The Graham Platner disaster just entered its most entertaining chapter yet.
Maine Democratic Party executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson went on camera Tuesday night to deliver a message that couldn’t have been clearer if she’d handed him a cardboard box and pointed at the door: stop calling us, you have no leverage, and drop out so we can replace you. The party that nominated this man — Nazi tattoo, domestic abuse allegations, sexual assault accusation, and all — has now publicly humiliated him on video and told him his campaign is over.
Platner’s response? He wants to negotiate.
According to people close to his campaign, Platner won’t drop out without a guarantee that his replacement shares his “values and vision.” He wants to put his thumb on the scale of the very process his party just told him he has zero role in. The man is facing a sexual assault allegation from a witness sympathetic to his own politics, has been abandoned by every major Democratic donor and institution in the country, and still thinks he gets to dictate terms.
Murphy-Anderson’s statement didn’t leave any room for interpretation. The Platner campaign has been repeatedly contacting the party trying to influence the replacement process. The party has repeatedly told them to stop. They haven’t stopped. So now it’s on video, for the entire country to see: Graham Platner is being run over by his own party, and he’s lying in the road refusing to move.
Here’s the part that should make every Maine Democrat furious — not at Republicans, but at themselves. This catastrophe was entirely preventable. The Nazi tattoo was public before the primary. The domestic abuse allegations were circulating. The New York Times had a story so damning that Platner’s lawyers spent 24 hours trying to kill it before publication. And Maine Democrats looked at all of it, shrugged, and gave him 150,000 votes anyway because they needed a Senate seat and he was the candidate in front of them.
Now they’re running out of time to fix the mess they created. July 13th is the deadline — five days from now. After that, Platner stays on the ballot regardless of what else surfaces, and Maine Democrats spend November defending a candidate their own party publicly told to get out on video.
GOP Sen. Susan Collins, meanwhile, is polling ahead for the first time and watching the entire spectacle from a comfortable distance. She has spent thirty years surviving everything the left throws at her. The left just threw themselves.
The only remaining question is whether Platner’s wealthy parents — who have reportedly bankrolled his entire political career — are willing to fund a vanity campaign against the explicit wishes of the party whose nomination he holds.
Don’t count it out. The audacity this man has shown at every step of this saga suggests he isn’t done yet.
The saga continues. And it only gets worse for Domestic Terrorist Party.
