The Bad News Keeps Rolling In For Graham Platner’s Senate Campaign

Graham Platner’s campaign manager quit just days after starting the job, the latest in a seemingly unending series of upsets for the Maine Democrat’s struggling campaign.

Axios reported Monday that Kevin Brown, a friend of Platner’s, resigned his post shortly after taking it up. Brown follows Platner’s political director, Genevieve McDonald, who resigned earlier this month after Platner came under fire for a series of Reddit posts in which he called himself a communist. McDonald made waves following her departure for publicly commenting about Platner’s tattoo with Nazi-era connotations, which he has since gotten covered up.

“Graham has an antisemitic tattoo on his chest,” McDonald wrote on Facebook. “He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff. Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and he should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

“Years ago I got a skull and crossbones tattoo with my buddies in the Marine Corps,” Platner wrote on X last week. “I was appalled to learn it closely resembled a Nazi symbol. I altered it yesterday, into something that isn’t deeply offensive to my core beliefs.”

“I am very sorry to all of you who had to contemplate a symbol of hate over the past 48 hours,” he added.

Platner told “Pod Save America” that he’s “not a secret Nazi” when discussing the Totenkopf tattoo. 

“Actually, if you read through my Reddit comments I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and antisemitism and racism in general. I would say, lifelong opponent.”

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“At no point in this entire experience of my life not once did anybody say ‘Hey, you’re a Nazi.’ It never came up, until we got wind that in the opposition research somebody was shopping the idea that I was secret Nazi with a hidden Nazi tattoo. And I can honestly say that if I was trying to hide it, I have not been doing a very good job for the past 18 years,” Platner said. 

“We got those and then we all moved on with our lives,” he added. 

However, a report in Jewish Insider indicated he knew about the meaning of the symbol as of at least 2012. 

Platner is facing Maine Governor Janet Mills in the state’s Democratic primary, the winner of which will likely take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in a highly-competitive general election race.

A recent poll of likely voters from SoCal Strategies indicated that Mills is leading with 41% compared with 36% for Platner, The Hill reported on Saturday. Another poll from the University of New Hampshire, taken from Oct. 16-21, showed that 58% of “those who plan to vote” are backing Platner, compared with 24% for the governor.