Today, Explained - Is Platner too “authentic”?

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Senate candidate Graham Platner swept the Maine Democratic primary no problem. The question is whether his "authenticity" can carry him past his scandals to a win in November. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Graham Platner at an event with voters in Portland, Maine. Photo by Laura Brett/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After winning Maine's Democratic Senate primary last night, Graham Platner thanked his parents. I want to thank my mom and my dad. thanked his wife. Hey me. Hey me. Thank to the people of Maine. And talked maybe a bit more than your typical politician about redemption.

Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It's a journey. I've made mistakes in my life. Mistakes that I regret that I live with. and that I continue to learn from. I'm still far from perfect. Platner, who got around 72% of the vote, will run against Republican Susan Collins in November.

He has so far weathered an impressively diverse series of scandals, including did he know that was Nazi imagery tattooed on his chest? And why was he sexting women who are not his wife? And was he physically violent with his exes? Main voters decided they can live with all that. Why, though? That's coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explain comes from Atio, the AI CRM for modern teams.

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Alex Seitzwall, deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine. What did Maine voters think about Grand Platner? You live there, you talk to people. What's the read on him? I've been talking to Platner voters since he jumped in as this totally unknown oyster farmer

in August, who no one had heard of running against a two-term sitting governor. And he instantly connected with people and developed this strong bond, people really related to him. And I think that helped him. and I think that helped him survive the first round of scandals in the fall with his tattoo. Platner was saying that he did not know the tattoo's resemblance to a Nazi symbol at the time.

He is saying that he had the tattoo covered with a new design. We went to a tattoo parlor in Split, Croatia, and we chose a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines, and, you know, skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing. And we got those tattoos. And then we all moved on with our lives. And the Reddit controversies. In other posts from 2013, he minimized challenges faced by service members in reporting sexual assault,

writing, quote, you make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose yourself control. So if you don't want to be in a compromising situation, act like an adult for F's sake. And then again, with this latest round, these later ones definitely hit differently. roll off his back the way the earlier ones did. There was a lot of concern. There was a lot of disappointment. But ultimately, Maine Democrats have been trying to get rid of

Susan Collins and failing for so long. And they have tried running more traditional candidates and lost. And so I think they are willing to take a chance on him. It seems like a very pragmatic calculation that a lot of Maine Democrats

are making right now, which is we need to beat Susan Collins. the stakes are too high, Supreme Court, control of the Senate, everything else, and will put aside any concerns we have with his personal life if he's our chance, our only chance, to beat Collins. You will know that outside of Maine there is so much speculation about who Graham Platner really is. Did he really know that that tattoo on his body was a Nazi tattoo?

Did he really mean what he said in those Reddit posts? And this is something that people speculate about wildly. I definitely hear what you're saying. It's like he's a Democrat. We want Susan Collins out. Are people in Maine speculating about who Graham Platner really is? Yes and no. I mean, I think there's been a major disconnect between what I've seen and heard on the ground.

When I drive my daughter's school every day, I pass dozens of Platner yard signs that have been out every day for months. And between what the national narrative is, which is typically much more negative. This is not good for the Grand Platter campaign. This is a problem. If I were in a position to move pieces around here when this story first broke, that would have been the moment where you have a call with the governor. You have her step back into the race. And you have this candidate remove himself. His former political director who quit the campaign in October wrote an op-ed in the

Washington Post yesterday saying that Platner should not be a U.S. Senator. And she wrote that his flaws as a candidate would be impossible to ignore. So I think there are very legitimate questions about his past that a lot of Maine Democrats have been asking. But he is also just a type of guy that is very familiar in Maine. And I think a lot of people kind of felt like they could connect with him, could relate with him, even if they didn't know exactly who he is. And I think he also did a really effective job of kind of weaponizing this chip on his shoulder that Maine has about how it's viewed by the rest of the world. There's this concept of you're either a Mainer or you're from away. You have lifted me up. You have had my back.

This is the state that raised me and this is the state that's saved me. And he is coded as extremely Maine. And he was able to kind of use that to say all these attacks from the New York Times or whatever outside world, don't listen to them. That's people from a way trying to tell us in Maine what to do. I think a lot of folks at the national level misunderstand the reason they keep getting everything wrong is they think this is a race about me.

But it isn't. This is a race about us. And that's hitting deep in the core of a lot of the main psyche. It is notable that Platner's scandals have unfolded over a long period of time, right? So it was late May that some news reports revealed that he'd been sexting with women. He's married, of course. The New York Times then talked to some of his former girlfriends who said he had been rough with them. others of his ex-girlfriends defended him.

But it's like the scandals have been rolling scandals. And it sounds like what you're saying is he's been able to push back against them with this, these are outsiders. Did the allegations in late May, I mean, I'm in D.C., not in Maine, and they felt huge to me. Are you seeing any shakiness after the most recent round? Oh, there's definitely a lot of shakiness and a lot of concern, a lot of disappointment. one voter told me they were heartbroken about it

because they really thought that he was different, that he was not a typical politician, and especially the way he responded to these. That first round of scandals with the Reddit post and the tattoo, he really took ownership. As I read through them, I read things that I absolutely do not agree with. I read through and I see things that words and statements that I abhorred.

