I Was Sure This Senate Candidate’s Nazi Tattoo Would Sink Him. That It Hasn’t Teaches Us Something New About Democrats. |
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There has never been a moment in the history of the modern Democratic Party when brandishing a Nazi tattoo, even one that has been hastily covered up, wouldn’t immediately torpedo a candidate’s electoral prospects. This is the information that made me conclude that Graham Platner, the oyster farmer turned politician gunning for Maine’s Senate seat, would not succeed in his race after news broke last October that he had a Totenkopf—a skull-and-crossbones symbol closely associated with the SS—emblazoned on his chest. Five months later, I’m still trying to figure out how I was so wrong.
Platner had come out of nowhere. He launched his campaign in the summer of 2025 with a viral ad that jolted life into a beleaguered coalition of exasperated liberals and lapsed progressives. Here was this former Marine with a husky voice and an understated charisma, railing against the oligarchy, the health care cartel, and unchecked military spending, at a moment when the Democratic Party looked especially inert. It also helped that Platner possessed a suite of masculine trappings that, in the rubble of the 2024 election, pundits had determined was sorely lacking in America’s leftward flank. He was stepping up to the plate to run against Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who has long bedeviled Democrats. But despite his overnight stardom, hopes were instantly dashed after the tattoo came to light. Platner pleaded ignorance—claiming that he had gotten inked with insignia while drunk and off duty in Croatia, and didn’t understand the horrific context until much later. Good try, I remember thinking at the time of this excuse. Points for boldness, I guess. I was sure the die had been cast. Platner was cooked. Baggage like this could not be overcome. Voters might look past a tattoo of a naked woman or a Celtic cross. But not a Nazi sign.
Or so I thought. As the controversy circulated through the airwaves and pressure mounted for his dismissal, Platner refused to drop out of the race. This proved to be wise! The months zoomed by, the primary drew nearer, and something genuinely surprising happened: Platner solidified himself as the overwhelming favorite for the nomination. He is leading his opponent, former Maine Gov. Janet Mills, by an average of 25 points in polls conducted in February and March. (More damningly, Mills has failed to crack 40 percent in any of the surveys conducted in 2026.) Simultaneously, Platner has emerged as a routine talking head on the broader liberal podcast circuit. He has yukked it up with the Crooked Media boys on multiple occasions, and enjoyed a hugely publicized moment on Slate’s own Death, Sex & Money, when he offered a particularly cogent defense of letting trans athletes play the sports they want. The Nazi tattoo, almost unbelievably, hasn’t become a besmirching caveat, the sort of albatross that bird-dogs a campaign.
That is a sea change, and it’s something I haven’t totally wrapped my mind around yet. It seems that the progressive intelligentsia has determined that it is willing to swallow Platner’s Totenkopf. Platner’s continued electoral success must be due to some combination of arcane factors—an appetite for a shake-up within the Democratic Party, the understanding that the rules of engagement have changed because of Trump, and the staggering numbers he has consistently posted in objective measurements of appeal. He thrives, Teflon and uncanceled, pretty much everywhere. Well, except for Bluesky. On Bluesky, having had a Nazi tattoo is still something that gets you canceled. Which turned out to be instructive for someone like me trying to sort out how Graham Platner is getting away with it at the ballot box.
If you aren’t familiar, Bluesky is a social media platform that popped up in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. The site aimed to offer a more wholesome alternative to Musk’s vision, which has swiftly rendered the newly christened X into a wasteland of algorithm-juicing spam and proudly asserted white nationalism (no Totenkopf apology required there). Bluesky’s digital terrain is closer in nature to Twitter of the mid-2010s, and naturally, it became a watering hole for liberal opinionists who achieved some amount of clout during Donald Trump’s initial rise to power and have since found themselves alienated by Musk. In practice, the site offers the last bastion of millennial wokeness, with all its corresponding tenets secure. Its social contract is built on uncompromising moral standards, an emphasis on resolute social justice, and, of course, a distaste for those who fail to properly share those values. In other words, Bluesky is a memory of a different time, one when a Nazi tattoo was impossible to resolve with a progressive political project. And so, for months now, Platner has been one of the least popular people on the platform.
