Transcript of The Implosion of Graham Platner New

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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the implosion of Graham Plattner's campaign for U.S. Senate, the battle over who should replace him on the ballot, and the identity crisis it has laid bare inside the Democratic Party. I spoke with two of my colleagues, national political correspondents Lisa Lehrer and Shane Goldmacher. It's Wednesday, July 8th.

Lisa and Shane, thank you for making time in the middle of a very big, very live story.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thank you.

We are talking to you around 4:30 PM on Tuesday, and I want to let listeners know exactly when we're talking because this is a story that's changing a lot, hour by hour. But at this very moment, it pretty much appears that it's a question of when rather than if Graham Plattner ends his Democratic campaign for US Senate in Maine, which is a race and a seat that could determine the overall control of the entire state. Senate this fall, which obviously has all kinds of implications, including the fate of President Trump's agenda for the rest of his second term. Do I have that when-not-if calculation correct?

That seems exactly right at this point. There are basically no major Democratic individuals or groups that are still actively supporting Graham Platner. There's been nobody who has spoken up for him since this allegation. And in fact, the people most supportive of him, probably most notably including Bernie Sanders, today came out and said, it's time for him to step aside.

Just catalog for me, Lisa, some of the people who have in the past day or so told Graham Plattner it's over.

We're talking about everybody from the Maine Democratic Party to the head of the state Senate in Maine to their gubernatorial nominee to Senator Chuck Schumer, who's the head of Democrats in the Senate, to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who controls the Senate campaign committee, to Zohran Mondani, to Elizabeth Warren. So this was a sentiment that really went across a party that really doesn't agree on all that much when it comes to strategy or policy. But on this one issue, that Graham Plattner has to go, everyone seemed to agree.

And it wasn't just all the people, it was the money. The groups that control the money that has been reserved in ads in this race said no more money for Graham Plattner if he is still the nominee. And if there's no money, there's no competing against Susan Collins, who has tens of millions of dollars reserved already.

Okay.

Lisa, let's talk about how the Plattner campaign reached this crisis point. And you know this story almost better than anyone because a few weeks back, you and Katie Glick came on the show to talk about the reporting you both did that in many ways started this all. You were looking into allegations about Plattner's treatment of women. You had spoken with several of his former girlfriends. That story has since evolved and gotten us, I think, to this moment.

Right. So we had spoken to 6 women who had previously been in relationships with Graham Plattner. 3 of them described unsettling incidents that at times felt physically violent or menacing towards them. One of those women who we had spoken to, a woman named Jenny Raseco, who is a Democrat who lives in Maine, after we spoke to her, she came forward with much more explosive allegations.

Which were what?

Basically, in interviews both with Politico and then CNN, she said that Graham Plattner sexually assaulted her.

It was at the end of 2021.

She says that they were in a relationship for 2 years or so, on and off.

It was a night where him and I were texting back and forth, and he had taken something that I said as, as an invitation. And I said, no, don't come over. Like half an hour later, I heard a noise outside my door. And then he came in.

He came over uninvited, let himself into her house.

And I was lying on the couch. It was probably pretty late at night. And I was getting— I was already ready for bed. I just wasn't in bed. And I looked at him, and I remember this very specific look in his eyes. And I could smell alcohol. And I was like, this is different. He is— Heavily intoxicated.

And she said he started climbing on top of her and trying to be intimate with her.

And I remember just at first being like, "Hey, I'm not into this. Like, don't. I'm not in the mood.

Like, don't." She says that she told him to stop and said, "No, no," but he kept going.

Is there any way that he thought this was consensual or no?

Just because I don't believe that you can think that that scenario was consensual. I mean, when somebody in the middle of it says, "Don't touch me," like, that's obviously not consensual.

She claims he raped her.

She claims he raped her. And, you know, when she spoke to us earlier, she had described on the record what she called reckless and unsettling behavior by Graham Plattner. But she also spoke to us off the record, And we honored that agreement. She has since told Politico, and later CNN, that she didn't go public with the specific assault at the time because she didn't want to be known as a rape victim.

