Graham Platner and Other Rough-Around-The-Edges Populists Can Win -- If They Take a Page Out of Donald Trump’s Book

Trump inspired his base with intense loyalty, so they forgave his warts. Can Democratic candidates do the same?

“Platner headshot“ by MAINEiac4434 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Oysterman and Marine veteran Graham Platner launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination in Senate in Maine two short months ago, raising a hefty raising a hefty $3.2 million in the first quarter of his race and scoring endorsements from leading Democratic-aligned populists like Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders and California Congressman Ro Khanna.

“People know that the system is screwing them. They know it in their bones. Nobody I know around here can afford a house. Health care is a disaster, hospitals are closing. We have watched all of that ripped away from us,” he said in a launch video that helped him develop a national following.

For a while it seemed like his campaign was going almost too well. Here was a guy who spoke about taking on the oligarchy and ending overseas wars, making sure everyone has health care and a good job. Maybe he’s finally the outsider who can finally unseat Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has served as the grim reaper for five different unsuccessful Democrats who went up against her in the past.

But in the past week, Platner has been hit with a spree of scandals in recent days that leave many wondering if he is better off just bowing out.

First came a wave of articles about a now-defunct Reddit account he operated where he some years ago he made a series of impolitic comments – from asking why black people don’t tip to suggesting that women should do more to drink responsibly to avoid sexual assault to referring to police as bastards to describing himself as a communist.

That was bad enough. His political director, a former state lawmaker, resigned. Axios reporters began editorializing about how his campaign was melting down.

But then came a bigger crisis. The Platner campaign did an interview with the popular liberal podcast Pod Save America where he claimed that when he was in the armed forces he drunkenly obtained a skull and crossbones tattoo at a Croatian shop.

That’s not so bad, right? A little gauche, maybe, but talk to your local veteran if you think it’s unusual for a Marine to snatch up a tattoo one night because he thought it looked badass.

Well, it turned out the particular skull and crossbones he obtained was one that was associated with the Nazis – one of the SS units even used it.

That’s right, the populist left-wing candidate endorsed by the most popular Jewish politician in America was going around with an actual Nazi tattoo.

Before I write anything further, I should acknowledge that it’s not stupid to think that Platner’s campaign is over. If you ask the average American what they’re looking for in their political candidates, tattoos featuring symbology from the most hated political movement in human history are not at the top of the list.

Even if Platner’s story is true – that the tattoo was an accident because he didn’t recognize what it represents – it’s no doubt a headache for the candidate and his campaign. Combined with his past online comments, he comes across more like a Key and Peele sketch than a savvy politician. In the eyes of critics, he is at best a buffoon and at worst a man who has a hidden sympathy for Naziism.

At the very least, Platner seems to be getting barraged with blows from a competent Democratic opposition research campaigned helmed either by staffers from Democratic Gov. Janet Mill’s campaign – she entered the Senate nomination race just days ago – or the Democratic party’s leadership, which encouraged her to jump into the race. It’s unlikely that these stories are the last we’ve heard about Platner’s past.

And yet despite all this, what Platner needs to realize is that not only is he not finished, it’s possible he can still win the Democratic nomination, unseat Collins, and help rejuvenate the Democratic Party. Here’s why.

The Democratic Party’s major political problem in the United States today is that it has been shedding the votes of working class voters – including, increasingly, working class voters from ethnic and religious minority communities.

Class in the political context is increasingly defined not just by income but by the diploma divide – with college-educated voters and non-college educated voters often living in entirely different social and political environments and voting accordingly.

Photo by RUT MIIT on Unsplash

For instance, it’s well-known that Trump made large gains among Latino voters in 2024, but looking at the class divide is more revealing.

Trump won the votes of 55% of Latino men with no college degree, while making large gains with Latino women without a college degree (winning 40% in 2024 versus just 28% in 2020). As the Brookings Institute later noted, “Among Latinos, the only subgroup that did not bolt from the Democratic fold was college-educated Latino women, who favored Harris 63% to 33%, a 30-point margin identical to the one they gave Biden in 2020.”

While Maine is one of the country’s whitest states, it’s also the only rural-majority state currently run by a Democratic governor. But that doesn’t mean that the class divides seen elsewhere are not starting to take root there.

“Over the last 20+ years, Maine politics has become more like politics in the rest of the state,” explained Mark Brewer, the chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine and a long-time politics watcher in the state. “And part of that is involved with Democrats losing ground among these traditional blue collar working class white voters.”

Brewer pointed to Aroostok, the state’s northernmost county.