I also see the trajectory of my life. And it was part of this whole redemption arc that he had built about how he was a combat veteran with PTSD in a really dark place. And then he came home to Maine, got involved with his community and his business, met his now wife, and was a different man. Coming back to Maine, moving back to my hometown,

reconnecting with the community that I'm from, building real friendships, being building real networks, real relationships of people. That helped cut my disillusion. I went from thinking that people were bad to knowing that people are good. But the latest round of scandals kind of punctured that narrative because he only got married in 2023,

and those sex messages were, you know, from just a couple years ago. He wasn't a young man in his early 20s. And so I did hear a lot of disappointment about that and also a lot of cynicism from people who thought he was different, thought he was a guy that they could really believe, and relegating him back to, oh, he's just a politician like the rest of them. And he also, the way he responded to those guys, he didn't really take as much ownership. The Wall Street Journal of New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer. I'm sorry. That's frankly, journalistic malpractice. And that turned some people off. But ultimately, you know, partisanship is a very powerful force. And the stakes being what they are in a race that could tip control of the Senate,

most Democrats are going to put aside their concerns, hold their nose. But, and this is a big butt and the thing to watch, I think, heading into November, Susan Collins has a proven, almost unique ability in this day and age to win split-ticket voters, to get people to vote for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, and then vote for her. So it would only take a relatively small number of defections from Platner or people who have previously voted for Collins, who would now be up for grabs, vote for a Democrat. it would only take a little, a small number of them to potentially tip things back into Collins' column,

especially if there are more revelations yet to come. Do you think he can win against Collins? I do think he can win against Susan Collins. I mean, just to level set for a second, I think any Democrat would have a tough time beating Susan Collins. A lot of people look at Maine. It's New England, it's a blue state. We haven't voted for Republican president since,

1988, so they assume, you know, this is low-hanging fruit. It's really not. Susan Collins is a very effective politician, proven durability. So I think this race, no matter who the Democrat was, was always going to be a tight within the margin of error race. That said, Plattner's been able to raise the money. He's been able to hold the coalition together so far. He hasn't had really, despite all these scandals, any defections from elected officials. He's, he's, He's done these enormous number of town halls. This is a small state where retail politics goes a long way and connecting with voters face-to-face can really make a difference. And that's not something that Susan Collins does.

And in 2020, Democrats ran a squeaky clean, well-qualified candidate who raised twice as much money as Susan Collins and still lost by nine percentage points. So I think there's a willingness or almost a sense of necessity among some main Democrats that we have to try something different. And, you know, there's a good chance we're going to lose anyway. So let's take a flyer on this guy and maybe he can do it. Alex Siteswold of the Mid Coast Villager. Coming up, political consultants love authenticity. But do voters, really? Support for the show already comes from Mint Mobile, who's like, you know what?

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So the people calling Graham Platner authentic are largely members. of a kind of consultant class. When they say that a candidate is authentic, what do the politicos mean? Yeah, it's a super interesting term because it's at once something that should mean something very simple, right? That someone is real or they're who they say they are or they sort of appear to be normal in some way. But actually, it's become loaded over a period of decades, at least, with a bunch of signifiers, right? So if someone's real self is that of kind of of a boring political nerd who speaks in soundbites. That isn't generally what's considered to be authentic. Rather, it's someone who appears to be outspoken or spontaneous or an outsider,

someone in the classic formulation who you'd like to grab a beer with. So those are personality traits. But with Platner, there's also some visual signifiers, aren't there? Yeah, absolutely. He's kind of gruff and gravel-voiced and macho, you know, has a big beard, has tattoos, on his arms, works on a boat on the water. I love most about man of the people. I have never met people who are more hard scrabble, even in a place that requires you to work like two or three different jobs. We have watched this state become essentially unlivable for working class people.

And it makes me deeply angry. He's also a white guy. The concept of authenticity as a political construction has been criticized many times for being kind of racially coded as well. being the easier for white candidates to pull off in a way that's legible to this consultant class. He really sort of seems out of central casting in that regard. Is Graham Platner authentic, for real, for real, in the way that the political class has kind of mapped onto him? I certainly think he is not a 2D stereotype of the gruff working

class man who, you know, has sort of been plucked from total obscurity. His grandfather was a leading architect and designer who sold these kind of... of quite high-end tables and chairs, for example. Donald Trump actually owned a set of the chairs, which was a delightful detail, if that's the right word, that I found while I was reporting this piece. As has been widely covered and discussed, Plattner went to a couple of elite schools. He said that one of those was with help from a, you know, from a financial aid package. I know that they're trying to frame me as some like Silver Spoon rich kid, but I'm sorry. It's anybody that comes down here and asks around about how I grew up and might, like, everybody here knows it's nonsense.

