They believe the accuser, but they also grieve the demise of a campaign that promised that politics could be different — and they blame those who failed to find a less flawed candidate.

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A person hangs a grid of signs on a wall including those reading, "Women for Graham."

Democrats at every level of the party assumed that women who had supported Mr. Platner would be thrilled that he was being pushed out of the race following an accusation of rape.Credit...Sophie Park for The New York Times

Emily Davies

By Emily Davies

Reporting from Belfast, Maine

July 10, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

Cory Upton-Cosulich sat in a parked car by a hiking trail in Maine this week, fuming over the implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign.

Her anger wasn’t directed at him.

It was aimed at the powerful people far away from her working-class harbor town who, one after the next, had rescinded their endorsements of a candidate she supported in the Democratic primary last month. The feeling was familiar — watching people in Washington decide who should represent her.

She said she believed the woman who had accused Mr. Platner of rape, a claim he has denied. She believed the other allegations too. She decided to support him anyway, because he had promised to work on her behalf, and she believed him.

“Establishment Dems are clutching their pearls because they don’t have him on a leash,” Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40, typed into the box on Facebook asking her what was on her mind as she sat in her car. “The people of Maine want change.”

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Democrats at every level of the party assumed that women who had supported Mr. Platner would be thrilled that he was being pushed out of the race. Instead, some women in this independent-minded slice of the country who powered the progressive upstart’s meteoric rise are angry and grieving.

Some of their pain stems from the loss of a candidate who put words to their frustrations with a political system that they feel makes their lives harder, not easier. Mr. Platner, they said, made them believe that a different reality was possible. His vision resonated so deeply that neighbors who had spent a decade disagreeing found common ground in someone who sounded like them.

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A woman with her hair pulled into a topknot and wearing a tank top poses looking to the side surrounded by pottery.

Cory Upton-Cosulich believed the woman who had accused Mr. Platner of rape, but decided to support him anyway, because she believed he would work on her behalf. He has denied the accusation.Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

That excitement was powerful enough for many women to push past their own feelings, after a monthslong trickle of unsavory revelations, that Mr. Platner was a morally compromised candidate. He had weathered scrutiny over a tattoo that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, a history of offensive online posts and a series of allegations by women he had dated that he had acted in disturbing ways.

“I supported him with trepidation,” said Kat Higgins, 64, a retired nurse, on a power walk through the coastal city of Belfast this week. “I was giving him the benefit of the doubt because of the bigger picture.”

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This week, as news spread that Mr. Platner had withdrawn from the race, The New York Times spoke with more than 40 women along Maine’s coast about why they felt that he had deserved their support.

Many of them explained that, after falling in love with his movement and its possibilities, they placed just as much blame on the leaders who had elevated Mr. Platner, and their failure to find someone less fallible, as on the candidate himself.

“It’s not as simple as we need to protect women,” said Libby Davis, 34, the owner of a raw bar and event company in Portland. “As much as yes, we believe the stories of survivors and that stuff needs to be taken seriously, there is grief there, too, because he was so relatable to Mainers.”

Ms. Davis said she was glad he suspended his campaign, given the seriousness of the latest accusation.

Several women said they recognized Mr. Platner’s swaggering style from men in their lives who had hurt them.

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They supported him anyway, at least until this week, because he cared about their medical bills, had ideas to make housing more affordable and seemed to be a normal guy who meant what he said and took responsibility for past mistakes. They saw him as a potential answer to a leadership void they believed existed on the left since former President Barack Obama left office.

“We were all fired up,” said Nettie Nelson, 77, who worked in a local superintendent’s office near her home in rural Clinton, Maine, before she retired. “I’m disappointed, to say the least.”

Whether Democrats can re-energize the Platner coalition in the coming sprint to replace him on the ballot is one of the questions hanging over the party. Defeating Senator Susan Collins, the five-term Republican who voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the Supreme Court, became a rallying cry for Mr. Platner this year. He also liked to say that Democratic control of the Senate this year runs through Maine.

Now, for many of these women, that prospect feels dim.

As recently as late June, a slight majority of women — 52 percent — said they supported Mr. Platner, according to a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll.

Some of them have not ruled out supporting Ms. Collins now that Mr. Platner is out of the race.

Ms. Collins has held onto her seat despite the state’s Democratic tilt, largely because moderate and independent women were willing to split their ticket to support the longtime senator. Joan Merriam, 79, a lifelong Democrat from Rockland, Maine, was planning to cast a reluctant vote for Mr. Platner until she saw a woman on the news accuse him of rape.

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The moment she heard what he allegedly did, she said she decided to “plug my nose” and vote for Ms. Collins.

“Here in Maine, we are practical people and have a sense of morals,” she said. “We’re not going to tolerate that.”

Now, Ms. Merriam, a retired teacher, said she was interested in Troy Jackson, the former president of Maine’s Senate, and in Nirav Shah, former director of Maine’s public health agency.

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A view of a waterfront with boats, docks and the roofs of buildings visible among treetops.