Hmm.

But as she watched him continue to be in the race, and she watched the reaction to our story, and she also connected with a woman who was involved with helping survivors of sexual assault tell their story, she decided she wanted to come forward and give this more detailed account.

Lisa, what has Grant Plattner said about this specific allegation?

Well, he released a video.

I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me.

And he denied that this sexual encounter was non-consensual.

Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false.

He didn't deny the encounter itself, just that it basically— that it was an assault. But he did also acknowledge the potential political implications of this.

Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.

And he said that he was taking a step back from his campaign to reflect. Which then, of course, prompted the deluge of calls.

Right. But Shane, it did not prompt, at least at this hour, him to leave the race. So as the entire party abandoned him and said, "Your campaign is over," what have the conversations been like inside the Plattner campaign?

I think you have to put in context all the other things that Graham Plattner has survived so far, which is the accusation that he knowingly had a Nazi tattoo, a tattoo he has since had covered up, all of the Reddit posts that came out that would in normal circumstances potentially sink a candidate, and even the previous questions about his relationships with women. And yet he won the Democratic primary. So yes, he said he was going to take time to reflect, and both Lisa and I have done reporting that shows that he seems to be aware of the political reality around him, but the campaign's discussions are about shaping the field after his exit, making sure—

meaning what?

Making sure that somebody who is aligned with his ideological movement becomes the nominee, that the Democratic Party doesn't pick an insider who is opposed to his view that was aligned with Bernie Sanders and the sort of left-wing ideology that he was pushing to have an expansive view of government to help the working class.

So despite being engulfed in this scandal, he wants to play a big role in picking his replacement. Is that right? And is that a reasonable request?

Well, he and his team believe they have leverage in this race. Their argument is that they were turning out thousands of Maine voters to these town hall meetings that was happening all over the state, that they really energized the base of the Democratic Party behind their bid, and that to win a general election, no matter who the Democratic nominee is, Democrats in Maine will need those people. But, you know, it's an open question over how much leverage he really has. Like, do Maine Democrats want to be taking advice from someone who left them in this position?

Shane, how exactly is this going to work? Assuming that Graham Flatner does in fact leave the race, how is his replacement chosen, and what role would he play in that exactly?

I mean, yeah, I don't think you can talk about this without describing the timing, which is the Democratic Party and Graham Platner have one week to get him off the ballot because there's this hard deadline of July 13th for him to withdraw and be replaced on the ballot by a different Democrat. And it is a pretty audacious thing to say, "I'm being accused of rape, and I'm going to try to shape my successor in this race." But to the extent that he does have leverage, it's because of this deadline. Because until then, he's the nominee, and if he doesn't get out, he will remain the nominee.

Because he could, in theory, just sit there, not drop out, and make life very, very miserable for the Democratic Party. But let's just play with the idea that the party is going to maybe be in conversation with him and find some mutually agreeable way of picking his successor. What might that look like?

Look, one of his concerns that I think is shared more broadly across the Democratic Party is the specter of the Biden-Harris replacement. That is major scar tissue in the Democratic psyche among consultants, among elected officials, among voters. How that process played out has left a lingering sense of distrust in the party that's, you know, really pervaded into the race we're in now. And so I think there is a real awareness of wanting to have Maine voters and really Democratic Democratic voters across the country feel that his successor was chosen by some form of Democratic process.

Because when Biden yielded to Harris, there was no role for Democratic voters. It was kind of a smoky backroom situation.

It was kind of a smoky backroom situation. You know, people came out and they endorsed Harris very, very quickly. And she just sort of became the new nominee. And I think that just left a lot of a lot of concern and a lot of mistrust in the party. And it's part of the reason the party has struggled still to this day with, you know, negative views of their brand, which, you know, as our poll showed last month, could potentially hurt them in these midterm elections.

Quite arguably, it's one of the reasons why someone like Graham Plattner did so well in this race to begin with. There's so much residual distrust of the Democratic establishment.

