Graham Platner

During his campaign, Maine’s former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner was a study in contrasts. Consider:

• As an 18-year-old, he heckled Pres. George W. Bush at the Bangor, Maine, airport about U.S. involvement in Iraq. Less than two years later, he joined the Marine Corps and ultimately served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• He said he was in the Senate race because the country needs “better politics,” yet his political experience consisted of serving as harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine, population (about) 1,300.
• He painted himself as politically progressive but his campaign was rocked – and ultimately ended – by past misogynistic, racist, and homophobic social media posts, and accusations of sexual misconduct.

Meet Graham Platner

• Birth date: September 1, 1984
• Birthplace: Blue Hill, Maine, U.S.
• Education: Attended George Washington University on the G.I. Bill but did not graduate
• Best known for: Running for Senate from Maine as a Democrat until scandal forced him to withdraw.
• Family: Married teacher Amy Gertner in 2023. The couple revealed they lost a child to miscarriage in 2026.
• Quotation: “You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.” —in 2026, to The New York Times

By July 2026, the campaign of the young, brash oyster farmer was over. Credible allegations, which he denied, of sexual assault cost him the support of local and national Democrats and left the party looking for a new candidate to face veteran Republican incumbent Susan Collins. The Maine Senate race had already been one of the most-watched races of the 2026 midterm elections.

• Who survives a political scandal?

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Early life

Graham Cunningham Platner was born to Bronson Platner, an Ivy League-educated attorney, and Leslie Harlow, an entrepreneur whose ventures over the years include making wreaths, running a coffee shop, and owning a smoked salmon business. The couple had another son, Alan, before divorcing when their boys were still young. Both parents were active in Democratic politics and donated to Democratic candidates. Young Graham was, as his mother described to Politico in 2025, an “inquisitive, smart son” who had a particular fascination with the military that included his dressing as a soldier for Halloween and learning to sing the Marine Corps hymn when he was three.

His parents sent him to a private boarding school in Connecticut for high school, but Platner hated it, refused to go to class, and ultimately got kicked out. He went on to graduate from John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, where he wrestled and was voted “most likely to start a revolution.” He was 17 on September 11, 2001, and wanted to join the Marines then, but his parents refused to allow him to enlist. A year later he applied to college but after graduation opted to do other things, including backpacking in Europe and North Africa. In 2004 he was old enough to enlist without parental permission, and he did so—still over their objections. “My father essentially told me I was a [expletive] idiot,” Platner, who uses a lot of expletives, told Politico in 2025. The contradiction of fighting in a war he had protested against is not lost on him. He told The New Republic in 2025 that he was motivated partly by noble motives and partly by boyish naivete: “I thought I could do some good. And I wanted to play soldier. I might have read too much Hemingway.”

Military service

Platner’s first deployment with the Marine Corps was in 2005 to Fallujah, Iraq, where he expressed belief in the mission in an email to his mother: “The United States is doing an amazing thing here. It took my coming here to realize that. Don’t think we are somewhere we shouldn’t be. We are exactly in the right place.” But by the time of his second tour, in Ramadi in 2006, Platner had killed combatants, had seen fellow Marines and innocent Iraqis killed, and was questioning the war.

In 2007 he was deployed again, this time to a ship sent to various ports around the world. During this deployment he spent time in the Balkans, and one night in Croatia while admittedly drunk, he got a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his chest. Nearly two decades later, when the tattoo was revealed to resemble a known Nazi symbol, Platner told Politico that he was unaware of the Nazi history, saying he got it to instead signify his status as a killer: “That’s what we did, and we were good at it, and we were proud of the fact that we were good at it.”

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

In 2008 he left the Marines and enrolled at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. At 24, he was chronologically just a few years older than his fellow classmates, but by virtue of what he had seen, he felt decades their senior, telling The Washington Post in 2009:

I’m this gruff, heavily tattooed former Marine. They’re these little 18-year-olds. I’m almost as scared of them as they are of me.

But the academic life was not for Platner, and he left GW and joined the U.S. Army in 2009. (He couldn’t rejoin the Marine Corps because a policy change meant that his tattoos disqualified him.) He served in Afghanistan until 2011 and returned to Washington and GW, where he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He admits that this was a low point in his life. He sought help from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) but noted that they were “understaffed and underfunded.” He drank—and was arrested for DUI. He went to class on and off. He took to Reddit, where he aired his grievances with the world in profanity-laced posts that included rants that seemed to blame women for rape and Black bar patrons for small tips, among other things.

In 2016 he left GW and went back home to Maine. He returned to Afghanistan one last time in 2018 as a contractor for the State Department. This time the trip had little to do with the mission and everything to do with the money he earned. When he returned he became a small business owner, running ecology tours, shucking oysters, and becoming involved in the governance of the town of Sullivan, Maine, where he served as harbormaster for a small annual fee and on the town’s planning commission. He became less active on social media and married a schoolteacher, but he had also become involved in the grassroots activist group Acadia Action. He had just a high enough profile to draw the attention of a group of Democratic operatives who had developed a specialty in electing veterans to office.

Campaign and controversies

Leslie Harlow has said of her son: “Graham always carved his own path.” In 2025, now with the support of a political strategist who had worked with Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman and New York City’s mayor-to-be Zohran Mamdani, Platner was about to try to carve out the most unlikely of paths.

He took to social media to announce his candidacy in a video that went viral and had him appearing on news shows and podcasts. He came out for universal health care, increasing the minimum wage, and in support of labor unions. And the boy who had played at war and turned into the Marine who fought in them came out against “endless” wars. He leaned into being a lifelong Mainer, portraying himself as just like his would-be constituents and ready to fight for them, telling The New York Times in 2026, in response to the U.S. war in Iran:

Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine.

He also aggressively took on the Republican incumbent, Collins, saying that “the difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn.” He almost immediately drew standing-room-only crowds at town hall events, where his long, at times thoughtful, almost always obscenity-strewn answers decrying billionaires and oligarchs won him support from the likes of liberal Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, from neighboring Vermont and Massachusetts, respectively.

But by October 2025 his campaign seemed threatened by the controversies surrounding the skull and crossbones tattoo, the social media posts, and the fact that he receives $4,800 a month from the VA as a fully disabled veteran. Several key staffers resigned from the campaign. The Democratic Party leadership, including New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, sought out Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, to oppose Platner in the primary. But Platner went on the offensive. He again became a fixture on podcasts and news shows, answering questions about his past. He denied knowing that the tattoo had Nazi history and announced that he had covered it up. He called some of what he had said on social media “indefensible” and proof of “me not knowing what I’m talking about.” He also noted that much of this occurred when he was dealing with PTSD.

In May 2026, news reports emerged that Platner had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with a number of women while married to Amy Gertner. Platner decried the reports as “journalistic malpractice,” while acknowledging that “Amy and I went through something hard — because of me. We did the work, and I’m grateful for her every hour of every day.” He has asked the voters of Maine to acknowledge that people can “evolve and grow from years ago,” adding that “everybody has posted something stupid on the Internet.” By April 2026 polls in the Democratic primary had him leading Mills by some 30 points, leading her to suspend her campaign. In June, despite the controversies, he easily won the Democratic primary. Collins, a five-time incumbent with a proven track record of getting Democrats to vote for her, may be a tougher challenge.

In July 2026, the Platner campaign endured yet another political crisis when a woman whom Platner had dated in 2021 recounted to Politico how he came to her residence without her consent and sexually assaulted her. Platner called the allegation “troubling, serious, and false.” But he canceled campaign events, as fellow Democrats withdrew endorsements and called on him to leave the race. Several days later, he did just that.