Democrats need to rethink their image of a ‘man of the people’ | Judith Levine

5 hours ago 16

Ana Marie Cox’s New Republic profile of the Maine oyster farmer and former Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner begins with an encounter on the shore with a salt in rubber boots. Learning that she’s looking for Platner, the guy says: “Good man.”

In the 2025 article, Cox is charmed by Platner, who’s as voluble as this guy is terse. She’s impressed by the oyster, calling it a metaphor for “how labor, science, and regulation can still stitch together a community and economy.”.

She is unvexed by one of Platner’s biggest contradictions – his protest of the war in Iraq, followed by his enlistment to fight in it, his three voluntary tours of duty with the reputedly badass marines, plus one with the army in Afghanistan. “I might have read too much Hemingway,” explains Platner, who returned from the wars in 2008 with numerous physical injuries and a case of PTSD.

Writes Cox: “It reminds me of some boys I grew up with. Young men for whom joining the military and radical protests were both ways of proving you could take more than most people could handle.”

Muck-smeared, disheveled, battle-scarred yet a little bookish, Platner was the very model of the working-class political hero. “If Bernie is what righteous anger sounds like,” says Cox, “Platner is what it sounds like when that anger represents longing for connection.”

For more than a year, his allies strained to keep connecting. Progressives agreed to overlook the Nazi-adjacent tattoo, whose meaning Platner claimed not to have understood. When it was revealed that he’d used the “R” word on social media, they accepted his apology: “I am endeavoring to improve, every single day. I am not a perfect person.”

Supporters in Maine defended him when his primary opponent, the Maine governor, Janet Mills, ran an ad highlighting social media posts in which Platner appeared to blame victims of rape. Under one Reddit post about rape prevention, he commented: “How about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?”

Each time he was challenged, he vowed that he is a different person than he was then.

Even after Jenny Racicot, a woman he dated and a political compatriot, accused him of raping her, the feminist state representative Valli Geiger posted that while she would never “slander” Racicot, she believes “Graham is a man becoming a better man and working hard on it”.

But on Monday, when Politico published a detailed, highly convincing account of Racicot’s experience, and she told CNN that Platner had “absolutely” raped her, most of his allies decided they’d taken more than they could handle.

On Wednesday night, in an 11-minute video suspending his campaign, Platner vehemently denied Racicot’s accusation. The distress and lividness in his face signaled honesty. It is possible that if he did it, he may not know he did. Racicot told Politico he was “almost blackout drunk” that night; he fell asleep afterward and didn’t remember any of it the next morning. We may never know, or find out why she came forward now, when the party has less than a month to choose a replacement.

“We’re not doing it because of the allegations,” said Platner in the video. “We’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.” It is unclear whom Platner is blaming for his downfall: Racicot, anyone who persuaded her to speak up or the Democratic establishment, which abandoned him. He is blaming everyone but himself.

Credible as I find Racicot’s account based on the reporting to date, I suspect more people might have defended him were it not for the unceasing ickiness preceding it. But why did everyone put up with the ickiness until now?

Here’s my take: a party aching for working-class cred – and progressives aching for real working-class politics – feel they’re in no position to be picky. The working-class hero doesn’t even have to be working-class. Platner is a private school graduate, son of a lawyer and a restaurateur, and grandson of a prominent architect. His main source of income is almost $5,000 a month in veterans’ benefits.

But what they feel least picky about is how a candidate regards or treats women.

“Voters don’t want authentic,” noted the New York Times Opinion page writer Michelle Cottle. “They want authentically charming and folksy and looking regular guy-y.”

Cottle may not be suggesting this, but by the unacknowledged logic of candidate selection, across the political spectrum, “regular” means white and “guy-y” means masculine. Only this regular guy can reach the alienated “working-class” voter – because, it is assumed, “working class” also means white and male.

This imagined white, male, working-class voter, furthermore, cares about one “real” issue: his pocketbook. He might also care about the wars in Gaza and Iran, about corruption and healthcare. But what he feels least picky – or icky – about is how a candidate treats women. Because he is a he, “women’s issues” are way down the list, if they’re on it at all.

Democrats are more guilty than Republicans on this score. For 50 years, while the Republican party courted the anti-abortion movement, Democrats remained squeamish about defending abortion rights. I have lost count of the male pundits who’ve suggested that if Democrats want to win, they should shut up about abortion altogether. As they see it, the existential equality of half the American people is not just a boutique issue, it’s an electoral liability.

So we end up with Graham Platner, a brilliant campaigner, bona fide progressive and apparently nice guy most of the time. His class politics are flawless. His rough edges just happen to be bigoted and sexist.

I think I speak for many women when I say I’ve had it with the image of the working-class populist as a bearded, buff, or scruffy guy whose toughness comes through in threatening behavior or dismissal of violence against women. How about some working-class feminist progressive populist women, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, some Jewish socialist nebbishes like Bernie Sanders or gay brainiacs like Pete Buttigieg?

And I would gladly vote for any straight white male working-class feminist progressive populist man who is confident enough about himself and his politics that he need never flex his muscles or utter a disparaging word about women.