Platner Says Democrat Leaders Threatened To “Rip My Life Apart” Before He Launched His Senate Campaign

Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Graham Platner is blaming his own party for trying to get him out of the race to make room for Janet Mills.

Even before Platner entered the race, he says in an interview with Slate magazine, his campaign “received messages from Washington, from the national-level party, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee,” that it was Mills, the term-limited governor, who would be the nominee.

“Very early on, we received very clear warnings that I had no right to do this, that they were the ones who choose,” he says. “They had a candidate they had chosen: Gov. Mills. She had not announced yet but was going to be the candidate. And I had essentially not done my time. I was skipping the line. And they essentially said that if we do this, they’re going to come after me. They’re going to rip my life apart.”

Platner says he believes that Democratic leaders in Washington – not Republicans – were the ones who outed his so-called ‘Nazi’ tattoo, which has become a lightning rod for his critics claiming he is a racist.

“The governor announced the campaign on a Tuesday and all of the negative stories began to drop Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of that week,” he said. “You don’t have to do a lot of deep thinking to find connections there.”

When asked by Slate’s Anna Sale whether New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, has spoken to him Platner replied with one word. “Nope.”

Platner had the same single-word reply when asked whether he has heard from Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator who heads the Democratic National Campaign Committee.

“We’ve never spoken to anybody at the DSCC, period,” he told Slate. “The only folks I’ve spoken to in Washington are other senators who have been very supportive of what I’ve done, both publicly and behind the scenes.”

Platner, who polls show is roughly 30 points ahead of Mills in the Senate primary race, suggests Democrats will lose against Republican incumbent five-term Sen. Susan Collins unless they coalesce behind him.

“A bunch of national campaign people in Washington are utterly convinced that they know more about Maine and the Maine electorate than people in Maine, despite the fact that in 2020, they somehow managed to lose the state by eight points in the Senate race while Joe Biden won it by eight or nine points in the presidential race,” he said.

Platner also downplayed the importance of the debate over whether boys should be allowed to play girls sports that Mills has made a centerpiece of her campaign via her ongoing, highly-publicized, dispute with President Trump.

“I think there are, like, two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine,” he said. “There are 40,000 Mainers who are going to lose health care because of the lack of the Affordable Care Act extension. One of those things seems very important and real to me. One of them seems like an invented culture-war scare to keep people divided.”

Platner told Slate that when he was captain of his high-school wrestling team, “I wrestled girls. Nobody cared.

“There was no uproar,” he said. “We had girls wrestling in boys wrestling, or vice versa, 20-plus years ago. There was a girl on our high school football team. Nobody cared. I’m sorry – I cannot take it seriously.”