The Daily - The Implosion of Graham Platner

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

The campaign for Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Maine, imploded this week after he was accused of rape. Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher, national political correspondents for The New York Times, discuss the battle over who should replace him on the ballot and the identity crisis inside the Democratic Party. Guest: Lisa Lerer, a national political correspondent for The New York Times. Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times. Background reading:  Mr. Platner’s Democratic support evaporated after the sexual assault allegation. Progressives and moderates are gearing up for a fight over an as-yet-undecided process in Maine to name a replacement for Mr. Platner. Photo: Sophie Park for The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow. This is the Daily. Today, the implosion of Graham Plattenor's campaign for U.S. Senate, the battle over who should replace him on the ballot, and the identity crisis it has laid bare inside the Democratic Party. I spoke with two of my colleagues, national political correspondence, Lisa Lair, and Shane Goldmacher. It's Wednesday, July 8th. Lisa and Shane, thank you for making time in the middle of a very big, very live story. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. We are talking to you around 4.30 p.m. on Tuesday, and I want to let listeners know exactly when we're talking because this is a story that's changing a lot, hour by hour.

But at this very moment, it pretty much appears that it's a question of when rather than if Grand Platt. ends his Democratic campaign for U.S. Senate in Maine, which is a race and a seat that could determine the overall control of the entire Senate this fall, which obviously has all kinds of implications, including the fate of President Trump's agenda for the rest of his second term. Do I have that, when not if, calculation correct? That seems exactly right at this point. There are basically no major Democratic individuals or groups that are still actively supporting Grand Platner. There's been nobody who has spoken up for him since this allegation and in fact the people most supportive of him, probably most notably, including Bernie Sanders, today came out and said, it's time for him

to step aside. Just catalog for me, Lisa, some of the people who have in the past day or so told Grand Platner, it's over. We're talking about everybody from the Maine Democratic Party to the head of the state Senate in Maine, to their gubernatorial nominee, to Senator Chuck Schumer, who's head of Democrats in the Senate to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who controls the Senate campaign committee, to Zoran Mundani, to Elizabeth Warren. So this was a sentiment that really went across a party that really doesn't agree on all that much when it comes to strategy or policy. But on this one issue, that Graham Platner has to go, everyone seemed to agree.

And it wasn't just all the people. It was the money. The groups that control, the money that has been reserved and ads in this race said, no more money for Graham Platner, if he is still the nominee. And if there's no money, there's no competing against Susan Collins, who has tens of millions of dollars reserved already. Okay, Lisa, let's talk about how the Platiner campaign reached this crisis point. And you know this story almost rather than anyone,

because a few weeks back, you and Katie Glick came on the show to talk about the reporting you both did that in many ways started this all. you were looking into allegations about Platner's treatment of women. You had spoken with several of his former girlfriends. That story has since evolved and gotten us, I think, to this moment. Right. So we had spoken to six women who had previously been in relationships with the Grand Platner. Three of them described unsettling incidents that at times felt physically violent or menacing

towards them. One of those women who we had spoken to, a woman named Jenny Rassico, who is a Democrat who lives in Maine. After we spoke to her, she came forward with much more explosive allegations. Which were what? Basically, in interviews both with Politico and then CNN, she said that Graham Platner sexually assaulted her. It was at the end of 2021. She says that they were in a relationship for two years or so on and off. It was a night where him and I were texting back and forth, and he had taken something that I said as an imitation. And I said, no, don't come over. Like half an hour later, I heard a noise outside my door. And then he came in. He came over, uninvited, let himself

into her house. And I was lying on the couch. It was probably pretty late at night. And I was getting, I was already ready for bed. I just wasn't in bed. And I looked at him. And I remember this very specific look in his eyes. And I could smell alcohol and I was like, this is different. He is heavily intoxicated. And she said he started climbing on top of her and trying to be intimate with her.

And I remember just at first being like, hey, I'm not into this. Like, don't. I'm not in the mood. Like, don't. She says that she told him to stop and said, no, no. But he kept going.