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Search Platner’s name on Bluesky and you’ll see what I mean. The truculence goes beyond posters casually accusing Platner of being a neo-Nazi, or a reactionary, or a closet MAGA sympathizer—though there are innumerable examples of those. No, the opposition toward the candidate is viciously intense, shockingly manifold, and wide-ranging to the point of sounding almost existential. One member of the site claimed that they were “not willing” to support the Democrats outright if the party allowed someone like Platner into the fold. Another argued that should Platner win the Senate seat, the federal government ought to march into Maine and occupy the state, “similar to the confederacy states during reconstruction.” Other posters have entertained the idea of composing a “blocklist” for all Platner supporters on Bluesky, while still others have made the case that his electoral viability is a right-wing psyop. It goes on, and on, and on, self-replicating in the infinite scroll. You can call the dissent marginal, yet another stronghold of partisans adrift in the intractable currents of social media, and therefore easily discounted. But political operatives are wary enough about the candidate’s unpopularity on the platform that, last month, when the Working Families Party endorsed him, it boosted the announcement on Facebook, X, and Instagram. Its Bluesky page, meanwhile, was left conspicuously blank.
The divide has not gone unnoticed. In early March, Jon Favreau, the former Barack Obama speechwriter and host of Pod Save America, offered on X: “I can’t remember the last time there was such a giant disconnect over a candidate between online (mostly Bluesky) Dems and Democratic voters.” He embedded a slew of data that, once again, showed Platner holding a sizable lead over Mills. The crux of Favreau’s argument is that the bubble of millennial liberalism—and its guardrails, which previously would have prevented someone like Platner from achieving power—was, to put it succinctly, out of touch. He implored those same liberals to look beyond the Totenkopf and dig deeper into Platner’s stated policy goals, for which he has expressed nothing that could be construed as Nazi ideology. (“If he’s a Nazi, he’s really fucking bad at it,” he wrote.) More to the point, he gestured toward the idea that those upset about Platner were being precious and annoying, the exact qualities responsible for the nerdy stench that had ushered Democrats into the minority.
It was obvious to me that Favreau was essentially talking about wokeness, at least in the way we understood the precepts of the ideology in the Obama mold. The political formation enjoyed a heyday for a number of years before sinking into a glacial decline, its currency dwindling in most places except for Bluesky, where it still thrives. In retrospect, its uncompromising litmus tests and chilly demeanor were real weaknesses, creating a pervading fear that any false step could expel one from good graces, and that a return trip was always, always treacherous. Wokeness remembered all your sins and was keen to remind you of them at every moment. Platner’s tattoo, then, is a particularly charged showdown between vectors of progressivism headed in opposite directions—the old world and the new. And at this precise moment, amid a coalition burned out on self-flagellation and ascetic living, a Totenkopf has been deemed forgivable. The new world is winning out. I mean, just look at the polls.
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It is, admittedly, hard to reconcile the fact that something so unambiguously tasteless has provoked this confrontation. It is completely understandable to raise concerns about a tattoo associated with the Nazi secret police; nobody should be regarded as a pedant for doing so. But I do think this particular controversy has tapped into something deeper, purging a spiritual angst that has long surrounded liberal culture. After Platner’s Totenkopf surfaced, reporters started digging into his social media accounts. They uncovered Reddit posts, some from more than a decade ago, revealing a boorish man trading in proto-manospheric thought. (The candidate wondered aloud why Black people don’t seem to tip much; he also used anti-gay slurs and voiced some retrograde ideas about sexual assault.) It is the playbook we’ve all become familiar with—sizing up the ethical makeup of our fellow man by using the worst thing they’ve ever said as the measuring stick. But I get the sense that we are all tired of living this way. A hunger grows for absolution. We want to trust that people can change. Because who doesn’t want to change?
Like many other Americans, I went to public schools and worked shitty jobs. I spent a year attending community college philosophy classes, and some of the best nights of my life have been spent standing outside a strip-mall GameStop. In those days—closing up pizza restaurants, drinking beers in garages, debating the Iraq War—I came across a lot of guys like Platner. This country is tiled with adrift twentysomething males, beset with incoherent politics, whose opinion about any issue is generated in the 10 seconds after they’ve been asked the question. We’ve shunned those former doofuses and nihilists for so long, even as it becomes clear that the future of the nation hinges on bringing them along. They are not perfect, but you know what? I’ll take as many of them as I can get.
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