Yeah. Let's wonk out in Maine for, like, one minute, which is there were two races that national Democrats tried to intervene in in Maine this year. One was Graham Plattner's race, where the party apparatus backed the two-term governor, Janet Mills, whose campaign got so little traction she dropped out a month before the primary. There was a second race also, which is the key House seat in Maine, where again, national Democrats picked a favored candidate, they intervened, tried to support this person, and that candidate also lost an important Democratic primary. So the voters of Maine have shown they are unhappy with getting kinds of directions from national Democratic leaders. And Plattner and people around Plattner see him as a part of that movement. Even if he is gone, they want that somehow to live on. The challenge is, given who he is at this moment—

Right.

—is his presence in negotiating that helpful to finding another person? That's not at all clear.

And there's another challenge too. That Graham Plattner, as we said, has to be out of the race by July 13th. Someone else needs to be the nominee by July 27th. There's not a lot of time, and it's totally unclear how you get from where we are now to where the party needs to end up at by the 27th of July.

That's not a lot of time.

Right. And let's keep in mind, we are less than 4 months away from Election Day. So this is a moment— in any midterm race where literally every single day matters. So they're also sort of costing themselves political momentum, political opportunity in a way for every single day the party does not have a firm nominee in this crucial, crucial Senate race.

What are some of the ideas being kicked around for a process of picking Plattner's successor that would avoid a Biden-Harris kind of scenario so far?

Yeah, there are a bunch of things. Two that I've heard the most about. One is coming up with some kind of convention where you would select delegates, and those delegates would then pick the nominee. Another is having a statewide caucus where everybody, actual people can go vote. Like another primary. Like a basically another primary, but hosted by the state party. In the middle of the summer. In the middle of the summer. As those discussions are happening, what we're seeing is the fissures inside the Democratic coalition ideologically just explode right now. The left is saying, We have to have somebody like one of us, like Platner, given their successes in these primaries. And the party establishment, the old guard is looking at this like, guys, you got this and look what we ended up with. Can we not do that again? Maybe we don't want a working class fresh face who's never held elected office, who we don't know about their past. Maybe we want an elected official who has a long record, who we are familiar with, who has proven that they can win the kind of votes you need to win an election. And the big arguments that are happening about, like, where should the Democratic Party go, they're happening really intensely in Maine right now.

Right. Yeah.

And our listeners can't see us, of course, but I was shaking my head a little bit when Shane was talking just because I think it's important for people to understand things like caucuses and conventions. These are things that parties spend months, if not years, planning how they're gonna execute in a way that is credible. And they can still be a mess.

We were at Iowa.

Well, when there's a mess.

And there's still a mess.

But it's a way that's effective that ends up with an election result that everyone feels like they can trust. Right. And now this Maine Democratic Party has to do this— In 2 weeks.

In 2 weeks. Yeah. Kind of an insane proposition.

It's an insane proposition, and they can't even really launch full bore into it because Platner has not pulled himself off the ballot yet.

We'll be right back.

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Shane, once we figure out how a replacement for Graham Plattner is theoretically chosen, and assuming he drops out, who are the people who might replace him? Who are raising their hands? Is there a front runner? Who might be the next Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine?

We definitely do not yet have a front runner. We definitely have a lot of people raising their hands or saying, I'm fielding phone calls, sort of leading the field. Is 3 candidates who ran for governor in Maine this year, all of whom lost that primary. Troy Jackson, who had Bernie Sanders' endorsement in the primary. You have Nirav Shah, who is a Maine public health official who actually finished second in the primary. And then you have Shenna Bellows, uh, who is the Secretary of State, all of whom could conceivably run. You have the Plattner world sort of thinking about other allies, like a state representative. Then you have the people who were in the Senate race who exited when it became clear it was Plattner versus Mills. A brewery owner named Dan Kleban who had declared and then exited the race. Jordan Wood, who had run for Senate, then ran for House, lost the House race.

I'm just gonna interrupt to say, 'cause this is a lot of names to absorb, these do not seem like household names who would catch fire in a few weeks.