“It’s heavily white, it’s heavily rural. It’s got a lot of veterans. It’s got a lot of working class voters. Including people who used to hold unionized jobs…those used to be Democratic strongholds not all that long ago,” he said. “Today, that’s Trump country.”

The shedding of working class voters has provoked understandable debate among Democrats. Without a sizable majority in both houses of Congress like former President Barack Obama had, Democrats can’t pass transformational legislation like the Affordable Care Act ever again.

This debate has often focused on public policy – whether Democrats should become more economically populist or whether they should cede more ground on social and cultural issues like guns, abortion, transgenderism, or immigration.

But I would argue that what is just as important as policy is persona.

It has long flummoxed Democrats that Trump, a billionaire who once helmed a television program where he publicly fired people, has developed such a strong connection with America’s working class, to where he trounced them among non-college degree holders in last year’s election without too much of a sweat.

After all, his greatest legislative achievement in both terms was cutting taxes for the richest Americans. His cabinets are a who’s-who of billionaires. And he flies around in a private jet.

But perhaps more than any president we’ve had in a century, Trump talks like a working person. And this can be proven scientifically.

For the past five years, I’ve worked part-time as an educator. One of the tools that educators use to see if a text is appropriate for a student of a certain grade level is called a readability formula. Online readability formulas quickly let you slap a text in and see the readability level.

It also happens to be a fantastic tool to demonstrate how accessible of a communicator Donald Trump is. Using a popular online readability tool, I plugged in Trump’s address to Congress this year. It suggested that he spoke at about an 8^th grade level to the audience. That’s not far from where the average American is.

Let’s compare that to the esoteric language we often hear from progressive Democrats. Take, for instance, New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2020 speech to the Democratic National Convention, which denounced “racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia.”

The readability formulas say that this address was appropriate for college graduates.

Whatever you want to say about Trump’s policies, at least he is speaking a language that working class people can understand and relate to.

This brings me back to Platner. Some have pointed out that despite working in a series of blue collar jobs, he’s also the son of a lawyer and he briefly studied at George Washington University. He’s not exactly Tom Joad. But Donald Trump isn’t Cesar Chavez. What helps Trump connect with working people is the way he talks. Platner has the same advantage.

I put the text of Platner’s launch video into the readability formulas and found that his language was aimed at 7^th grade readability – meaning that the broad majority of Americans could understand it, much like Trump’s televised address to Congress and unlike AOC’s maiden DNC address.

But Trump’s strength with working class voters isn’t just that his language is accessible and easily understood. It’s also that he can ignore the mores of a typical politician and speak directly to people in an authentic and unvarnished way, a quality that his broader Make America Great Again movement has championed.

Many Democrats convinced themselves that a joke that a comedian told at a pre-election rally in 2024 was going to swing a massive number of Latino voters their way. When the comic Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a garbage dump, Kamala Harris’s campaign decided to launch an ad exclusively about the joke, aiming to motivate Latino voters to shift to their side.

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

But as we know now, the event had little to no impact on the election.

Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira, a longtime analyst of the Latino vote, told me shortly after the race that the party misunderstood the Latino response.

“When Puerto Ricans hear about this joke, they don’t necessarily say, ‘Oh my God, I was gonna vote for Trump, now I gotta vote for Kamala Harris,’ it’s like haha, I can’t believe he said that,” he said.

That’s because the lion’s share of the Latino votes who Trump won are working class voters. They’re not socialized into environments where they’re constantly walking on eggshells to avoid offending people.

They work in construction, agriculture, hospitality, service industries and other workplaces where the only thing you want from HR is a paycheck, not a diversity training.

There is no doubt that Platner’s past remarks were uncouth and off-color. It would be unwise for a Senate candidate to engage in an open ethnic stereotyping about tipping. And he probably waited way too long to cover up that tattoo (he did so the week of his Pod Save confession) even though there were risks with doing it in the past and being accused of being a secret Nazi who tried to hide his tracks.

But the reality is that populists have always said they want to put ordinary people in charge of the country. Ordinary people are not an army of overchievers organizing their entire lives around dotting every i and crossing every t so as to avoid a scandal that might derail a future political career. Those people are sociopaths, and the greatest blessing of my life is that I no longer live in the Metro D.C. area and have to deal with those people on a daily basis.

Ordinary people, in contrast to political sociopaths, are weird and flawed up because life is weird and flawed. My first roommate at the University of Georgia had a giant Confederate flag, a poster of Che Guevera, and he was a Japanese immigrant whose family moved from overseas to a small town in Georgia. Normies can be really freaking strange.

I know what a skeptical reader is thinking. OK everybody has a few skeletons in their closet. But an accidental Nazi tattoo? I don’t know anyone with an accidental Nazi tattoo. He’s not just some ordinary guy. He must be a freak!

