Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner said a string of controversies have only “strengthened” his campaign.
Platner’s comments to NBC News come on the heels of the resignations of his national finance director Ronald Holmes III and his campaign manager and longtime friend Kevin Brown last week. Holmes said he resigned Friday because he feels his “professional standards” are “no longer fully aligned with those” of Platner’s campaign. Brown resigned days into his role after learning he has a baby on the way.
“It is amusing for me to watch the campaign described in the media as collapsing or falling apart — when internally, we frankly have not felt this strong since the beginning,” Platner told NBC News. “It hasn’t sunk my campaign. In fact it seems, in many ways, it’s strengthened us.”
The insurgent Democrat’s bid to take on Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in 2026 has been beset with controversy over the past three weeks.
Last month, a video of Platner surfaced showing him with a tattoo depicting a skull superimposed over crossbones, similar to the Totenkopf symbol adopted by the Nazi SS during World War II.
Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer from Sullivan, denies knowing that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol. He has said he got the tattoo in 2007 while deployed abroad with the U.S. Marines. While on leave, Platner and other Marines went to Croatia, where they got “very inebriated” and decided to get tattoos. He said that they all picked “terrifying” designs off the wall.
Platner has further denied allegations from Genevieve McDonald, a former state representative who resigned as his campaign’s political director, that he knew the tattoo was problematic weeks ago. He told The Associated Press that he has covered the tattoo.
Before that, his campaign was contending with the fallout from numerous deleted Reddit posts in which Platner asked why Black people “don’t tip” and suggesting that women concerned about rape not drink around certain people, among others.
Then, on Oct. 22, Platner confirmed to The Advocate that he was the author of a number of Reddit posts featuring homophobic slurs, anti-LGBTQ+ jokes and sexually explicit stories denigrating gay men.
He called the posts “indefensible,” according to The Advocate.
During his NBC News interview, Platner has not shied away from taking accountability for his past.
“I want to talk about my evolution as a human being,” Plater told NBC News. “A lot of Americans also want to have hope that you can change and that you can evolve, and that we can have a society that gives grace and forgiveness to people. Because if we can’t, if we think that people are just ossified into who they are right now, and can never be something different, then what’s the point?”
But in a bid to tamp down on the harmful revelations, Platner’s campaign has begun circulating non-disclosure agreements to staffers and hired the firm Spruce Street Consulting, which Politico reports has connections to Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
Non-disclosure agreements, common in the corporate world, are becoming a fixture as well in politics, according to a 2021 article published in New York University’s Journal of Legislation and Public Policy. That article noted that non-disclosure agreements have been used in presidential campaigns and heavily during President Donald Trump’s first term in office in a bid to stem the flow of information to the press.
Platner, who has support from unions and an endorsement from independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, made waves in August when he announced that he would challenge Collins in the 2026 November election. Sanders has told reporters in Washington that he is still supporting Platner.
Even before these recent revelations, he already faced an uphill battle against Collins, who plans to run for a historic sixth term next year. She has handily beaten back challengers, including in 2020 when she defied polls and expectations to eke out a fifth term in the Senate. Despite that, Collins, once ranked the country’s most bipartisan senator, has seen her popularity slump since Trump’s first term in the White House.
The oysterman also has to contend with a primary fight against Gov. Janet Mills, who launched her campaign earlier this month with the support of national Democrats, and former End Citizens United Vice President Jordan Wood, who has called on Platner to drop out of the race.
Nonetheless, Platner — for now — maintains a wide lead in the polls among likely Democratic voters. In a recent University of New Hampshire, he had the support of 58% of likely primary voters, compared with just 24% for Mills.
