Is Graham Platner Democrats’ Ken Paxton? Some hope they don’t have to find out
One week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the wife of the presumptive Democratic Senate candidate in Maine found evidence he had sent “sexually explicit texts with several women,” and just one day after that candidate told his would-be colleagues in Washington that no new credible allegations about his admittedly complicated life were expected, The New York Times published a new one.
The Times reported that one ex-girlfriend of the candidate, Graham Platner, alleged that years earlier, “he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”
Graham has denied the accusation, but the fallout was instantaneous.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., appearing on MS Now minutes after the story was published, said, “I look forward to the day when I am not answering every single week a question about bad behavior by another dude.” (“You and me both,” replied host Nicolle Wallace.) Slotkin added, “If there are allegations of violence, I have a real problem with that.”
A senior correspondent at Vox — “covering the crisis of global democracy” — was more direct, writing on X: “Platner needs to withdraw.” Within about 90 minutes, Bloomberg Opinion updated a piece it published that morning, titled “Graham Platner is the Democrats’ Ken Paxton.”
Democrats who once gleefully hoped they could defeat Maine’s longtime Republican senator, Susan Collins, suddenly faced the prospect of heading into a general election with a candidate whom they were unsure would survive further scrutiny.
“It definitely is causing a great deal of concern in the party,” said David Costello, the only other candidate whose name is on the ballot in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary who is still actively campaigning.
Gov. Janet Mills “suspended” her campaign but noted recently that her name is still on the ballot; another Democrat, Andrea LaFlamme, is running as a write-in candidate.
Costello, speaking to Straight Arrow by phone Friday afternoon, reiterated his pledge to support the party’s nominee but said he had concerns about heading into November with Platner the way things are going.
“I don’t know how the party might resolve this,” Costello said, before noting, “it’s conceivable that Graham could drop out and the party replace him with another nominee by July.”
Election rules in Maine give nominees until July 13 to withdraw their candidacy; political parties have until July 27 to name a replacement. Costello said he wanted to see Collins defeated. The only question, he said, was whether to stick with Graham to find out.
“We’d hate for, come August, something worse comes out,” he said.
The hand-wringing by Democrats is not unlike what Republicans experienced in 2016, when then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump faced numerous accusations of sexual assault and misbehavior. In October 2016, Trump apologized after the Washington Post published a video in which he could be heard saying years earlier that he grabbed women’s genitals without permission because, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
More recently, Texas’ scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton, defeated longtime Republican senator John Cornyn in a primary run-off. In a sign of the party establishment’s resistance to embrace their successful insurgency of Paxton, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a statement that night that made no mention of him. But the NRSC — which had backed Cornyn in the primary — did go through the exercise of deleting a host of attack videos and critical statements it had posted online about Paxton, CNN and other outlets noted.
Attacks the NRSC made against another Republican in the primary, Rep. Wesley Hunt, remain on the organization’s YouTube channel and X account.
The nearly two decades of scandals and accusations against Paxton range from bribery charges raised by former members of his staff to accusations that he pocketed a lawyer’s expensive pen (he said it was a mistake and returned it). The U.S. Justice Department in the waning days of the Biden administration declined to prosecute Paxton on corruption charges, the Associated Press reported in April 2025. Paxton’s wife, a state legislator, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds,” the New York Times reported in July 2025.
Trump endorsed Paxton days before he trounced Cornyn in a primary run-off; he will face Democratic nominee James Talarico, a state legislator who quotes the Bible to explain the roots of his progressive policies. The much-watched Cook Political Report says the Senate race in Texas “leans” Republican, meaning Republicans are still expected to win, though by a smaller margin than expected in a state Trump won in 2024 with 56% of the vote.
Republican consultant Evan Siegfried, who is not working for any candidates in Maine, told Straight Arrow that Democrats in that state should not expect to do what Republicans in Texas are trying.
“Texas is a deep-red state where Paxton’s base was never going anywhere regardless of what he did,” Siegfried said in a statement. “[A]nd Republicans who backed him faced no meaningful consequences.
“Maine is purple, Collins is a legitimate incumbent with a real approval rating, and the margin for error is essentially zero,” he added. “Republicans backing Trump had a massive electoral floor underneath them. Maine Democrats backing Platner do not.”
The lesson, Siegfried said, “isn’t that you can survive by circling the wagons — it’s that you can only do that when the underlying terrain lets you.”
“In Maine, it doesn’t.”
One Democratic operative working outside Maine, who asked not to be named for fear of career reprisal, told Straight Arrow that the debate over Platner is a result of a party in transition.
“The Trump era has changed the Democratic Party in terms of our tolerance of misbehavior,” among candidates, this person said.
As the #MeToo era was in full swing in 2017, then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., announced his resignation from office three weeks after a photo was published showing his hands on a woman’s chest while she was asleep. But by July 2019, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported, “Seven current and former U.S. senators” who pushed for Franken to resign now said it was wrong of them to do so. One of those people was Maine’s other senator, Angus King, an independent. King now felt Franken deserved to have the allegation against him vetted through “a process,” Mayer reported, and that the way he was ousted was unfair.
A spokesman for King, who has endorsed Platner, did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
“I think we take for granted that Republicans will hold their nose and vote for people who do awful things,” this Democratic operative said. “What we have seen with Graham Platner, and I think some people have come around to that viewpoint, is that we’ve got to win and that’s that.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
