, Graham Platner thanked his parents. I want to thank my mom and my dad. Thanked his wife. Amy, Amy, Amy. thanked the people of Maine, and talked maybe a bit more than your typical politician about redemption.
Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It's a journey. I've made mistakes in my life, mistakes that I regret that I live with and that I continue to learn from.
And I'm still far from perfect.
Plattner, who got around 72% of the vote, will run against Republican Susan Collins in November. He has so far weathered an impressively diverse series of scandals, including did he know that was Nazi imagery tattooed on his chest? And why was he sexting women who are not his wife? And was he physically violent with his exes? Main voters decided they can live with all that. Why, though?
That's coming up on Today Explained.
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Alex Seitzwald, deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine. What did Maine voters think about Graham Platner? You live there. You talk to people. What's the read on him?
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Chapter 2: How have Graham Platner's scandals shaped public perception?
And we got those tattoos, and then we all moved on with our lives. And the Reddit controversies...
In other posts from 2013, he minimized challenges faced by service members in reporting sexual assault, writing, quote, You make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose your self-control. So if you don't want to be in a compromising situation, act like an adult for F's sake.
And then again, with this latest round, these later ones definitely hit differently. They didn't roll off his back the way the earlier ones did. There was a lot of concern. There was a lot of disappointment. But ultimately, Maine Democrats have been trying to get rid of Susan Collins and failing for so long. And they have tried running more traditional candidates and lost.
And so I think they are willing to take a chance on him. Yeah. It seems like a very pragmatic calculation that a lot of Maine Democrats are making right now, which is we need to beat Susan Collins. The stakes are too high. Supreme Court, control of the Senate, everything else. And we'll put aside any concerns we have with his personal life if he's our chance, our only chance to beat Collins.
You will know that outside of Maine, there is so much speculation about who Graham Plattner really is. Did he really know that that tattoo on his body was a Nazi tattoo? Did he really mean what he said in those Reddit posts? And this is something that people speculate about wildly. I definitely hear what you're saying. It's like, he's a Democrat. We want Susan Collins out.
Are people in Maine speculating about who Graham Plattner really is?
Yes and no. I mean, I think there's been a major disconnect between what I've seen and heard on the ground. When I drive my daughter to school every day, I pass dozens of platinum yard signs that have been out every day for months. And between what the national narrative is, which is... typically much more negative. This is not good for the Graham Platt campaign.
This is a problem. If I were in a position to move pieces around here when this story first broke, that would have been the moment where you have a call with the governor, you have her step back into the race, and you have this candidate remove himself because...
former political director who quit the campaign in October, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday saying that Plattner should not be a U.S. senator. And she wrote that his flaws as a candidate would be impossible to ignore.
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Chapter 3: What do Maine voters think about Graham Platner's authenticity?
It's New England. It's a blue state. We haven't voted for a Republican president since 1988. So they assume, you know, this is low-hanging fruit. It's really not. Susan Collins is a very effective politician, proven durability. So... I think this race, no matter who the Democrat was, was always going to be a tight within the margin of error race.
That said, Plattner's been able to raise the money. He's been able to hold the coalition together so far. He hasn't had really, despite all these scandals, any defections from elected officials. He's done these enormous number of town halls. This is a small state where retail politics goes a long way in connecting with voters face-to-face. can really make a difference.
And that's not something that Susan Collins does. And in 2020, Democrats ran a Squeaky clean, well-qualified candidate who raised twice as much money as Susan Collins and still lost by nine percentage points. So I think there's a willingness or almost a sense of necessity among some Maine Democrats that we have to try something different.
And, you know, there's a good chance we're going to lose anyway. So let's take a flyer on this guy and maybe he can do it.
Alex Seitzwald of the Midcoast Villager. Coming up, political consultants love authenticity. But do voters, really?
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Chapter 4: How do Platner's personal struggles influence his political narrative?
We need a sunshine law in Washington to open up the deliberations of executive and legislative branches of government to the public so that we can understand when decisions are made about our own lives. what went on behind those locked doors.
Presented himself as, you know, a man of the South, a man who, you know, got his hands dirty on his farm.
Jimmy Carter knows what it's like to work for a living. Until he became governor, he put in 12 hours a day in his shirt sleeves during harvest at his farm. Can you imagine any of the other candidates for president working in the hot August sun?
just a kind of normal person who was, yeah, who was an outsider to DC in this corrupt, broken system. And I think it sort of went from there in terms of, yeah, in terms of the signifiers we were talking about earlier specifically.
Post-Carter, I think you see over decades this kind of same politics of trying to present yourself as this kind of outsider who speaks their mind and is an honest, reliable person who is kind of legibly all-American, even if they were very much insiders. Or in the case of someone like George W. Bush, the scion of a kind of Yankee...
elites and an oil dynasty, they would try and appropriate those codes for themselves, right? Just a regular guy who sort of talks in a normal way and is relatable.
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But I think people got sick of or started to perceive or become more aware of the superficiality and fakeness of that. And I think Trump was kind of both the logical endpoint of that style of politics, but had also kind of smashed it to smithereens, as he has done with so many other things. On the one hand...
you could kind of read him as incredibly authentic, someone who is unconstrained, completely disinhibited, always seemingly speaks his mind, even when it's to his political detriment or the cost of things that people will say about him in polite society, and certainly a complete outsider to normal political structures. At the same time,
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