Graham Platner needs to stay home and shut up | Steve Collins
After his spectacular post-primary flameout, former U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner had every reason to go home, spend time with his wife and maybe catch up on his Netflix viewing.
The one thing he really doesn’t need to do, at least until the election is over, is to stand on a stage in Maine and deliver a speech about the “history of unions and the important role organized labor has played in our communities and our country” or anything else, for that matter.
Sure, Platner has a right to speak up about anything he likes. But taking the focus off the man Democrats chose to replace Platner, former state Senate President Troy Jackson, is a grotesque disservice to a party that is trying to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
It’s clear that Platner and his devoted minions still don’t understand the politics at play in this race.
Worse still, some of them — perhaps including the ex-harbormaster of Sullivan himself — are holding on to this weird notion that Platner could yet emerge as Maine’s next senator. Seriously.
There’s a move afoot to persuade Platner to file as a write-in candidate in the Senate race by the Aug. 25 deadline.
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A mysterious group of people who call themselves “volunteers from Maine and surrounding states” have created a spiffy online petition urging Platner to step back into the fray. The person behind the website, a New York software builder named Danny Aguilar, told me that “if people are wondering why an ‘out-of-stater’ cares about a Maine Senate race I’d say, if lobbyists can do it why can’t private citizens?”
The site isn’t shy about making its case for Platner (“9 DAYS FOR GRAHAM TO DECLARE”). It says, correctly, that Platner won the June 9 primary with 72% of the vote. Then it says, incorrectly, that “the party threw the result out. Nobody got a say in that.”
In fact, Platner quit the race after his donors and major supporters told him they would no longer back him in the wake of a scathing Politico story that included credible allegations of sexual assault by the candidate.
His departure left Democrats scrambling to fill a vacancy. With the solid support of his party, Jackson emerged to take on the tough assignment of sending Sen. Collins into retirement.
But the Platner diehards, who blame everyone but Platner for the disintegration of his in every respect astonishing campaign, can’t accept the obvious truth of what happened. Neither can Platner, if this decision to speak at the Labor Day event is any indication.
Hard as it is to believe, I can’t help thinking this reemergence, paired with the write-in effort, are a means of testing the waters to see if he can still win on Election Day.
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The write-in proposal, which would require Platner’s public support, urges voters to write in Platner as their first choice on the ballot and to write in Jackson as their second. That way, they say, if Platner isn’t one of the top two finishers, no harm has been done to Jackson.
In one sense, that’s true. But any attention devoted to Platner between now and November would be harmful to Jackson.
The simple truth is that Platner is somebody that Democrats shouldn’t have to deal with again.
That he can’t stay home for a few more months is a telling sign of how selfish he is. It calls into question how much he really cares about defeating Susan Collins.
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Tagged: columns, election 2026, senate 2026
Steve Collins became an opinion columnist for the Maine Trust for Local News in April of 2025. A journalist since 1987, Steve has worked for daily newspapers in New York, Connecticut and Maine and served. More by Steve Collins