Women said they supported Mr. Platner because he cared about their medical bills, had ideas to make housing more affordable and seemed to be a normal guy. Credit...Ryan David Brown for The New York Times

Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40, is a mother, a pottery studio owner and a survivor of abuse who said she had made a point of teaching her young daughter that Ms. Collins did not represent the interests of women.

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Although she believes the woman, Jenny Racicot, who said Mr. Platner had raped her, she also believes, with just as much conviction, that politicians in Washington are corrupt. Not only had many of them, including President Trump, survived their own allegations of sexual assault, but they seemed to have lost sight of their main responsibility to the regular people who had elected them, Ms. Upton-Cosulich said.

How else could it be that, after years of promises, she still could not afford medical checkups? With a deductible north of $10,000, she said she had to weigh whether a mammogram was worth the $450 price tag.

She was in the kitchen of the house she cannot afford to buy when she learned that Mr. Platner had suspended his campaign.

The feeling reminded her of 2016, when she read reports that officials with the Democratic National Committee had privately derided and mocked her preferred presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The revelations convinced her that the fix had been in for his primary rival, Hillary Clinton.

Her emotions this week also brought her back to the way she felt in November 2024, when she was handed a ballot featuring former Vice President Kamala Harris, a candidate she never got to choose.

She had wanted 2026 to be different.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990518)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990380)

“Establishment Dems are clutching their pearls because they don’t have him on a leash,” Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40, typed into the box on Facebook asking her what was on her mind as she sat in her car. “The people of Maine want change.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990381)

Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40, is a mother, a pottery studio owner and a survivor of abuse

Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40, is a mother, a pottery studio owner and a survivor of abuse

Ms. Upton-Cosulich, 40, is a mother, a pottery studio owner and a survivor of abuse

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990387)

The feeling reminded her of 2016, when she read reports that officials with the Democratic National Committee had privately derided and mocked her preferred presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The revelations convinced her that the fix had been in for his primary rival, Hillary Clinton.

Her emotions this week also brought her back to the way she felt in November 2024, when she was handed a ballot featuring former Vice President Kamala Harris, a candidate she never got to choose.

She had wanted 2026 to be different.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990389)

I want her to peg me at a secluded cabin in Bar Harbor, then catch fish all day while she fries them up in a cast iron skillet over an open fire.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990391)

She is also like 8x more attractive than the tinder landbeasts Platner was piping.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990396)

They believe the accuser, but they also grieve the demise of a campaign that promised that politics could be different — and they blame those who failed to find a less flawed candidate.

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politics could be different? Platner was chosen by two idiots looking for a reality TV star to run for Congress. what's to mourn?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990514)

NYT: the biggest losers in all this? women, that's who.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990522)

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Opinion

Guest Essay

‘There’s No Graham Platner Without Donald Trump’: 3 Writers on the Fiasco in Maine

July 9, 2026

By Michelle GoldbergAlex Seitz-Wald and Matthew Yglesias

Ms. Goldberg is a Times columnist. Mr. Seitz-Wald is deputy editor at the Maine newspaper Midcoast Villager. Mr. Yglesias, a contributing Opinion writer, writes extensively about politics, economics and more at Slow Boring.

The wait is over. Graham Platner has withdrawn from the Maine Senate race, and a furious process to figure out how to replace him is on.

On Thursday, three writers gathered online for a conversation about his rise, fall and replacement. All three had spent extensive time on the ground in Maine — following the Platner campaign, talking to him and to voters. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Matthew Yglesias: Michelle, last fall, you went to Maine and walked away impressed by Platner’s charisma. You’d later write that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature” you’d encountered online. I met Platner last summer, right after he announced his campaign, and also found him incredibly charming and charismatic, even though I didn’t really agree with his populist pitch. Alex, you have spoken to him too.

Is it possible that many of us were somehow too informed on this story, and people who hadn’t interacted with the candidate saw things more clearly?

Michelle Goldberg: I don’t want to let myself off quite that easy — I don’t think being too informed was the problem. But I definitely think people who went to Maine, and people who lived there, were affected by seeing the incredible energy around Platner. When I traveled to Maine last October, right after the first round of scandals broke, I was pretty skeptical — up to the last minute, I was emailing my editor wondering if I should cancel the trip because I thought he was probably cooked. Then I got there and saw the effect he was having on these huge crowds, and it made me think he had something special.

What should have been more obvious is that charisma and intelligence can easily coexist with very dark personal qualities. I still don’t think Platner had any Nazi inclinations; if he did, they would have shown up in his thousands of anonymous Reddit posts. But his extremely dismissive attitude about sexual assault was right there, a waving red flag signaling how this would all end.

Alex Seitz-Wald: The reality was that the enthusiasm for Platner was real, organic and pervasive in Maine. He did something basically unprecedented in modern politics — going from absolute unknown (no elected office, no celebrity, no big business) to steamrolling a two-term sitting governor. Yes, he had help from savvy national political operators and online voices with big platforms, but on the ground in Maine, I saw extremely offline friends, family members and acquaintances fall hard for him. Just weeks into his campaign, there were hundreds of people at our local pizza place in Rockport, where my daughter just had her sixth birthday party, and everyone I spoke to left tremendously impressed. Among grass-roots Democrats here, at least, there was a real desire for an “authentic” outsider (even if we now know he was not who he claimed to be), and I don’t think we can blame his voters for being taken for a ride.

