Why Graham Platner’s “Scandals” Actually Helped Him with Voters

I have been increasingly fascinated by Graham Platner, the lefty Dem Senate candidate in Maine, who keeps courting scandals and controversies (he has a Nazi-style tattoo, he’s expressed some socially unacceptable opinions on social media, he was sexting with multiple other women after he got married, some of his former girlfriends say he behaved caddishly).

Yet I think, after his resounding success in the Maine primary on Tuesday, there’s a pretty good chance he wins in November (recent head to head polls show the race tied or Platner slightly ahead). And the interesting thing to me is that if he does I suspect it will be at least as much because of, as in spite of, his “scandals.”

It’s been obvious since Trump won in ‘16 that the old norms that defined appropriate public behavior from candidates and elected officials – norms that were zealously policed by the once powerful gatekeepers of the traditional media and widely accepted by the broader public – have shifted radically (as some conservatives pointed out to me on X, this process really started with Clinton’s public popularity surviving Lewinsky and impeachment).

The old media gatekeepers are still with us, but they are rapidly losing a desperately quixotic battle to preserve their boundary-defining influence. The public may still pay lip service to the old public morality, but it’s increasingly evident that the voters are actually judging candidates according to a new, private morality and alternate code of conduct.

The traditional norms and rules were rooted in a kind of linguistic literalism. You took what a candidate said or did at face value, and judged accordingly. But no longer. Now some candidates are discovering that if they successfully position themselves as outside-the-box anti-establishment insurgents, increasingly disaffected voters are inclined to judge that candidate’s actions or statements according to a different yardstick, rooted in an emerging code of symbolic transgression.

They are taken not at face value, but understood, in these instances, as a form of signaling about the candidate’s relationship to what voters increasingly see as a corrupted and illegitimate ruling elite. 

The insightful Salena Zito quip from 2016 that “the press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally” first captured this shift. When Trump said John McCain was “not a war hero” and called him a loser, his voters didn’t see a lack of patriotism; when his “grab ‘em by the pussy” boast surfaced they didn’t see a rapey misogynist. They saw someone who was gleefully and unrepentantly giving a middle finger to a corrupt and illegitimate cultural and political order, a bona fide outsider and change agent candidate deliberately transgressing to get a rise out of a self-serving, self-congratulatory ruling class that his voters hated and wanted to dislodge from their high perches as much as Trump did.

What’s going on with Platner right now is no different.

Under the old literalist norms, getting a Nazi tattoo meant you’re sympathetic to Nazis; having written offensive or inappropriate things (even though they expressed viewpoints we all know a lot of non-college educated people privately hold) meant you were at best a complete cad or jerk, and probably worse. It was disqualifying. But no longer.

Judged according to the new rules of symbolic transgression, to Platner’s voters and much of the public writ large they mean not that he’s a Nazi or a misogynist but rather that he’s a fiercely anti-elitist warrior, an outlaw and a cultural badass whose working class cosplay transgression of the old norms is proof of his determination to act like a bull in the china shop of the old, failed, prissy cosmopolitan establishment. 

It’s worth noting that there are still rules at work here, and limits to what is allowed (at least on the Democratic side of the divide). This isn’t the dawning of an anything goes era – just ask Eric Swalwell. If Platner were to blurt out anything that was actually anti-semitic, or if women start to surface saying he actually sexually abused them (the June 4 NYT exposé of his “messy personal life” fell short of that) – if his symbolic transgressions turn out to be literally true – his support will collapse the way Swalwell’s did.

But absent that, or the Rs using some of his orthodox left-progressive issue positions to paint him as too radical or out-of-touch (which I would suggest is actually Platner’s greatest vulnerability), I think the dude is pretty well positioned to ride a growing wave of anti-establishment anger to vanquishing Susan Collins and winning a Senate seat in November, because, under the new dispensation, so far the voters are taking him seriously, not literally.

A earlier version of this piece was posted to Substack, where you can follow Sandeep @skaushik100.