Barbara Kay: Progressive women embrace Maine’s Nazi-tattooed dude-bro Senate candidate

BLUE HILL, MAINE - JUNE 9: Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his Primary Election event on June 9, 2026 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee and will face incumbent Sen. Collins (R-ME) for Maine's U.S. Senate seat in the general election. (Photo by CJ Gunther/Getty Images)

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Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon described Platner as “a bearded scumbag with a Nazi tattoo and a vanity oyster farm.” (Most, if not all, of his oysters go to his mom’s restaurant.) Stiles reminds us that Platner has also fantasized about raping burglars to show dominance (“not in a gay way,” you understand) and admitted to masturbating in porta-potties. There’s more, but I have other points to make and breakfast to keep down.

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How to explain Platner’s political ascent from his personal swamp? Wrong question. How to explain the personal swamp fuelling Platner’s ascent? In large part, Platner won because progressive white women saw nothing to seriously object to.

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A 2024 Gallup poll found that the partisan gap between American men and women has almost doubled in the past 25 years among 18-29-year-olds. These women are swelling the leftward voting trend among educated progressive white women of all ages. Polls show they are also “more likely to vote, care about political issues, and participate in social movements and protests” than their male peers — even though they tend to be less politically literate than them.

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Platner’s unexpected popularity encouraged endorsements from female heavy hitters like Elizabeth Warren, who said in a video produced after revelations of past racist and misogynistic social media comments, that he was a “fighter” and the “real deal” who has “the grit to go against the grain.” So much for female oppression under the heavy hand of patriarchal scourges like the #MeToo (alleged) campus “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity.”

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It seems that achieving that elusive Democratic Senate majority, and the promise of a Trump impeachment it represents override the party’s previous feminist principles. In a cringe-inducing interview on CNN, Jodi Kantor, #MeToo reporter at the New York Times, got on her metaphorical hands and knees to scrub Platner’s muddy footprints from Maine’s clean, pine-scented living room rug: No, Kantor said, these are not “classic” #MeToo accusations against Platner that have come forward, contrasting these accusations against Trump’s, except, ok, for that “one allegation of crossing a line physically,” but normally, when Graham Platner acts creepy and coercive to women, it’s…it’s ..so they were “mostly made in the context of consensual relationships,” she fansplains. “And so, I think it speaks to the kind of confusion of the long post-#MeToo moment in which, like, gender-related accusations get bundled together. But they’re actually very different.”