Maine Democrats Must Replace Graham Platner Now |
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Maine Democrats Must Replace Graham Platner Now
The Senate seat can be saved, but the window to act is going to close in days, not weeks.
It’s time for Graham Platner to bow out.
When the first credible reports surfaced that Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, may have sexually assaulted women, my first instinct was one I am not proud of. I did not want to believe it.
The stakes are incredibly high this year, and that Senate seat is one of the best chances Democrats have to stop the current march toward authoritarianism. Poll after poll has shown Platner running neck and neck with or ahead of Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent, in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate. The math of saving the country runs straight through Maine. So when the allegations came, the temptation was to look away, to question the timing, to wait and hope. I have heard others across the progressive ecosystem report the same reflex—people who believe survivors in the abstract and very much want to keep believing in their candidate.
That reflex deserves to be named honestly, and then it must be set aside. Because if we are willing to look away from credible allegations of sexual violence whenever the political stakes are high enough, then we are not, in fact, the movement we claim to be.
This week has seen a new, credible, and well-corroborated account of the candidate’s committing sexual assault. Jenny Racicot described to Politico how, in 2021, an intoxicated Platner entered her home uninvited and “forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop.”
Racicot’s account was gathered and substantiated by Cheyenne Hunt, the attorney and advocate who helped lead the reckoning that followed the Eric Swalwell revelations and who now runs Reckoning Action, an organization built precisely to support survivors and to verify claims like these. In preparing the story, Politico “reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.”
Platner, for his part, has denies the allegations and says they are “false.”
We can hold two........