His dad's a lawyer in Maine, applied to himself, studied in D.C., worked in a bar on Capitol Hill, so not totally divorced from those circles, albeit, as I mentioned earlier, I don't think really connected to them in a professional sense. And so, yeah, he's not a guy who's worked on the water his whole life. at the same time, you know, I think he is someone who is complicated and complication in someone's life is in some ways, you know, a claim to authenticity, right? And I think in another sense also, he stands for authenticity and what I see is a slightly different sense to that which is signified by the word as it's often used in political media, in that he is a guy who has lived a lot, not, you know, not an unblemished life. There have been these scandals that have come out. And he sort of stands for the idea, at least to him, tell it that he has worked through those issues and become a better person and gone to therapy and worked on himself.

If there's one thing I can say, I went to therapy for years. I still go to therapy. Super helpful. It's great. More people should do it. Makes you a better person. Makes you all around happier. It gives you a lot more tools to engage with thoughts and feelings that you otherwise don't have tools for. It's this kind of broader, I guess, sort of more romantic idea in many respects of searching for his real self and kind of coming closer to finding it, which I think taps into sort of a different current current of what is understood by authenticity than the one that the political media might mean. Where do our current ideas about authenticity in politicians? Where do they come from? Several historians trace the idea in its modern form, really to Jimmy Carter's presidential campus in 1976. Years ago, as a farm boy, sitting outdoors with my family on the ground in the middle of the night, gathered close around a battery radio connected to the automobile battery.

And listening to the Democratic conventions in far-off cities, I was a long way from the selection process then. I feel much closer to it tonight. And there are several reasons for that. An important one, I think, was that it was the first presidential election after, you know, the Watergate scandal really blew up. That was obviously an episode that dented Americans trust in politicians' character and integrity and honesty.

And so there was more of an appetite to learn about the character of candidates. It was also, you know, television by that point wasn't new, but had become a sort of ubiquitous medium and kind of allowed for that intimacy of getting to know someone or seeming to get to know someone. And Carter sort of took advantage of that. He had this, you know, these kind of ads that were almost cinema, verite, in the way that he was filmed just sort of at home, I think, doing normal things.

We need a sunshine law in Washington to open up the deliberations of executive and legislative branches of government to the public so that we can understand when decisions are made about our own lives. but went on behind his locked doors. Presented himself as, you know, a man of the South, a man who, you know, got his hands dirty on his farm. Jimmy Carter knows what it's like to work for a living. Until he became governor, he put in 12 hours a day

in his shirt sleeves during harvest at his farm. Can you imagine any of the other candidates for president working in the hot August sun? Just a kind of normal person who was, yeah, who was an outsider to D.C. in this corrupt, broken system. And I think it sort of went from there in terms of, yeah, in terms of the signifiers we were talking about earlier specifically. Post-Carter, I think you see over decades this kind of same politics of trying to present yourself as this kind of outsider who speaks their mind and is, you know, an honest, reliable person who is kind of legibly all-American, even if they were very much insiders or in the case of someone like, you know, George W. Bush, the sion of a kind of a kind of Yang, key elites and oil dynasty, you know, they would try and appropriate those codes for themselves,

right? Just a regular guy who sort of talks in a normal way and is relatable. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive. But I think people, you know, got sick of or started to perceive or become more aware of the superficiality and fakeness of that. And I think Trump was kind of both the logical end point of that style of politics, but I'd also kind of smashed it to smithereens, as he has done with so many other things. On the one hand, you could kind of read him as like incredibly authentic, someone who is unconstrained, you know, completely disinhibited, always seemingly speaks his mind, even when it's to his political

detriment or, you know, the cost of things that people will say about him in polite society. and certainly, you know, a complete outsider to normal political structures. At the same time, he lied and continues to lie all the time, which is not, you know, a great thing if you're trying to use the word authenticity to describe someone. And so, yeah, I think Trump was simultaneously, you know, someone who benefited from the decades non-construction of these sort of authenticity norms, and at the same time benefited from telling people with a wink and a nod, these are hollow, people call me a fake or a phonial,

or whatever, but this system doesn't work for you and I can come in and maybe kind of out fake and phoony in them and smash it to pieces. And I think in his wake, you know, he has shifted the meaning of the concept somewhat as well. You said this has been going on for generations. You cited Carter. Do you think it changes our politics? Do you think it changes ultimately who ends up in office and therefore how the United States, the sort of path that the United States ends up on? I think that the way that authenticity has been constructed since Carter, which we talked about before, you know, this idea of politicians you'd rather have a beer with. Yeah, I think that's that has fed into a much broader political culture that is obsessed with quite superficial sort of image construction over policy. It structures, you know, who gets into politics in the first place and how those people behave during elections and then, you know, if they win, uh, in office. That being said, I think my piece was about, you know, two different, connected but different definitions of authenticity and politics, right?

This one that we've discussed, which is a construction of the consultant class. But another one that taps into, I think, a much like longer term and more deep-seated desire for people to like connect with what is, you know, what they believe is real, either in themselves or in the world around them. And I kind of think there's something. something in that that's like an innate part of being a human. And I don't think you could sort of expunge that from politics. John Alsop writes for The New Yorker.

Danielle Hewitt produced today and Amina El Sadi edited. Patrick Boyden, David Tadishore, are our engineers and Gabriel Donatov check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Support for this show comes from fetch pet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise.

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