“We continued to ask Graham for the billionth time in this race if there was any information he had not shared,” says one adviser. “He continued to say no.”
Graham Platner fought angrily to the bitter end to stay in the U.S. Senate race as advisers tried to persuade him he was finished, according to a new report.
“Headlines had been bad enough already, and his campaign aides spent much of their time dealing with lurid rumors,” says the Vanity Fair’s Aidan McLaughlin, “that there was a sex tape on the verge of leaking. That notes from his therapist were floating around.
“One adviser tells Vanity Fair that the relentless onslaught of speculation was “disorienting,” McLaughlin writes.
As fresh rumors of serious misconduct began to swirl, Morris Katz, one of the Democrat insurgent’s top strategists, took the first step toward ending the turbulent campaign.
Fearing the worst, he contacted several pollsters to commission surveys for alternative candidates, according to McLaughlin.
Platner’s inner circle, meanwhile, questioned the candidate directly on what they were hearing.
“We continued to ask Graham for the billionth time in this race if there was any information he had not shared,” says one adviser. “He continued to say no.”
After Politico quoted earlier this month a former girlfriend that Platner had raped her five years ago, a key campaign advisor realized “there was not a path forward,” Vanity Fair says.
“Platner wasn’t easily convinced and fought to stay in the race,” McLaughlin reports. “As his staff confronted him, he responded with anger to suggestions that he drop out.”
As a wave of prominent Democrats withdrew their endorsements and called for the end of his campaign the man leading the quixotic effort apparently started to grasp the reality.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a prominent Platner backer who was on a trip through the Middle East when the story broke, withdrew his endorsement in a post on X. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders said he had called the candidate and urged him to drop out.
“The slow-burn collapse of the Platner campaign ignited a battle between the outsider progressive and the party apparatus he so often railed against on the campaign trail,” McLaughlin writes. “It started to look more like a hostage situation after a Platner campaign staffer told reporters that the candidate expected to have a say in the selection of his successor.”
Once Devon Murphy-Anderson the executive director of the Maine Democrat Party accused the campaign of meddling in the succession process, the internecine back-and-forth proved there was no going back.
Platner responded angrily, furiously denying the claims and casting the pressure as a “political witch hunt.”
Eventually, the advisers convinced Platner that he had no other choice. They urged him to take a “conciliatory tone” in his announcement video, a suggestion Platner refused.
True to form, he conditioned his exit from the race on being able to rage against “the establishment” one last time.
“Platner walked out onto the porch of his home in Sullivan and recorded a fiery 11-minute video denying the allegations, assailing his political opponents, and casting the collapse of his campaign as the consequence of partisan sabotage.” – Vanity Fair
“The corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury, and executioner,” Platner said. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people.”
In his defiant letter of resignation to the secretary of state, Platner never addressed why he was quitting the race or whether in doing so he had made a deal with the attorney general to escape possible criminal charges.
