Here's the piece with all citation links removed:
Platner on the Brink
The insurgent Senate campaign that the progressive left held up as its future is now teetering on the edge of collapse, and the spectacle says everything about a Democratic Party that never knows where its own red lines are until the polls force the issue.
Graham Platner, the Maine oyster farmer and Marine veteran who stormed to the Democratic nomination on a populist, anti-establishment wave, now faces the most serious allegation yet in a campaign that has been drowning in them. Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine resident who dated Platner on and off, told Politico and CNN that he came to her home drunk and uninvited one night in 2021 and forced himself on her. Platner has called the allegation "serious, troubling and false," and his campaign has categorically denied it, saying he is "taking the time to reflect on the best path forward." It should be stressed the claim is unproven and Platner denies it outright.
But here's the part worth dwelling on: this is not the first alarm bell. It's roughly the fifth. Platner's record-setting primary win came despite a barrage of stories about deleted online posts containing inflammatory statements about rural white Americans, Black people and women, and comments dismissive of women's fears about rape. Then came the revelation of a chest tattoo resembling a symbol adopted by the Nazi SS, which Platner claimed not to understand and has since covered up. There were reports he sent sexually explicit text messages to at least half a dozen women while married, and earlier abuse allegations from a former girlfriend. Each time, the progressive establishment shrugged.
And who was leading the shrug? None other than Bernie Sanders. Back in June, as the scandals piled up, Sanders waved them away, telling reporters it was "important for us to focus on the issues facing working families a little bit more than Graham Platner's marriage." Sen. Chris Murphy went further, suggesting Platner had more character than five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins because he "served his country" and "admitted his mistakes." This is the moral clarity the left offers voters: a Nazi-adjacent tattoo and a trail of mistreated women are fine, so long as the candidate hates the right billionaires.
That calculus held right up until it threatened the map. Only after the rape allegation surfaced did Sanders reverse course, saying he had recommended Platner "step aside" in light of "these very serious allegations." Schumer and the Democrats' Senate campaign arm went blunter still, refusing to spend a dime against Collins unless Platner withdraws and is replaced. The conversion was not moral. It was electoral. Maine is the only state won by Kamala Harris that is still held by a Republican senator, and the party was not about to torch its best pickup opportunity for a candidate they'd defended through every prior scandal.
Watch the scramble now unfolding, because it's revealing. Should Platner exit before the July 13 deadline, Democrats have until July 27 to field a replacement, and would-be successors are already circling. Even here, the left is drawing battle lines: Our Revolution, the group Sanders founded, warned the party establishment, "This is not your opening." A candidate accused of rape hasn't even formally quit, and the progressives are already fighting the establishment over who gets the seat next. The wound, apparently, is the opportunity.
The contrast writes itself. Republicans nominated Susan Collins, a five-term senator with a long record Maine voters know well. Democrats, chasing the fever dreams of their online base, hitched their hopes to a first-time candidate whose past unraveled in slow motion, and then defended him at every turn until the arithmetic finally cornered them. The Cook Political Report rates the race "leans Republican." Given what the Democratic Party just put its voters through, it's not hard to see why.
Platner may still be weighing his options. But the larger verdict is already in, and it's not really about one man in Maine. It's about a party that will forgive nearly anything for the sake of ideology, right up until the moment it costs them a seat.
