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A high-profile Democrat has expressed concerns with party candidate Graham Platner’s Maine US Senate campaign amid revelations that Platner reportedly sent a number of sexually explicit messages to other women while married.
“Yes, I have concerns,” Cory Booker, the US senator from New Jersey, said Sunday on ABC’s This Week when host Jonathan Karl when asked about the Platner revelations. “That guy has questions to answer – and that’s what campaigns are for.”
Booker then emphasized the importance of the Democratic party winning a majority in the US House and Senate in November’s midterm elections as the halfway mark of Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches.
“So much is riding on Democrats taking control” of Congress from the president’s Republican party, said Booker, who alluded to increased prices in the country, including for gasoline with the US war in Iran unresolved. “If we do not get the votes necessary to take care of the House and the Senate, we will continue to have an out-of-control president.”
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Amy Gertner, Platner’s wife, found sexually explicit text messages on her husband’s phone in the spring of 2025 and then shared them with the campaign’s political director at the time, Genevieve McDonald.
McDonald told the New York Times: “The United States Senate is not a training ground for redemption. It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity.”
She resigned from the campaign in October 2025 after controversial Reddit posts made by Platner between 2009 and 2021 – and in the wake of reports of the candidate’s Nazi symbol tattoo.
Gertner, who married Platner in 2023, criticized the leaked texts from the former staffer and noted the couple went into marriage counseling after she discovered the texts.
“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” Gertner said in a statement. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives – the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”
Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee ahead of a 9 June party primary to run against Republican US senator Susan Collins in the November general election. Janet Mills, Maine’s governor and another Democratic contender, dropped out of the race in April.