Well, there is one household name, Michael. Patrick Dempsey. McDreamy. The actor. The pride of Maine is on the list. You know, I'm not sure how serious that bit is at all, although he was tossed about in one of these polls that was sent out out to Maine voters at one point. But I think that his inclusion really gives you a sense of where the state of things are. Chaotic. Chaotic, yes. Okay.

Is it possible the state's governor, Democrat Janet Mills, who was seen by the establishment as the logical person to have beaten Graham Plattner— she didn't— she might just suddenly become the nominee?

I mean, there's always a chance, but I think it's a pretty hard case to make given that she exited the race because she said she couldn't raise enough money, she wasn't making any traction in the polls, and didn't even make it to primary day.

She's come up in precisely zero of the phone calls that I've had with people about who is the likeliest to replace Plattner at this point. Okay.

Given the turmoil on the Democratic side of this race now, and the reality that Susan Collins has been the United States Senator in Maine for a very long time, how should we think about both sides' odds in this race and how they have just changed in the last few days?

So right now it's a total disastrous mess for Democrats, but there is a silver lining that a lot of Democrats are seeing, which is that Graham Plattner, before this scandal, was looking like a wounded candidate. The New York Times just did a series of polls in all of the key Senate battleground states that Democrats are trying to flip to take the majority, and Plattner scored worse than all the other Democrats on some of the most important questions of character, whether you are the right moral values to be a leader, And Susan Collins was among the highest-scoring people. And so there are a lot of Democrats saying, "Hey, this might be messy now, but we have a chance for a fresh start in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024, in a state that leans Democratic." You don't need a movement leader like Graham Plattner, somebody who has a particular charisma. You might just need a Joe Schmo, generic Democrat, can beat Susan Collins. Now, That might be a little ambitious given how many races Susan Collins has won. She's beaten an awful lot of Democrats in the past, in good years for Democrats, in bad years for Democrats.

But this does not look like a good year for the Republican Party, and the Democrats are excited about the possibility of starting over at this point.

Yeah. And I think one way to assess that is how Republicans are feeling. And Republicans are feeling fairly disappointed by this outcome, at least in private conversations, because they felt that they had a candidate in Graham Plattner who was extremely flawed. One Republican group spent $9 million since the end of April— Wow. —running ads defining him as bigoted and violent and too risky for the state. So they were charging into this general election defining Plattner as unfit for office. And now they're gonna get some new person, and they certainly will have to do all the research to figure out who this person is and figure out how to define them. In a way that works for Republicans in a very, very short period of time. And I think it's also important to remember in these conversations that Senator Collins has plenty of her own vulnerabilities. And there's two that stood out quite strongly in our polling. Please. One is her age. She's 73 years old at a time when we know voters are very, very eager for generational change, change in Washington. She's running for a sixth term. And also, She is aligned with the Republican Party, and she's, you know, been— And an unpopular president.

An unpopular president who she has, for all her sort of moderate maverick reputation, she has voted with the vast majority of the time. And she's in a national political environment that is quite bad for Republicans. Not only is there an unpopular president, there is an unpopular war, and people are really, really anxious about the economy.

Which she did vote against via the War Powers Resolution. But Shane, is it right to think of Collins as weak and as Republicans not looking forward to having to pivot from making a case against Plattner to suddenly making an affirmative case for Susan Collins?

I think that the Republican brand in Maine is weak. I don't think that there's evidence that Susan Collins herself is as weak. In that poll, we asked voters, how do you feel about President Trump handling the cost of living issue, which is for so many voters the defining issue of this moment? His approval rating was 31%. So if you are running and you're Susan Collins, you're gonna need to win a huge chunk of voters who think the president is blowing the issue most important to them. So I do think the president creates deep vulnerabilities for her in that state.

Lisa, just remind us of where this Maine Senate race fits into the national Senate map. And let's presume for a minute that this race gets a little bit challenging for Democrats to win, despite what Shane just said, and maybe they don't win the Maine Senate race. Let's just take Maine off the map. Can Democrats win back the Senate without it?

