Why Graham Platner's "Scandals" Actually Helped Him with Voters

By Sandeep Kaushik

I have been increasingly fascinated by Graham Platner, the lefty Dem Senate candidate in Maine, who keeps courting scandals and controversies (he has a Nazi-style tattoo, he’s expressed some socially unacceptable opinions on social media, he was sexting with multiple other women after he got married, some of his former girlfriends say he behaved caddishly).

Yet I think, after his resounding success in the Maine primary on Tuesday, there’s a pretty good chance he wins in November (recent head to head polls show the race tied or Platner slightly ahead). And the interesting thing to me is that if he does I suspect it will be at least as much because of, as in spite of, his “scandals.”

It’s been obvious since Trump won in ‘16 that the old norms that defined appropriate public behavior from candidates and elected officials – norms that were zealously policed by the once powerful gatekeepers of the traditional media and widely accepted by the broader public – have shifted radically (as some conservatives pointed out to me on X, this process really started with Clinton’s public popularity surviving Lewinsky and impeachment).

The old media gatekeepers are still with us, but they are rapidly losing a desperately quixotic battle to preserve their boundary-defining influence. The public may still pay lip service to the old public morality, but it’s increasingly evident that the voters are actually judging candidates according to a new, private morality and alternate code of conduct.

https://www.postalley.org/2026/06/11/why-graham-platners-scandals-actually-helped-him-with-voters/