Is there any way that he thought this was consensual or no, just because... I don't believe that you can think that that scenario was consensual. I mean, when somebody in the middle of it says, don't touch me. Like, that's obviously not consensual. She claims he raped her. She claims he raped her. And, you know, when she spoke to us earlier, she had described on the record what she called reckless and unsettling behavior by Graham Platner,

But she also spoke to us off the record, and we honored that agreement. She has since told Politico and later CNN that she didn't go public with the specific assault at the time because she didn't want to be known as a rape victim. But as she watched him continue to be in the race and she watched the reaction to our story, and she also connected with a woman who was involved with helping survivors of sexual assault tell their story, she decided she wanted to come forward. and give this more detailed account. Lisa, what has Grand Planner said about this specific allegation? Well, he released a video. I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. And he denied that this sexual encounter was non-consensual.

Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false. He didn't deny the counter itself, just that it, basically that it was an assault. But he did also acknowledge the potential political implications of this. Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality, it will inflict. We are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins. And he said that he was taking a step back from his campaign to reflect, which then, of course, prompted the deluge of calls. Right. But Shane, it did not prompt, at least at this hour, him to leave the race. So as the entire party abandoned him and said your campaign is over, what have the conversations been like inside the Platner campaign? I think you have to put in context all the other things that Graham Platner has survived so far, which is the accusation that he knowingly had a Nazi tattoo, a tattoo he has since had covered up all of the other things.

all of the Reddit post that came out that would, in normal circumstances, potentially sink a candidate and even the previous questions about his relationships with women. And yet, he won the Democratic primary. So, yes, he said he was going to take time to reflect, and both Lisa and I have done reporting

that shows that he seems to be aware of the political reality around him, but the campaign's discussions are about shaping the field after his exit, making sure that... Meaning what? Making sure that somebody who is aligned with his ideological movement becomes the nominee, that the Democratic Party doesn't pick an insider who is opposed to his view that was aligned with Bernie Sanders

and the sort of left-wing ideology that he was pushing to have an expansive view of government to help the working class. So despite being engulfed in this scandal, he wants to play a big role in picking his replacement. Is that right? And is that a reasonable request? Well, he and his team believe they have leverage in this race. Their argument is that they were turning out thousands of Maine voters to these town hall meetings that it was happening all over the state, that they really energized the base of the Democratic Party behind their bid, and that to win a general election, no matter who the Democratic nominee is,

Democrats in Maine will need those people. But, you know, it's an open question over how much leverage he really has. Like, do Maine Democrats want to be taking advice from someone who left them in this position? Shane, how exactly is this going to work? Assuming that Graham Plattener does, in fact, leave the race, how is his replacement chosen? And what role would he play on that exactly? I mean, yeah, I don't think you can talk about this without describing the timing, which is the Democratic Party and Graham Platner have one week to get him off the ballot

because there's this hard deadline of July 13th for him to withdraw and be replaced on the ballot by a different Democrat. And it is a pretty audacious thing to say, I'm being accused of rape and I'm going to try to shape my successor in this race. But to the extent that he does have leverage, it's because of this deadline. Because until then, he's the nominee. And if he doesn't get out, he will remain the nominee. Because he could, in theory, just sit there, not drop out.

and make life very, very miserable for the Democratic Party. But let's just play with the idea that the party is going to maybe be in conversation with him and find some mutually agreeable way of picking his successor. What might that look like? Look, one of his concerns that I think is shared more broadly across the Democratic Party is the specter of the Biden-Harris replacement. That is major scar tissue in the Democratic psyche, among consultants, among elected officials, among voters,

how that process played out has left a lingering sense of distrust in the party that's, you know, really pervaded into the race we're in now. And so I think there is a real awareness of wanting to have main voters and really Democratic voters across the country feel that his successor was chosen by some form of democratic process. Because when Biden yielded to Harris, there was no role for Democrats. Democratic voters, it was kind of a smoky back room situation. It was kind of a smoky back room situation.