It's not impossible, but it's very, very hard. To win control of the Senate, Democrats must retain all the states they currently hold and flip 4 Republican-held seats. No simple task. No simple task. There are 6 battleground states that both sides are looking at. Of those 6 battleground states, only one went for Harris in 2024, and that is Maine. So Maine has long represented what many Democrats believe is their best shot to flip one of those 4 Republican-held seats that they have to flip. So without Maine, it's not impossible, but the task gets much harder.

Yeah, I mean, the task is just really hard. And 4 of those 6 battleground states are places that Trump won by 10%age points or more. Democrats don't hold any seats in the entire United States Senate that look like that. So the idea they're gonna flip 2 or 3 of them is really, really tough.

I think it's fair to say that the situation that Platner has created in Maine was the Democratic establishment's worst fear. They articulated it over the last year over and over again as they made the case against Graham Platner as the nominee in Maine. They felt it's a winnable seat with a deeply flawed candidate. They fought it at every turn. And it came to embody this tension we keep talking about on the show between the establishment and the insurgent left. And at times, it has felt like the Democratic establishment has felt wise in its conclusions about Maine, and there have been times it felt like they were completely wrong. They were wrong to assume that Platner couldn't win, and then they were right to have intuited that he was a flawed candidate. Ultimately, is this a vindication, what's happened in Maine, for the Democratic establishment or not?

I don't think that there are any winners right now in this process, right? No one's vindicated. No one is vindicated. The Democratic establishment had originally recruited Janet Mills, the state's two-term governor, but she would've been the oldest freshman senator in American history, right after Joe Biden's age was the central issue of the 2024 campaign. And that was just a mismatch for where voters are. How this plays out going forward, there could be some winners, right? But they have to navigate the very ideological divides that are tearing at the party in this really compressed time period to find somebody who can continue to keep the real grassroots motivation and momentum that built up Graham Plattner and not turn off the rest of the voters.

Mm-hmm. And in August, we're gonna have a Michigan primary where these same forces will clash up against each other again. You have a candidate, Hailey Stevens, who's preferred by Schumer, going up against Abdul El-Sayed, who is backed by some of the same strategists that backed Graham Plattner. So the party will go through another round of this, you know, shortly after they navigate through this Maine mess.

Is it possible or likely even that the leaders of the Democratic Party play it really safe and not embrace all this insurgent energy at a time when Democratic Socialists are ousting incumbents in New York? And winning in Colorado. And the most successful strategy, and you've both documented it, is to run against the Democratic Party brand in order to represent the Democratic Party brand.

I mean, the Democratic Party brand is in crisis. I've been talking with a bunch of Democrats in recent weeks just to put in perspective how big a deal it was that Platner became the nominee and how important it would be if Abdul El-Sayed was the nominee in Michigan. The party establishment basically hasn't lost a competitive Senate primary in 10 or 15 years. Like, Chuck Schumer and the DSCC have picked these candidates in basically every competitive race. And these are the first instances where voters have come and said, "You know what? Not so much. We don't like that. We want to try something different." And the party is not sure how to deal with this. This is a new phenomenon. We've seen this in the Republican Party, where the voters rejected the leadership following Trump, but, like, this is new for the Democrats. And so, they're just— a steep learning curve because it is all so new.

Mm-hmm. It also feels like there's a very important lesson here for running against the Democratic brand. And that's about the value of vetting and the tradition of evaluating candidates the establishment has put an emphasis on for a very long time. As you both know, there's a group of political consultants who took some measure of pride in bucking that set of protocols and traditions when they found Graham Plattner. And I wonder if they now second-guess the pride they took in bypassing some of that traditional vetting.

Look, I think there was a desire in Democratic circles to find candidates who had, quote unquote, "authenticity." That was the big buzzword. But authenticity comes with authentic problems and missteps and mistakes. I think the people involved with the campaign in Graham Plattner's race felt that voters would like a narrative of someone sort of pushing through adversity, cleaning up their life, finding a new path forward. And I think voters do like those kinds of stories. Everybody likes those kinds of stories. But the question is, how much of their past will voters say is acceptable, at least when it comes to Democratic candidates? Right. Of course, authenticity doesn't always come with flaws.

