The tattoo is the latest skeleton to come tumbling out of his closet since—coincidentally—Mills entered the race. Last week CNN dredged up some old Reddit posts in which Platner described himself as a communist, called cops “bastards,” and insisted that rural white Americans really are as racist and stupid as the president seems to believe. Other posts saw him wondering why blacks tip so little at bars and advising women who worry about rape not to get drunk around strangers.
Platner responded by posting a direct-to-camera video in which he blamed the Reddit posts on PTSD and depression caused by his military service. Democrats who’d spent the last few months fangirling over his populist authenticity (which is less authentic than you might think) watched it and fell more in love than ever.
Then came Tattoo-gate. On Tuesday Platner got ahead of the next oppo dump by admitting he had a skull and crossbones insignia on his chest that bears a distinct resemblance to a Nazi SS death’s head, i.e. Totenkopf. He claimed in an interview that he got the tattoo as a Marine, on a lark when he was drunk, and didn’t know its historical pedigree.
But if so, it seems he discovered it at some point and kept it anyway. An old acquaintance told Jewish Insider that Platner referred to the marking explicitly as a Totenkopf years ago, and his campaign’s former political director claims he told her at some point last month that some of his ink might be “problematic.”
Today Platner posed shirtless for the cameras to prove that he’s (finally!) gotten a new tattoo to cover up the death’s head. “I am not a secret Nazi,” he insists, in what must be the second-most surreal soundbite by a U.S. Senate candidate in modern political history.
Totenkopfs are unusual in Democratic primaries, but leftists getting irrationally excited about charismatic young progressive candidates is not, Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted. The playbook goes like this: “Political outsider or mostly new name mounts statewide campaign with online video that leans heavily on compelling biography or powerful oratory, out-of-state liberal hobbyists quickly fall in love and fork over money, and journalists rush to profile the latest heartthrob before inevitable disappointment when the candidate loses or, well, becomes John Fetterman.”
Stacey Abrams and Beto O’Rourke each ended up rolling in dough, media coverage, and progressive adulation by following that playbook, and each ended up in early retirement. Granted, they ran as leftists in reddish states, whereas Platner is running in a bluish one, but neither Abrams nor O’Rourke was guilty of “problematic” behavior that risked alienating swing voters out of the gate. And neither faced an opponent as formidable as Collins, who’s seeking her sixth term in the Senate.
Platner’s candidacy is an interesting test of how Democrats might or might not be devolving in their statewide candidates’ respect for “norms.” How scummy should left-wing nominees be allowed to be in a party that’s desperate to broaden its appeal to an increasingly scummy America?
Relatability.
Cleverly, Platner is trying to spin his old Reddit posts and Tattoo-gate as political assets.
Democrats are “out of touch,” right? They’re no longer relatable to the average voter, especially the average male. Well, what better way to connect with that constituency than by sh-tposting incessantly and getting trashy nationalist ink?
“How do you expect to win young people?” Platner asked Semafor when pressed on his indiscretions. “How do you expect to win back men when you go back through somebody’s Reddit history and just pull it all out and say: ‘Oh my God, this person has no right to ever be in politics?’ Good luck with that. Good luck winning over those demographics.”
It does seem unfair that we can make a boorish gasbag with questionable tats secretary of defense yet, according to Platner’s critics, we can’t have someone like that in the U.S. Senate. Frankly, it’s too bad that he’s married: If he had some incel cred, he would have perfectly mirrored America’s sizable “awkward young dude radicalized by social alienation” constituency.
Except for the fact that he’s a socialist rather than a fascist, I mean. And the fact that, unlike him, a lot of those young dudes haven’t repented of their illiberalism and might never do so.
Platner’s defense is clever because it capitalizes on Democrats’ anxiety about how “wokeness” has damaged the party in the age of Trump. Progressives would have forgiven him his cultural sins no matter what, as they’re forever desperate to find and promote the next Bernie Sanders, but even normie libs who’d rather nominate Mills have a reason not to pummel him too brutally. The working-class exodus from the party was partly a cultural reaction to left-wing thought-policing; if centrist Dems want to show that they’re, er, defunding those police, accepting Platner’s contrition and letting him slide would be a splashy way of doing it.
Simply put, if you want the biggest possible tent in America 2025, you need to make room for guys with Totenkopf tattoos.
Another factor working in Platner’s favor is the elephant in the room: Many Democrats would feel like chumps for disqualifying a candidate for impropriety while the sleaziest president in U.S. history goes about torching every ethical norm in government. This lousy country elected a coup-plotting convicted criminal last fall; its people plainly don’t care anymore about rectitude in public officials. At a certain point, in a dystopia like ours, insisting on pretending that there are still standards in politics begins to look less like virtue and more like denial.
That logic probably helps explain why Jay Jones, the Democrats’ repulsive candidate for attorney general in Virginia, wasn’t driven from the race after his old texts wishing death on a Republican colleague and his children emerged. Jones isn’t fit for office—yet everyone understands, and even takes for granted, that Trump’s supporters would have no qualms backing a member of the GOP who’d been caught speaking that way about Democrats. The president himself talks openly about “hating” the other party and treating them as “enemies,” even in remarks to the military. Platner’s nastiness barely rises to the level of a Republican group chat.
If anything, his Nazi tattoo qualifies him to lead one of Trump’s agencies.
Americans can and should hold their own side to a higher standard than that of the other’s worst actors, but there are a lot of things Americans “should” do in politics that they no longer do. Imagine, then, being a progressive who’s exasperated with your party’s leadership and infuriated by Trump steamrolling the constitutional checks on his power, suddenly stumbling upon exciting new guy Graham Platner—and being told by party elders that some old Reddit posts he’s since renounced make him unviable. You’d lose your mind.