You know, people came out and they endorsed Harris very, very quickly, and she just sort of became the new nominee. And I think that just left a lot of concern and a lot of mistrust in the party. And it's part of the reason the party has struggled still to this day with, you know, negative views of their brand, which, you know, as our poll showed last month, could potentially hurt them in these maternal. Arguably, it's one of the reasons why someone like Graham Platner did so well in this race to begin with. There's so much residual distrust of the Democratic establishment.

Yeah. Let's walk out in Maine, like one minute, which is there were two races that National Democrats tried to intervene in in Maine this year. One was Graham Platner's race where the party apparatus backed the two-term governor Janet Mills, whose campaign got so little traction she dropped out a month before the prime. There was a second race also, which is the key house seat in Maine, where again, national Democrats picked a favored candidate. They intervened, tried to support this person. And that candidate also lost an important Democratic primary.

So the voters of Maine have shown they are unhappy with getting kinds of directions for national Democratic leaders. And Platner and people around Platner see him as a part of that movement, even if he is gone. they want that somehow to live on. The challenge is, given who he is at this moment, right, is his presence in negotiating that helpful to finding another person? That's not at all clear.

And there's another challenge, too, that Graham Platner, as we said, has to be out of the race by July 13th. Someone else needs to be the nominee by July 27th. There's not a lot of time, and it's totally unclear how you get from where we are now to where the party needs to end up at by the last. the 27th of July. That's not a lot of time. Right. And let's keep in mind, we are less than four months away from Election Day. So this is a moment in any midterm race where literally every single day matters. So they're also sort of costing themselves political momentum, political opportunity

in a way for every single day, the party does not have a firm nominee in this crucial, crucial Senate race. What are some of the ideas being kicked around for a process of picking Platonor's successor that would avoid a Biden-Harris kind of scenario so far? Yeah, there are a bunch of things. Two that I've heard the most about. One is coming up with some kind of convention where you would select delegates and those delegates would then pick the nominee.

Another is having a statewide caucus where everybody, actual people can go vote. Like another primary. Like basically another primary, but hosted by the nominee. the state party in the middle of the summer. As those discussions are happening, what we're seeing is the fissures inside the Democratic coalition ideologically just explode right now. The left is saying we have to have somebody like one of us, like Plattner, given their successes in these primaries. And the party establishment, the old guard is looking at there's like, guys, you got this and look what we ended up with. Can we not do that again? Maybe we don't want a, you know, working class,

fresh face who's never held elected office who we don't know about their past. Maybe we want an elected official who has a long record, who we're familiar with, who has proven that they can win the kind of votes you need to win an election. And the big arguments that are happening about,

like, where should the Democratic Party go? They're happening really intensely in Maine right now. Right. Yeah, and our listeners can't see us, of course, but I was shaking my head a little bit when Shane was talking, just because I think it's important

for people to understand And things like caucuses and conventions, these are things that parties spend months, if not years, planning, how they're going to execute in a way that is credible. And they can still be a mess. We were in Iowa when there's a mess. But it's a way that it's effective that ends up with an election result that everyone feels like they can trust. And now this main Democratic Party has to do this. In two weeks. In two weeks.

Yeah. Kind of an insane proposition. It's an insane proposition. And they can't even really launch full bore into it. because Plattner has not pulled himself off the belly yet. We'll be back. Shane, once we figure out how a replacement for Graham Platner is theoretically chosen and assuming he drops out, who are the people who might replace him,

who are raising their hands, is there a frontrunner? Who might be the next Democratic nominee for Senate and Maine? We definitely do not yet have a frontrunner. We definitely have a lot of people raising their hands or saying, I'm fielding phone calls, Sort of leading the field is three candidates who ran for governor in Maine this year, all of whom lost that primary. Troy Jackson, who had Bernie Sanders endorsement in the primary. You have Narav Shah, who is a Maine public health official, who actually finished second in the primary.

