EAST MILLINOCKET, Maine — Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner said the attacks he’s increasingly faced from Gov. Janet Mills over controversial old social media posts have given him an opportunity to show he’s a changed man.
“If you believe in transformational politics, which I do, you have to be able to believe that people can transform,” Platner, an oyster farmer and military veteran from Sullivan, told more than 100 people packed into the East Millnocket municipal building Wednesday night. “At least I get to model … that you can in fact become a different version of yourself.”
Mills over the last two weeks has used TV ads to lay into Platner over his 2013 Reddit comments on sexual assault that were unearthed in October. The governor says the comments and other controversies, such as a skull-and-bones tattoo that Platner removed, will lead five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins to trounce Platner in the general election.
But Platner has maintained a polling lead over Mills in the race to take on Collins in one of the biggest Senate races in the country this year. He apologized for many of the comments and has run several countering ads of his own. He called his own ads annoying but necessary in case many Mainers are only learning about him now through the airwaves.
But the town hall gave him the chance to tackle the issue facing a crowd of more than 100 Mainers, tying what he characterized as his own personal growth to his call to organize against entrenched politicians and corporate power.
“I don’t want to have nice little conversations and change their minds [in Washington]. This is about building power to retake politics,” he said. “We have an opportunity to show the rest of the country that this kind of politics still wins.”
Mills is trying to revive the fall controversies that rocked Platner’s campaign in November, including old Reddit posts reported by the Bangor Daily News in which he said that women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to,” and “act like an adult for f—ks sake.”
The governor launched her first ad targeting the comments last week and came out with another round this week. Her attack got heavy media coverage but had fairly little money behind it on the air. Platner spent over four times more on ads than Mills’ campaign did last week, and his edge is about three times larger this week, according to AdImpact data.
“Graham Platner: The closer you look, the worse it gets,” the ad closes.
But Platner told his crowd Wednesday that he was “not full of shit” and is a “fairly normal person. He said he found Mills’ ads disappointing, noting the governor went to law school with his father. The attacks come at a time of “intense polarization and toxicity that everybody hates,” he said.
But he said he would not rely on negative ads or personal attacks against Mills, pledging to focus instead on policy differences including taxing the rich and labor issues that have drawn unions onto his side of the primary.
Amanda Fullerton, a 43-year-old in-home health care worker from Lowell, said Platner’s past comments were concerning “as a woman, and as a mother of a daughter.” But she said she understood how people can make comments that may not represent their thinking now.
“I’d hate to be held accountable for things I may have posted online when I was in college,” she said.
