Privileged Socialist Casting Directors Brought the Graham Platner Reality Show.
Posted by Ed Folsom, July 10, 2026
The Graham Platner reality show just came to an end. He has filed official paperwork withdrawing from the Senate race ahead of the Monday, July 13, 2026, 5:00 p.m., deadline. Democrats are no longer stuck with him as their Senate candidate on the November ballot.
How did a guy who kept an S.S. “death’s head” Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for 17 years, before covering it only after it became public, who has a social media history that includes: misogynist remarks, disparagement of white, rural Mainers as “stupid,” disparagement of all cops as “bastards,” disparagement of an American soldier wounded in combat, a claim that he “got older and became a communist,” and an admission that he has an “uncontrollable urge” to masturbate in porta potties, not get screened-out as a candidate to begin with?
Now add his history of “sexting” multiple people after he got married, a reported history of domestic violence against at least one former girlfriend, and a reported history of sexual assault against another.
Maine Democrats held their primary election on June 9. They knew about every bit of this, except for the last part about the girlfriend’s report of sexual assault. That didn’t come out until this past Monday, July 6, in a story in Politico. Yet Platner won the June 9 primary overwhelmingly.
Forget “believe all women.” Evidently, Democrat voters now believe there are reasons some women make up claims of physical abuse by a man. And forget all that stuff about any association with Nazis or Naziism requiring immediate and lifelong ostracism. Platner still has a tattoo etched in his skin (albeit now obscured under a Celtic symbol) that was the symbol of a particular division of the S.S., the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units), the ones that guarded the death camps!
But then, suddenly, Platner’s poll numbers for the general election race against Susan Collins dropped significantly. Oops! Over the July 4 weekend, a news story emerged that attorney and social media influencer Cheyenne Hunt was working, pro bono, with multiple women who were lined up to report abuse by Platner. Then, on Monday, July 6, one week before the deadline that allows Platner to withdraw from the race in time for Maine Democrats to replace him on the November ballot – Voila! — a Democrat who says her politics are still aligned with Planter’s suddenly reports that he sexually assaulted her in 2021 .
Two days later, Platner suspended his campaign. Now he has finally filed his official written withdrawal from the campaign. In it, he included: “F*ck ICE. Free Palestine,” because he’s so authentic. It must have been very painful for him to give up to the Democrats the thing that he held over them these past several days before he filed his withdrawal paperwork, the thing that every leftist covets more than anything else in this world: power and control.
How did Maine happen to be treated to Graham Planter as its Senate candidate on the Democrat side to begin with? As a recent article in Slate magazine put it:
“What qualified Platner to be one of the most influential people in the country? He had no experience in elected office, no notable history of activist organizing, no college degree, no significant success in the private sector, not even a record of pulling himself up by his proverbial bootstraps. (He was given his oyster farm by a family friend, and it’s not clear that it does much business; he doesn’t take a salary, and his mother’s restaurant is his biggest customer.) Platner could relate to disaffected Maine voters, the thinking went, because like many of them, he had never quite found his footing in life. According to this school of thought, his main qualification was a lack thereof.”
Platner’s grandfather was an architect who designed Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of New York’s World Trade Center. His father was a successful attorney. His mother owns a successful restaurant near Acadia National Park. Platner was educated in private high schools and attended George Washington University. The “oysterman” Mainer shtick has always been a cosplay. So who picked Platner for the role?
Oh, those two precious punkins are as precious as they come, straight out of Democratic Socialists of America central casting, ready for roles in a redux of Portlandia. Check them out in the Wall Street Journal interview (here) where they discuss finding Platner, quickly vetting him, convincing him to run, and setting him up with what amounted to his own reality show.
They’re Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and they came to Maine to further the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) cause by fielding a candidate to run against Susan Collins. They got a heads-up on Platner from fellow DSA members in Maine. They saw a video clip of Platner motoring his boat across Frenchman Bay and growling a few lines. Then they checked Platner’s political contributions and saw that he contributed to Bernie Sanders. They had their man. They approached him and convinced him to run as a Democrat.
In 2017, Moraff penned an article (still viewable here, on the DSA’s website), on running socialist candidates as Democrats in primary elections. As Moraff put it then:
“Primary campaigns provide real opportunities for leftists to compete and win. Campaigns off the party line, in all but the rarest cases, do not.”
…
“We don’t have to put all our eggs in the realignment basket [realignment of the Democratic Party into a socialist party]. We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces—forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists.”
And so, according to a story in the New York Post, he did. He did it in his home state of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. Then he decided to pick a candidate to run in Nebraska, so he found one named Daniel Osborn who, in that case, ran in the general election as an independent. Moraff also went to Iowa and found a guy named Nathan Sage to run for Senate as a Democrat, although Sage has since dropped out. And Moraff came to Maine and found Platner to run for Senate as a Democrat.
How does Moraff happen to be bouncing around to all these odd places — Pittsburgh, PA, Nebraska, Iowa, Maine – to find people to play his roles? And, by the way, who is paying for it? It couldn’t possibly be a billionaire could it?
Moraff is a recent Yale Law graduate whose grandfather, Seymour Ginsburg, was the founder and first president of Toys “R” Us (read more about him here). Do you get the picture? Moraff is a child of great privilege, whose millionaire grandfather made his fortune with Toys “R” Us, who flits around the country finding people to run for office as socialists while attending Yale Law School. La Ti Da. What do you suppose he intends to get out of socialism? I guarantee it isn’t the best interests of the downtrodden, of which he knows zero other than third-hand.
As the author of the recent Slate piece on Platner says:
The voters Platner swayed were the college-educated ones, the same voters who are rapidly realigning with Democrats across the country, a trend Trump has accelerated. They may have supported whatever Democrat was on the ballot. But it also makes perfect sense that in a race where class signifiers were treated as the be-all-end-all of political merit, the voters most swayed by Platner may have more in common with the strategists who chose him than with the candidate himself.
What do you suppose they expect to get from socialism? I suspect that they think they’ll get even for their frustrated ambitions. As for the non-elites without college degrees, as of the end of June they were polling +15 for Collins over their cosplaying blue collar champion.
And so, the fall.