And then you have Shenna Bellows, who is the Secretary of State, all of whom could conceivably run. You have the Platner world sort of thinking about other allies, like a state representative. then you have the people who were in the Senate race who exited when it became clear it was Platner versus Mills a brewery owner named Dan Cleben who had declared and then exited the race Jordan Wood who would run for Senate

then ran for House, lost the House race. I'm just going to interrupt to say because this is a lot of names to observe. These do not seem like household names who would catch fire in a few weeks. Well, there is one household name, Michael. Patrick Dempsey, McDreamy, the actor, the president,

The Pride of Maine is on the list. You know, I'm not sure how serious that bit is at all, although he was tossed about in one of these polls that was sent out to Maine voters at one point. But I think that his inclusion really gives you a sense of where the state of things are. Chaotic. Chaotic, yes.

Okay. Is it possible the state's governor, Democrat Janet Mills, who was seen by the establishment as the logical person to have beaten Graham Platner, she didn't, she might just suddenly become the nominee. I mean, there's always a chance, but I think it's a pretty hard case to make

given that she exited the race because she said she couldn't raise enough money, she wasn't making any attraction in the polls, and didn't even make it to primary day. She's come up in precisely zero of the phone calls that I've had with people about who is the likeliest to replace Platterner at this point. Okay, given the turmoil on the Democratic side

of this race now, and the reality that Susan Collins has been the United States Senator in Maine for a very long time, how should we think about both sides odds in this race and how they have just changed in the last few days? So right now, it's a total disastrous mess for Democrats. But there is a silver lining that a lot of Democrats are seeing, which is that Graham Platner before this scandal was looking like a wounded candidate.

The New York Times just did a series of polls and all of the key Senate battleground states that Democrats are trying to flip to take the majority. And Platner scored worse than all the other Democrats, on some of the most important questions of character, whether you were the right moral values to be a leader. And Susan Collins was among the highest scoring people. And so there are a lot of Democrats saying, hey, this might be messy now,

but we have a chance for a fresh start in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 and a state that leans Democratic. You don't need a movement leader like Graham Platner, somebody who has a particular charisma. You might just need Joe Schmo, generic Democrat can beat Susan Collins. Now, that might be a little ambitious,

given how many races Susan Collins has won. She's beaten an awful lot of Democrats in the past, in good years for Democrats, in bad years for Democrats. But this does not look like a good year for the Republican Party. And the Democrats are excited about the possibility of starting over at this point. Yeah, and I think one way to assess that is how Republicans are feeling, and Republicans are feeling fairly disappointed by this outcome, at least in private conversations,

because they felt that they had a Kansas in Grand Platner, who was extremely flawed. One Republican group spent $9 million since the end of April running ads defining him as bigoted and violent and too risky for the state. So they were charging into this general election, defining Platner as unfit for office. And now they're going to get some new person.

And they certainly will have to do all the research, to figure out who this person is and figure out how to define them in a way that works for Republicans in a very, very short period of time. And I think it's also important to remember in these conversations that Senator Collins has plenty of her own vulnerabilities. And there's two that stood out quite strongly in our polling. Please. One is her age. She's 73 years old at a time when we know voters are very, very eager for generational change. change in Washington. She's running for a sixth term. And also she is aligned with the Republican Party. And she's, you know, been. And an unpopular president. An unpopular president who she has for all her sort of moderate maverick reputation. She has voted with the vast majority of the time. And she's in a national political environment that is quite bad for Republicans. Not only is there an unpopular president, there is an unpopular war. And people are really, really anxious about the economy. Which she did vote against via the War Powers resolution.

But, Shane, is it right to think of Collins as weak and as Republicans not looking forward to having to pivot from making a case against Platner to suddenly making an affirmative case for Susan Collins? I think that the Republican brand in Maine is weak. I don't think that there's evidence that Susan Collins herself is as weak. in that poll, we asked voters, how do you feel about President Trump handling the cost of living issue, which is for so many voters, the defining issue of this moment, his approval rating was 31%. So if you are running in your Susan Collins, you're going to need to win a huge chunk of voters who think the president is blowing the issue most important to them. So I do think the president creates deep vulnerabilities for her in that state. Lisa, just remind us of where this main Senate