But obsessing with the details of Platner’s skeletons is missing the point. If it’s not a Nazi tattoo maybe it’s that you took a picture with a Confederate flag (or your Japanese roommate confusingly hung it over your dorm room window). Maybe when you were younger you called someone gay or retarded. Perhaps you even said something racist one time in an obscure internet comment – millennials and Gen Z are having our every thought recorded for decades out into the future, so welcome to the world of political mass surveillance.

All of this can and will be turned into scandals, particularly if you’re a populist. Democratic and Republican Party leadership don’t sincerely care about any of these things. These people walk into the chamber every day and vote to send bombs to countries that incinerate kids with them. You think they’re sincerely worried about tattoos and naughty questions on Reddit? Let’s not be naïve.

Nobody actually thinks Platner is a Neo Nazi. What they want to do is destroy him because they don’t control him.

He’s a guy who could’ve walked the white collar path like his dad and gotten cozy with the elite in Washington. Instead he went off and joined the armed services and ended up as an oyster farmer running not only against Collins but to kick Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer out of his position. He’s coming for their power. Of course they will do anything they can to crush him, including the expertly-rolled out oppo campaign that began this month and is likely to continue in the coming weeks.

Maybe you’re reading all this and thinking, OK. Maybe his Reddit comments are just the sort of thing you can expect from an authentic unvarnished normie. Maybe Platner’s tattoo was an accident, and we all have crazy accidents even if this one was particularly shocking. And maybe Platner really does have the potential to be an independent-minded populist Senator who will take on the elite in Washington in a way that Collins or Mills never would. But how can he possibly win? He’s spending every day apologizing. Is that really a winning campaign? Is he really cut out for politics?

These are all fair thoughts to have. I have them myself. But if Platner really is the generational talent many of his fans hoped he was, there is a way for him to thread the needle and win this contest.

To do so, he has to look across the aisle.

There is no politician that Democrats loathe more than Donald Trump. When I worked in D.C. during the first Trump term, I think many educated Democrats would’ve rather committed bank robbery than cast a vote for the former Apprentice host.

But something that Trump proved is that a scandal doesn’t have to destroy you if you don’t let it destroy you. The Trump approach to these things is to simply barrel right through them. He has throughout his life said or done dozens of things that would’ve completely destroyed a lesser politician.

And yet instead of jumping in front of the cameras and apologizing for those things over and over, he turned around and said: “They’re not after me. They’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way.”

Trump made millions of people fall in love with him because he convinced them that for all his personal flaws, he was the only person who was capable of defeating the Democratic progressive hegemon. And to his credit, he did win two presidential elections and make some of the biggest gains in minority votes the party has seen in decades.

How can Democrats really look at a country that elected Trump and think to themselves, what Americans really want are better-mannered politicians?

What they want are politicians who can channel their anger. In 2016 and 2024, Trump was able to channel the populist energy of a country infuriated at the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, inflation, endless wars, and, yes, hegemonic political correctness and human resources culture that dominated so many liberal institutions from Hollywood and universities to the Fortune 500 and

In order to win, Platner has to do what Trump did. He has to make people fall in love with him because he’s fighting the same people they want to fight: Feckless and compromised Democratic leaders like Schumer, Wall Street, AIPAC, the pharmaceutical companies, and every moneyed interest group that has made the lives of people in rural Maine so difficult for so long.

Photo by Mike Doherty on Unsplash

Unlike the liberal commentariat who has been so quick to turn on Platner, I was born and raised in a conservative corner of the country and after a stint in D.C. returned to that same corner. One of the most common refrains I hear about Trump from people who voted for him is that they think he’s a horrible person but that he’s doing the right thing, he’s fighting the right people, so they will continue to support him.

(He’s not the only politician who’s managed to survive these sorts of scandals – my congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene went from being kicked off the committees in Congress for being so conspiratorial to being praised by Wolf Blitzer.)

Platner isn’t even a horrible person. He’s just led a messy life. But if he stops apologizing and goes on offense, he can win the same loyalty because what he’s saying about America’s elite is fundamentally true.

“Yes I have a flawed and sometimes downright weird past. I served overseas in wars based on lies and came back fucked up and disoriented,” he could tell people. “It took me years to figure myself out. I’m not perfect, but I promise you that every day I will wake up and fight the bastards who are trying to take me down because the reason they want to take me down is they want to take you down. We’re coming for their power and they’re scared as hell.”

Left-wing populists have had nowhere near as much as success as their counterparts on the right because they’re too genteel and afraid to offend. If Platner wants to prove he’s any different, he’s running out of time to show it.