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Maine Senate Candidate Graham Platner Outed as an Actual Rapist.
Platner officially denies the allegations, but you can tell from his statement that deep down he knows it's true. He can't admit to it because he would go to actual jail, but everyone knows his campaign is over.
The haters said he would crash and burn, and they were correct. Honestly great call by the haters.
The Maine Democratic Party has one week until the ballot deadline to pick a candidate while stepping on as few toes as possible. Let the games begin.
Just because Ms. Racicot said that Platner had non-consensual sex with him doesn’t mean that he did, of course. Right now, it’s a “he said—she said” situation, and there’s no way a prosecutor could charge Platner with no more evidence than her testimony, [1] but since there is a leftist “believe all women” streak in the Democratic party, since she has made the claim, Platner’s career is ruined. If he were a Republican, there’s a good chance he would still be standing (Kavanaugh, Trump, etc.) since conservatives are more inclined to believe in due process and presumption of innocence w.r.t. rape accusations.
About that “believe all women” streak, it’s an open question what percent of rape accusations are false rape accusations. I will list two sources with different conclusions:
Both sources show their homework, so people can look at them and see which source is more reasonable in its methodology.
[1] If she made a complaint right away after the 2021 alleged rape, they could had used a rape kit to prove beyond a reasonable doubt they had sex. It would then be a discussion about whether the sex was consensual, but police could had looked for signs of force being applied in the crime scene when it was still fresh. Five years after the fact, proving it happened is nay to impossible.
I wonder if this will prompt Platner to jump ship.
He wouldn’t be a Republican. His whole schtick is being very progressive.
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It's hard to imagine that working: Platner's "hype" is mostly around him being willing to speak up on a bunch of issues the extremely-online crowd cares about and be blunt and "manly" about it. "This is what a male feminist looks like, willing to beat up the fascists and protect trans rights".
But the Democrats aren't going to stomach an abrupt about-face in terms of values, even if Platner was mercenary enough to do it, and I think he's a true believer given the post history that's been dug up. They're supporting him despite his aesthetic because he's saying the right things, they're not going to stick around if he switches to the wrong things. Fetterman pulled it off because he's able to stick to his working-class focus and just making the case that the Republicans aren't that bad for that, and the working class to some extent buys it (remember when some major union was voting to endorse Trump?). Platner would have to drop a lot of the culture war stuff that made him popular in the first place.
And the Republicans have no reason to accept him: they already have a fairly unobjectionable centrist candidate, there's no point in risking splitting the vote, especially now when the Democrats are going to drop in whoever the committee approves without a lot of time to get the base excited, and it's just going to be "vote blue no matter who" really pushing for the new person, with potentially people who got excited about Platner staying home when he's sidelined and talking theories about how this was trumped up to cut him out. Republicans wouldn't want Platner even before the allegations: if they wanted to run a blunt ex-military guy with dubious tattoos and ideas about consent, there are probably a few of them available to the Republican party already.
Why not? They stomached Platner before now. He has a Nazi tattoo, he has already been accused of sexual impropriety towards women. The difference is that before the Democratic tastemakers decided Platner was in, now they've decided he's out.
Platner going over to the Republicans means that he's going to have to change position on culture war issues: he'd probably have to be positive towards Trump, be negative on immigration, maybe talk about LGBT stuff going too far. If he's not doing that, just changing the D next to his name to an R and changing nothing else, he has all the same problems with the added bonus of losing anyone who's voting blue no matter who. He'd need to actually adjust his platform to appeal to Republicans.
With Fetterman that kind of works: his thing has always been working class economy stuff, and that doesn't really force him to take a position on most of these things. The working class has at least some level of support for Trump, so he can just kind of sit on that, take centrist positions, not talk too much about the culture war stuff. I'm sure there are people in PA that voted in Fetterman as a Democrat and still support him now even when he's often taking Republican positions.
There are other politicians that have a following of their particular brand of politics that might be able to hold constituents crossing the aisle. Bernie could conceivably be very concerned about immigration (there's a quote from him about immigration oppressing the working class or something, from before 2016) and end up as a R: he'd lose a lot of voters but I bet he'd hold some number. Thomas Massie might make it as a D, certainly the Israel focus would go over well. As long as there's something that's orthogonal to the red/blue divide you might be able to be on either side of it.
I don't know what that orthogonal thing would be for Platner. My impression of him is that his unique edge is that he's a "military tough guy" that we'd expect to be a generic Republican, but instead holds generic Democrat positions: he's an unusual delivery vehicle for those positions that might attract voters that wouldn't normally be amenable to them. If he switched sides, that edge is gone: a military tough guy who holds Republican positions is not hard to find in the slightest.
I can't imagine who would be voting for a Republican Platner, over Collins or whatever generic candidate the Democrats end up putting up.
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Fetterman also wasn't running for Senate as a political newcomer. He was more prominent as the mayor of Braddock than he had any right to be, and the biggest skeleton in his closet, the incident where he chased a guy with a shotgun, happened after he was already in the public eye. It was on the news at the time, but didn't affect any of his subsequent runs for mayor, or his failed 2016 Senate campaign, or his 2018 election for Lieutenant Governor. Platner's entire life prior to 2025 was a mystery as far as the public was concerned, and there were red flags from the very beginning that he might have a checkered past.
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