race fits into the national Senate map. And let's presume for a minute that this race gets a little bit challenging for Democrats to win despite what Shane just said. And maybe they don't win the main Senate race. Let's just take Maine off the map. Can Democrats win back the Senate without it? It's not impossible, but it's very, very hard. To win control the Senate, Democrats must retain all the states they currently hold and flip four Republican held. seats. No simple task. No simple task. There are six battleground states that both sides are looking at. Of those six battleground states, only one went for Harris in 2024, and that is Maine. So Maine has long represented what many Democrats believe is their best shot to flip one of those four Republican held seats

that they have to flip. So without Maine, it's not impossible, but the task gets much harder. Yeah, I mean, the task is just really hard. And four of those six battleground states are places that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more. Democrats don't hold any seats in the entire United States Senate that look like that. So the idea they're going to flip two or three of them is really, really tough. I think it's fair to say that the situation that Platner has created in Maine was the Democratic establishment's worst fear. they articulated it over the last year over and over again as they made the case against Graham Platner as the nominee in Maine.

They felt it as a winnable seat with a deeply flawed candidate. They fought it at every turn. And it came to embody this tension we keep talking about on the show between the establishment and the insurgent left. And at times it has felt like the Democratic establishment has felt wise in its conclusions about Maine. And there have been times it felt like they were completely wrong. They were wrong to assume that Platner couldn't win, and then they were right to have

intuited that he was a flawed candidate. Ultimately, is this a vindication what's happened in Maine for the Democratic establishment or not? I don't think that there are any winners right now in this process, right? No one's vindicated. No one is vindicated. The Democratic establishment had originally recruited Janet Mills, the state's two-term governor, but she would have been the oldest freshman senator in American history right after Joe Biden's age was the central issue of the 2024 campaign. And that was just a mismatch for where voters are. How this plays out going forward, there could be some winners, right? But they have to navigate the very ideological divides that are tearing at the party in this really compressed time period to find somebody who can

continue to keep the real grassroots motivation and momentum that built up Graham Platner and not turn off the rest of the voters. And in August, we're going to have a Michigan primary where these same forces will clash up against each other again. You have a candidate, Haley Stevens, who's preferred by Schumer, going up against Abdul al-Said, who is backed by some of the same strategists that backed Grant Platner. Fassing.

So the party will go through another round of this, you know, shortly after they navigate through this main mess. Is it possible or likely even that the leaders of the Democratic Party play it really safe and not embrace all this insurgent energy at a time when Democratic Socialists are ousting incumbents in New York and winning in Colorado.

And the most successful strategy, and you've both documented it, is to run against the Democratic Party brand in order to represent the Democratic Party brand. I mean, the Democratic Party brand is in crisis. I've been talking with a bunch of Democrats in recent weeks, just to put in perspective how big a deal it was that Platner became the nominee and how important it would be if Abdul al-Said was the nominee in Michigan,

the party establishment basically hasn't lost a competitive Senate primary in 10 or 15 years. Like Chuck Schumer and the DSCC have picked these candidates in basically every competitive race. And these are the first instances where voters have come and said, you know what, not so much. We don't like that. We want to try something different. And the party is not sure how to deal with this. This is a new phenomenon.

We've seen this in the Republican Party where the voters rejected the leadership following Trump, but, like, this is new for the Democrats. And so they're just a steep learning curve because it is all so new. It also feels like there's a very important lesson here for running against the Democratic brand. And that's about the value of vetting

and the tradition of evaluating candidates. The establishment has put an emphasis on for a very long time. As you both know, there's a group of political consultants who took some measure of pride in bucking that set of protocols and traditions when they found Graham Platner. And I wonder if they now second guess the pride they took in bypassing some of that traditional vetting. Look, I think there was a desire in democratic circles to find candidates who had quote unquote authenticity. That was the big buzzword. but authenticity comes with authentic problems and missteps and mistakes.

