Graham Platner says he’s no John Fetterman. But he gets the concerns.
“No one could have predicted that John would turn into the kind of pariah within the Democratic Party that he has become,” he continued, adding, however, that Platner “seems to be a very thoughtful person, genuinely progressive, espousing things that are far to the left of anything John actually supported during his ’22 campaign anyway.”
In addition to the stroke that kept him off the campaign trail for three months, Fetterman faced controversy during his run for Senate. Opponents at the time criticized him for a 2013 incident in which Fetterman, then mayor of Braddock, Pa., chased a black jogger and pointed a gun at him, detaining him because he thought he was fleeing what Fetterman said he believed were gunshots. The man was not armed.
Former Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Pa., was one of Fetterman’s opponents in the 2022 Senate primary. He said Platner should answer questions about his character.
“In summary, what I have to say is that character matters left, right and center,” Lamb said in an email. “In 2022, people thought Fetterman was in the right positions on the left, so they ignored the obvious red flags about his character. The question needs to be asked.”
“A Nazi tattoo is on another level and the candidate’s explanation seems more like an apology to me than a simple ‘I was wrong,'” Lamb continued. “However, he has time to show the character of the man he is today and voters should think about his character separately, regardless of whether he is left-wing, moderate, young or old.”
Even as Platner faces the fallout from his recent controversies, he draws sizable crowds. The 41-year-old oyster farmer spoke to a packed audience at the State Theater in Portland on Sunday.
“It’s funny to me to see the campaign portrayed in the media as collapsing or collapsing — when internally we frankly haven’t felt this strong since the beginning,” Platner told NBC News. “It didn’t sink my campaign. In fact, it seems like, in many ways, it made us stronger.”
“I want to talk about my evolution as a human being,” he said. “Many Americans also want to have hope that we can change and evolve, and that we can have a society that extends grace and forgiveness to people.”
Maine’s Senate race is shaping up to be the most hotly contested of the 2026 cycle — the Republican-held seat that Democrats have the best chance of flipping on a map with few, if any, other realistic opportunities to pick up. Platner, who also shares advisers with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, is running on an agenda focused on housing affordability, universal access to health care and ending U.S. involvement in foreign wars.
About a dozen rally attendees who spoke with NBC News at Platner’s event said they did not view his past comments as disqualifying, although some said it gave them pause and they were undecided. Others, however, said they accepted his explanation and planned to vote for him in next year’s primaries, where he faces several rivals, including Democratic Gov. Janet Mills.
Additionally, Tuesday’s election showed that Democratic voters may be less likely to punish controversial candidates. In New York, Mamdani beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by about 9 points in a race where a number of top New York Democrats declined to support the self-described democratic socialist or withheld their support for months, fearing his left-wing advocacy would hurt the party’s electoral chances elsewhere.
In Virginia, Democratic candidate for attorney general Jay Jones comfortably defeated his Republican opponent after the release of years-old text messages revealing Jones suggested the top Republican in the state’s House of Delegates deserved “two bullets to the head.” Jones released a statement apologizing for the comments.
A former Fetterman campaign official said it would be unwise for Democrats to rule out rallying behind candidates like Fetterman and Platner, noting that Fetterman managed to score a big victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican challenger, even after having to leave the campaign trail for months. On Platner, this person said that while the tattoo was a problem, she considered it a bit over-the-top, emphasizing that it’s “not like you have a swastika.”
“You have to have cognitive dissonance not to understand the difference between Fetterman and Graham,” this person said. “And so just to say, ‘Oh, well, John is a right-wing guy in Israel and now he spends all his time on Fox News messaging Republicans, attributing that as the obvious arc of someone who presents himself as a left-wing, non-establishment white guy, and obviously they’ll do the same thing when they’re elected, is just stupid.’
In an interview with NBC News before launching his campaign, Platner said his term would focus on “fighting for working class values” and “fighting for policies that help working people.” [claw] reclaiming much of the power that has been consolidated in the establishment’s upper class type of politics. He said that “getting drawn into a lot of these minor types of culture war skirmishes is not the solution at all.”
He also praised Rep. Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, who announced Thursday he would not run for reelection, for working to protect working-class voters in his state, as well as Sen. Josh Hawley, Democrat of Missouri, for his efforts to ban stock trading in Congress.
Speaking to NBC News, Senator Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, said he was not concerned that Platner was some sort of “crypto Fetterman.”
“He’s running a very authentic race,” Gallego said, adding, “I’m not worried about how he ends up governing because I think he’s been upfront about who he is. I think he’s caught fire. He’s going through tough times, but people still show up in the middle of nowhere to see him speak. So he must be doing something right.”
Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist, said he thought Platner would govern as “a pretty straight progressive,” noting that he never believed Fetterman was that progressive.
“My biggest problem,” Schale said, “I’m not convinced he can win the general election.”
