Why Wasn't the Tattoo Enough?
Graham Platner's campaign is over — nine months too late
Content warning: sexual violence
Graham Platner’s campaign is over. Nine months after he was revealed to have a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest, the populist oysterman has suspended his bid for Maine’s Senate seat. It was not his Totenkopf that sunk his campaign, but a separate despicable scandal: A former girlfriend claimed that Platner had drunkenly raped her in 2021. These horrific and jarringly well-corroborated allegations, in the wake of another sordid investigation into his mistreatment of women and preceding a subsequent accusation that he had violated another ex-partner via stealthing, generated a backlash that even Platner could not weather.
These accusations are horrific and disqualifying, and the ubiquitous pressure for him to drop out in time for the Democrats to replace him on the ballot was the correct response. Yet this (hopefully) final chapter in Platner’s political career highlights a stunning moral failure for the party and for our society: the fact that he got this far.
We should be clear about what happened with Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, as the crux of the problem has been largely swept under the rug since it came to light in October 2025. Platner has said that he was drunk when he got it and did not know what it was. I can buy that as an initial excuse, though I’m comfortable saying that a candidate having ever etched Nazi iconography into their flesh is disqualifying for public office no matter of their intent. But the thing about tattoos is that they stick around. Every day for 18 years, from his hangover haze the morning after until he caved to public pressure and got it covered up last fall, Graham Platner looked at himself in the mirror and chose to keep the Totenkopf on his chest.
The candidate’s insistence that he did not realize what it was before the scandal broke would be laughable if the subject were not so grave. Platner is a known military history enthusiast with a niche interest in symbols and tattoos. His former campaign manager does not believe him. People who knew Platner in his younger days have contradicted his story of ignorance, and an old friend recalled him referring to his tattoo as “my Totentkopf.” A timestamped message from an ex-girlfriend proves that people close to him were aware of the symbol. Anyone who confidently takes his word on this — especially now — is either lying to you or lying to themselves.
You and I cannot say whether or not the ink reflected the values he felt in his heart, though I’d posit that calling himself a “longtime fan” of antisemitic conspiracy-theorist Nate Cornacchia and having his account retweet notorious white nationalist Stew Peters are sordid hints about that.1 Yet it is a distinction without a difference. The historical term for someone who does not believe in white supremacy yet willfully associates themselves with Nazis, as Platner did for nearly two decades, is “a Nazi.”
Somehow this was not the end. There was a sense that his many controversies paradoxically helped him win the primary by feeding the narrative that the establishment was out to get him. If anything, Platner grew more popular after his Totenkopf was revealed, especially among the Democratic Party leaders against whom he had positioned himself as a foil. Those who embraced him through and after the tattoo came to light only to abandon him now have told us that they believe in a clear moral standard for their candidates, and a Totenkopf is on the acceptable side of it.
I wrote at length a few months ago that Platner’s rise must be contextualized in an established bipartisan tolerance of antisemitism, which desensitized the electorate to such bigotry. As such, I try to have grace for the ordinary people who were inspired by his stated vision of progressive change and did not grasp the significance of his ink. We live in a time when there is widespread disillusionment with the status quo, when the media declines to describe bigotry except in he-said-she-said terms, and when politicians use the word “antisemitism” to mean the belief that Palestinians are people while condoning the actual hatred we Jewish people face. This is not exculpatory for who supported Platner, but it explains why his campaign had thrived despite — perhaps even because of — his scandals.
Yet there are those who knew better. Public figures, elected officials, pundits who do politics for a living. People who certainly knew that Platner was literally chest-deep in Nazism, who doubtlessly understood what that meant, and who chose to endorse him anyway. This group has been virtually unanimous in denouncing him now. Better late than never, and the fact that their deals with the devil proved for naught is satisfying (if insufficient) comeuppance. But why did it take them so long?
Sheldon Whitehouse is one of my senators. He took an early interest in Platner and praised his campaign before the torrent of scandals began. The initial sordid stories did not shake Whitehouse’s faith, as he hosted a March fundraiser for a man who he by then knew had sported an SS emblem on his chest for nearly two decades. Only now has he rescinded his endorsement. As a Jewish constituent, I am left to infer that Whitehouse believes some behavior is disqualifying for the candidates he endorses — and somehow a Totenkopf is not in conflict with that.
Whitehouse’s colleague Elizabeth Warren is one of the most-influential progressives in the country. Her endorsements carry weight. By the time she lent her credibility to Platner’s campaign, she surely knew the story of the tattoo, including the myriad reasons why his claims of ignorance did not hold water. Warren quite reasonably does not want to link her name with his any longer. But why was she proud to do so before?