I think the people involved with the grand platinum's race felt that voters would like a narrative of someone sort of pushing through adversity, cleaning up their life, finding a new path forward. And I think voters do like those kinds of stories. Everybody likes those kinds of stories. But the question is how much of their past will voters say is acceptable, at least when it comes to Democrat. candidates. Right. Of course, authenticity doesn't always come with flaws, certainly doesn't always come with an accusation of that serious nature. I suspect that as humbled as some of the strategists are who recruited Graham Platner, they still would like the party to trust their overall instinct that fighters are required in this moment, that agitators are the future of this party, and that Graham Platner very successfully challenged that in a way that his flaws aside may still want to be a model for the party.

I think there is something to that. I think Democrats are looking for people who are willing to fight. And I think there's a pervasive sense among the party's base that Democrats haven't stood up in the past strong enough to Trump and haven't spoken out strong enough for their values. But the issue is finding people who meet their criteria of authenticity of fighting, but also can be electable by a general electorate in battleground states. It's a challenge. I think there's a push to find fighters of the political system, not just of Republicans, but saying everything that has kept you economically where you are needs to be overturned. I'm not just going to fight Donald Trump. I'm going to fight to overturn the oligarchs, as Bernie Sanders likes to say, or the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Party donors, or the corporate class, right?

It's picking villains and fighting those villains and making it not just Trump. The criticism from the left is that too many of the sort of squishy middle say they're going to be big fighters and they just want to fight Donald Trump, but they don't want to fight other powers that are holding you back. And Platterner very much framed his candidacy from the start. as a fight not just against Trump, but against Democrats. And it's that energy that is very hard for the Democratic Party establishment to pull in because it's energy against them. Right.

Well, Shane, Lisa, thank you both very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. Hi, Caitlin. Hi, Carolyn. How are you? Oh, sad. Yeah. Yeah.

We're just sad yesterday afternoon. They were reporting it. And so by 4.30, I was out there pulling up my lawn sign and just, you know, heartbroken. On Tuesday, Daily producer Caitlin O'Keefe spoke with Democratic voters in Maine. Many of them once passionate supporters of Graham Platner about the latest allegation against him. and the growing calls for him to drop out of the race. I went, oh, shit. It's just beyond frustrating.

I don't mean my politicians to be perfect. As a matter of fact, I'd prefer they'd be imperfect. But it's like, you know, cram, really? Really? That's awful. The details of the sexual assaults feel horrendous. I just could have sat down and cried. I feel a little dismal.

disgusted with it all. Like, I'm annoyed that there's another dude who is in line to become a leader, and we're dealing with this shit again. Whether it's true or false, I think he has to withdraw. Clearly, he has to drop out. I absolutely think that he needs to drop out. He'd be better off. It's another candidate. If he does drop out, what do you want to see in a replacement for Plattner? The replacement for Platner has to have a similar progressive done with the establishment vibe. Class consciousness, Medicare for all, whole kitten caboodle. Honesty.

Honesty in the clean background. You know what I'm saying? I just want a politician that I can trust in that has integrity. You don't have to make this like our heart man appear as our savior. I think the main Democratic Party has to be very, very careful with how and who they choose to replace him. There are fully competent people out there, but they don't have his charisma. Who has it? Is there someone that I don't know about?

I truly have no idea of who could step into this role. We just need somebody. We need some hope someplace. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. In the latest challenge to a shaky ceasefire, Iran attacked three commercial ships and the United States retaliated by carrying out airstrikes against several Iranian military targets and by revoking Iran's right to sell oil on the open market.

The tit-for-tat attacks. demonstrated the challenge of restoring both peace and pre-war levels of trade in the region. And... In France, a court has upheld the conviction of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen on charges of embezzlement, but in a major victory for Le Pen,

the court lifted a ban on her ability to run for office. hours later, Le Pen announced her candidacy for the French presidency in 2007, her fourth bid for the office. Le Pen has gotten closer to victory in each of her last three campaigns. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennisketter, Shannon Lynn and Caitlin O'Keefe. with help from Jack DeSodoro. It was edited by Rachel Quester, Paige Cowan, and Liz O'Balen, and contains music by Alicia Boutitou and Marian Lazzano.

Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bobaro. See you tomorrow.