Certainly doesn't always come with an accusation of that serious nature. I suspect that as humbled as some of the strategists are who recruited Graham Plattner, they still would like the party to trust their overall instinct that fighters are required in this moment, that agitators are the future of this party, and that Graham Plattner very successfully challenge that in a way that, his flaws aside, may still want to be a model for the party.

I think there is something to that. I think Democrats are looking for people who are willing to fight, and I think there's a pervasive sense among the party's base that Democrats haven't stood up in the past strong enough to Trump and haven't spoken out strong enough for their values. But the issue is finding people who meet their criteria of authenticity, of fighting, but also can be electable by a the general electorate in battleground states. It's a challenge.

I think there's a push to find fighters of the political system, not just of Republicans, but saying everything that has kept you economically where you are needs to be overturned. I'm not just gonna fight Donald Trump, I'm gonna fight to overturn the oligarchs, as Bernie Sanders likes to say, or the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Party donors or the corporate class, right? It's picking villains and fighting those villains and making it not just Trump. The criticism from the left is that too many of the sort of squishy middle say they're gonna be big fighters and they would just wanna fight Donald Trump, but they don't wanna fight other powers that are holding you back. And Platner very much framed his candidacy from the start as a fight not just against Trump, but against Democrats. And it's that energy that is very hard for the Democratic Party establishment to pull in because it's energy against them. Right.

Well, Shane, Lisa, thank you both very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks. Hi, Caitlin. Hi, Carolyn, how are you? Oh, sad. Yeah, yeah, we're just sad. Yesterday afternoon they were reporting it and So by 4:30, I was out there pulling up my lawn sign and just, you know, heartbroken.

On Tuesday, Daily producer Caitlin O'Keefe spoke with Democratic voters in Maine, many of them once passionate supporters of Graham Plattner, about the latest allegation against him and the growing calls for him to drop out of the race.

I went, oh, shit. It's just beyond frustrating. I don't need my politicians to be perfect. As a matter of fact, I'd prefer they'd be imperfect. But it's like, you know, Cram, really? Really? That's awful. The details of the sexual assault feel horrendous. I just could have sat down and cried. I feel a little disgusted with it all. Like, I'm annoyed that there's another dude who is in line to become a leader and we're dealing with this shit again. Whether it's true or false, I think he has to withdraw. Clearly he has to drop out. I absolutely think that he needs to drop out. We'd be better off with another candidate.

If he does drop out, What do you want to see in a replacement for Plattner?

The replacement for Plattner has to have a similar progressive, done-with-the-establishment vibe. Class consciousness, Medicare for All, whole kit and caboodle. Honesty. Honesty and a clean background. You know what I'm saying? I just want a politician that I can trust and that has has integrity. You don't have to make this, like, Carhartt man appear as our savior. I think the Maine Democratic Party has to be very, very careful with how and who they choose to replace him. There are fully competent people out there, but they don't have his charisma. Who— who has it? Is there someone that I don't know about? I truly have no idea of who could step into this role. We just need somebody. We need some hope someplace.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. In the latest challenge to a shaky ceasefire, Iran attacked 3 commercial ships and the United States retaliated by carrying out airstrikes against several Iranian military targets and by revoking Iran's right to sell oil on the open market. The tit-for-tat attacks demonstrated the challenge of restoring both peace and pre-war record levels of trade in the region.

And—

In France, a court has upheld the conviction of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen on charges of embezzlement. But in a major victory for Le Pen, the court lifted a ban on her ability to run for office. Hours later, Le Pen announced her candidacy for the French presidency in 2027, her fourth bid for the office. Le Pen has gotten closer to victory in each of her last three campaigns. Today's episode was produced by Clare Tanaschetter, Shannon Lim, and Caitlin O'Keefe, with help from Jack DeSidero. It was edited by Rachael Quester, Paige Cowan, and Liz O'Balen, and contains music by Elisheba Ittoop and Marian Lozano. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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