This is populism in microcosm. Once the public decides that “authenticity” is more important than propriety, any impropriety that might be justified as a form of authenticity becomes defensible and non-disqualifying. Platner got a Totenkopf because, you see, he’s just an earnest young bro who makes mistakes like anyone else; Trump is fleecing the U.S. Treasury because he’s sincerely mad about the 2020 election-rigging conspiracy that exists in his, and millions of Republicans’, muddled heads.
If we can tolerate President Trump, how can we not tolerate Sen. Platner?
Electability.
The political dilemma here for Democrats is that they’ve been maneuvered, mostly unwillingly, into being the party that cares (or pretends to care) about norms.
That’s why, I assume, the bottom has fallen out in Jay Jones’ polling in bluish Virginia since the news about his texts broke. It’s not that Democratic voters are inherently better people than Republicans, although that’s an easy bar to clear anymore. It’s probably a function of the Democratic “brand” nowadays attracting a certain type of voter who cares about civic norms. When it turns out that the Democratic nominee in a particular race is himself more of a menace to those norms than his Republican opponent, those voters head for the hills.
If I’m right about that then Graham Platner has some rough sledding ahead against Susan Collins, certainly more so than Janet Mills would have.
And that’s another thing that makes his candidacy interesting. To some extent, it’s a referendum on how much Democrats care about electability in 2025.
They’ve cared about it a hell of a lot more in recent years than Republicans have. Bernie Sanders was far more charismatic than his chief opponents in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, but he lost both races because the base prefers neoliberal dinosaurs who won’t scare swing voters the way a socialist dinosaur would. Meanwhile, at the state level, the GOP continues to nominate insurgent firebrands like Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano while Democrats counter with professional pols like Ruben Gallego and Josh Shapiro. The safe bet usually works out for Team Blue.
The more desperate they get to stop Trump, the more they should care about electability. The odds that they’ll retake either chamber of Congress next fall are getting longer in the House as redistricting proceeds, and the odds are already dauntingly long in the Senate. Collins’ seat is the easiest pick-up opportunity Democrats will have; logically, they should prefer a candidate like Mills whom the state’s voters already know and trust to a wild card like Platner.
But maybe that era of prioritizing electability is over.
As America comes apart at the seams and the left radicalizes in response, sticking with boring electable choices rather than potentially game-changing loose cannons will require real discipline. Political data analyst Lakshya Jain sees an ominous parallel in Platner’s ascension, in fact: Democratic voters appear to be following the same arc that the Tea Party right did circa 2010, turning bitterly against their own leadership and the wider political establishment following a demoralizing presidential defeat. That arc led to Republicans losing numerous winnable Senate races by insisting on nominating kooky unelectable populist “outsiders,” Jain noted—and now here liberals are, getting excited about Graham “Totenkopf” Platner.
You can imagine how progressives might reply to that: The “loose cannon” strategy has worked out pretty well for the GOP since 2015. Donald Trump and his party are on the verge of converting America into an autocracy, are they not? Passionate right-wing kookery has succeeded like gangbusters. Perhaps left-wing kookery is the antidote.
But here’s where Jain’s parallel breaks down: Democrats don’t have the same margin for error that Republicans did in 2010. The House GOP was on its way that year to the sort of wave election that no longer seems possible in a polarized, ruthlessly gerrymandered America. Republicans could leave seats on the table in the upper chamber knowing that they were on a glide path to flipping the lower one and paralyzing Barack Obama’s political program. Liberals won’t have that reassurance next year.
And the stakes are higher now, needless to say. Blowing the Senate in 2010 meant that Obama would have a Democratic Senate to approve his nominees for the rest of his first term. Blowing the Senate in 2026 means that Donald Trump gets to continue consolidating autocratic power unchecked and installing postliberal henchmen on the federal bench with the approval of John Thune’s quisling Republican conference.
Democrats need to behave as though next year is the last chance they’ll have to break the GOP’s stranglehold on government because, in an increasingly scummy America, it might be.
Ultimately, then, the argument for nominating Platner will take two somewhat contradictory forms. One is that focusing on electability has led the party and the country to the brink of extinction; Democrats need to stop obsessing about it and try something radically different. Platner, a candidate of the leftist id, is different. Youth, passion, and bold progressive colors, not pale neoliberal pastels, are what the moment calls for.
The other argument will be that Platner is the most electable candidate in the race, Mills’ statewide successes notwithstanding. Zohran Mamdani’s looming victory in New York City’s mayoral race over establishmentarian Andrew Cuomo will strengthen that case a little (although Maine isn’t Manhattan, needless to say), but inevitably the more common comparison—rather awkwardly—will be to John Fetterman. Fetterman was the progressive choice in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Senate primary and therefore was supposed to be a riskier nominee than his more centrist opponent, Conor Lamb. He smoked Lamb anyway and then won the general election, shining proof that a Platner-esque populist mix of progressive economic policy and conservative cultural “vibes” is the secret recipe for success.
Three years later, Fetterman is the sort of “progressive” who avidly supports Israel, applauds Trump’s trade war, and has begun egging on the Senate GOP to nuke the filibuster in order to reopen the government. Platner is the new Fetterman will be an … uncomfortable argument for leftists backing the oysterman from Maine.
But they’ll have no choice except to make it. Electability will be more important for Democratic candidates, and for the country, next year than at any previous point in American history, especially in races for an institution like the Senate that holds a veto over Trump’s future nominees. Unless a credible case can be made that a guy with a Nazi tattoo is the more electable choice in Maine, it would be a dereliction of civic and patriotic duty to nominate Platner over Mills.
And if that case can be made, let’s have it. We’ve done worse than him in choosing our public officials, and will yet do even worse in the future.
