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I don't know how many red coded men there are in Maine, but I've observed the backlash against #MeToo from those circles morph into support for anyone who gets accused of sexual harassment. Platner might have had a chance with that sort of crowd if he fronts a bit more tough and masculine, which should not have been outside of his wheelhouse. And considering his opposite number Susan Collins is a woman, he might have been able to steal some votes. But now that he's out... eh.
All in all I'd code this as the Democrats in Maine coming out on bottom. Any hardline Platner fan will walk away from this scorned. But considering that Susan Collins is a staunch supporter of Israel, it might not even count as a loss in the eyes of Liberal Zionists on the establishment left.
I think the problem with that is that up until the allegations surfaced, he was throwing those people under a bus.
He had some previous posts on Reddit back in 2013 talking about victims needing to take responsibility for his actions, but when confronted he immediately backed down, said he was "myopic", and said it was never the victim's fault, always the aggressor.
If he had consistently pushed for a perspective of mutual responsibility there might have been some space to rally around "the situation is more nuanced than that, as it often is" and cross the aisle, but his own stated philosophy, applied to him, means that he has no defense. He was the aggressor, so by his own words it is entirely on him.
So lame. That's like the most rookie political mistake in the book.
It would make sense to back these if it was part of his general political plan, but I don't think he was intending to come at the topic from that angle: he genuinely did believe the Democrat party line of "the aggressor is always at fault", or at the very least had cynically decided to take the generic Democrat line.
All he ever was was a "tough guy" wrapped around a generic Democrat party platform, so if he started bucking that trend and going "actually don't believe all women" earlier, it's likely that he would have just lost his voter base, without a corresponding gain elsewhere. The media would have revved up on how he was basically a rapist, women would have been uncertain about him (with later stuff like that Republican ex-girlfriend gossip hitting much harder, even if we imagine a world where the current news stuff didn't happen), and he almost certainly would have just lost the primary.
Well, he could have defected to the Republicans. As mentioned upthread, there’s a large enough contingent of Red Tribers who reflexively doubt any SA allegations, if only because they perceive #MeToo and “Believe All Women” as Blue Tribe cuckery, that he would receive a hero’s welcome.
I addressed that above as well.
Graham Platner was running on essentially a generic Democrat party platform, and that's mostly what people were excited about, taking the same old Democratic talking points but with a "manly man" that could deliver them in a new form that might attract different demographics.
If he defects to the Republicans, he's either going to retain his generic Democrat positions or more likely switch to Republican ones.
If he retains his positions:
If he switches to Republican positions:
There's maybe some middle ground where he tries to only switch on a few limited positions, but that's not going to fly for either party. At least for white men, the Democrats aren't going to allow deviation on core party tenets, and for Republicans an 80% defection where the 20% focuses on gender relations isn't going to draw a lot of people. There may be some "communist incel" demographic that this might work for, but that's not a significant number of votes.
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