One of the inflection points in Platner’s campaign was earning the backing of Ruben Gallego. Gallego has gravitas within the party after winning a Senate seat in Arizona while Donald Trump carried the state, and has since positioned himself as a Blue Dog. An endorsement from a high-profile moderate on the other side of the country helped legitimize Platner as more than a loony-left protest candidate. Gallego chose to spend his political capital in such a way mere days after Platner retweeted Peters and his Cornacchia fandom surfaced. Strange that those incidents did not bother him.
Fellow southwestern senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico is also among those fleeing the sinking ship. This week’s allegations crossed a line for him, which is certainly understandable. But I wonder why he previously chose to ignore Platner’s documented belief that survivors of sexual assault should “just take some responsibility for themselves” — one of many jaw-dropping posts he made on his old Reddit profile, which also included an insistence that Black bar patrons do not tip and a whole lot of slurs. Do you think Heinrich had considered what such a comment betrayed about the person who wrote it?
Outside the Senate, Representative Ro Khanna was Platner’s highest-profile cheerleader in the House. To his credit, Khanna was notably quick to disavow his candidate after this week’s allegations. Which makes it all the more conspicuous that he chose not to do so when the first troubling allegations from former partners were reported last month — or in response to any of the myriad revelations about Platner’s past that normal people understand as beyond the pale.
And of course there is his main surrogate, Bernie Sanders, who was so closely tied to Platner’s campaign that he seemed like the oysterman’s unofficial running mate. Sanders was both the first high-profile politician to endorse Platner and notably the last of his big-name supporters to call for him to step aside. In between he was brusquely dismissive of every scandal Platner has faced. Whether Sanders was conned by the candidate’s charisma, too stubborn to admit a mistake, or sucked so deep into a cycle of negative polarization that he could not conceptualize critiques of Platner beyond a reflexive us-against-them philosophy, one of the most-admired politicians in the country has spent almost a year tarnishing his legacy providing now-pointless cover for one of the grossest figures in the party. Sanders is also Jewish and does not need me to explain why a Totenkopf tattoo is so horrifying. Suffice to say that, as with Chuck Schumer making bedfellows with John Hagee (as well as Platner) and Jonathan Greenblatt sucking up to Elon Musk, he and I have a profound disagreement about the merits of forging alliances with such people.
The list of public figures now running from the moral compromise they chose is too long to fully enumerate. I am not aware of a single elected official who has directly acknowledged their mistake, let alone apologized for it.2
It was not a given that these latest allegations would sink Platner. It is naïve to believe otherwise when Donald Trump is the President,3 and the ability to compartmentalize such behavior is sadly not unique to Republicans. Between Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, a credibly accused sex pest has been on or married to the Democratic ticket in almost every presidential election of my lifetime. The party had already glossed over Platner’s denigration of assault survivors and his previously reported mistreatment of women. There were two World Cup matches the day these allegations became public, and I read the Platner news amid a seemingly endless parade of commercials portraying multiple-time offender Jameis Winston as a charming podcast host. Count me among those relieved that this time it mattered.
Was it sincere, long-overdue moral outrage that drove all the politicians I listed to finally abandon Platner, or was it their decreasing confidence that he could beat Susan Collins? Without remotely sympathizing with Platner, you can understand his apparent surprise that this time people give a shit.
Platner’s campaign is finished. So, hopefully, is his political career. Yet the ending is a reminder of all the other abhorrent revelations that every wing of the party — left and center, establishment and outsider — had been content to abide. The lesson of Platner’s candidacy cannot be that sporting a Totenkopf is a sign of other problems to come. It must be that having a Nazi tattoo is itself inexcusable. I will never forget all the leaders who pretended not to know that.
In an unsolicited response to my earlier essay, a campaign staffer denied that Platner had been the one to signal-boost Peters’ tweet. The aide did not clarify why someone who reads a white nationalist’s posts was running Platner’s social media for him, nor whether they were fired for doing so.
The closest I have seen to this came from writer Naomi Klein, who is not a politician, and still elided some of the worst specifics.
Thank you for outlining this so clearly and damningly. The rallying around a nobody, by big time names in the party, was always such a surprise to me. Having to explain to friends and in-laws that having a Nazi tattoo was the disqualifying detail, not anything that came after it (and this was before the SA allegations) made me feel like I was losing it. I hope the party learns something, anything, from this, but I’m not confident.