Yglesias: I’ve also been struck across several trips to Maine by the genuine enthusiasm for Platner, at least among folks in Hancock County, where I am at the moment and where Platner is from. One thing I’m wondering is, how much has Trump — or the shifting media environment — changed what Democrats look for in a candidate?

Goldberg: People’s willingness to overlook the first round of scandals — the Reddit posts and Totenkopf tattoo — definitely came from a sense that the rules of politics had changed, and that Democrats had been, if anything, too fastidious in choosing their candidates. And his anger matched the anger of the electorate. Trump’s re-election radicalized a lot of Democrats, so that someone who’d posted online about arming themselves to fight fascism no longer seemed so unreasonable.

In retrospect, it seems clear that Platner had something of Trump’s shamelessness. I saw him when the first scandals had just broken, and wondered both how many people would be in the crowd and how he’d explain himself. (No one knew at the time that much worse was to come, though of course some people suspected it.) He was unbowed in a way that read as strength.

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His furious, conspiratorial video announcing his withdrawal shows the toxic, narcissistic side of that self-belief. It made the Trump parallels — the self-righteous refusal to apologize or admit fault — quite stark.

Seitz-Wald: There’s no Graham Platner without Donald Trump. Trump’s ability to keep winning and hold G.O.P. support made Democrats feel like they had permission to accept Platner’s faults for as long as they did — though there’s clear asymmetry in how his strongest supporters were willing to toss him overboard the instant a credible sexual assault allegation came out.

Trump also discredited the so-called Democratic establishment in the eyes of much of the progressive base. They felt like they were forced to accept Hillary Clinton — and then Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — in the name of beating Trump, only to lose two out of three of those elections (and 2020 was much worse for Democrats than many expected or admit).

Yglesias: I wrote a piece a little while back praising Dan Moraff, the young operative who recruited Platner, suggesting that people who don’t necessarily share his ideology should learn from his willingness to push unconventional figures. Obviously in retrospect the vetting-lite model that Moraff used here does not look so good! But is there a middle ground where Democrats can get more creative in recruiting without getting this sloppy? Maybe find some women instead of lazily assuming that “working class” equals “burly man”?

Goldberg: Part of the problem is the casting-call approach to candidate recruitment; I heard that they started by looking at a lobsterman who’d donated to Bernie Sanders, then moved on to oyster farmers.

But the bigger problem — besides the truly egregious absence of vetting — was not taking the time to do candidate development. Compare Moraff’s approach with that of Amanda Litman, head of Run for Something. She’s also supporting unconventional figures to run for office, some of them white men! (James Talarico was a Run for Something alum.) But Run for Something isn’t throwing neophytes into high-profile national races. They’re helping people run for local and state office, and those who shine there can move on to bigger things. That process is a lot more laborious and time consuming, but far more effective in building a Democratic bench.

Seitz-Wald: It’s really too bad because I think a lot of Americans across the political spectrum like the idea of fewer Harvard-Yale lawyers in power and more “regular” people. Now the people who pushed for Graham Platner have done more to discredit their theory of the case than any corporate super PAC or vape-filled room in Washington.

To build a durable governing coalition — one that actually represents the working class — Democrats do need to do a better job appealing to non-college-educated white people, who make up somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of U.S. adults.

Yglesias: Any takes on who will be — or should be — next in line for the seat? Former State Senate president Troy Jackson had Platner’s support in the gubernatorial primary, and there’s a sense that Platner’s circle wants to throw the nomination to him on the theory that he best represents Platner’s values. Nirav Shah, who also recently lost the governor’s race, is also pushing for the nomination; he got a lot more votes than Jackson in that primary. Dan Kleban, a brewery owner who was briefly in the Senate race before reportedly getting talked into withdrawing in favor of Janet Mills, is back in. Personally, I like House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, a huge YIMBY champion, a lot, but his name doesn’t seem to be in the mix.

Goldberg: I have no opinion about who Democrats should choose, but I’m not convinced by the argument that it should be Troy Jackson because he best represents Platner’s movement. Platner’s voters have made it clear that there’s a huge hunger for a populist political outsider, and that should be taken seriously. But the fact that Jackson came in third in the governor’s race, even as Platner won overwhelmingly, suggests that Platner’s voters weren’t all lining up behind Bernie Sanders-style politics. Some of them, maybe a lot of them, just wanted someone who seemed like a fighter.

Seitz-Wald: One of Janet Mills’s main problems was that it felt like Chuck Schumer and other people “from away,” as Mainers derisively refer to outsiders, were trying to dictate the candidate. The 2020 Democratic Senate nominee, Sara Gideon, struggled with that same perception and ended up losing to Susan Collins by nine points. So we have to let Maine Democratic voters take the lead here (and I’m an independent).

We have two and a half weeks for this lightning psuedo-primary, and I know at least several of the candidates are going to run it just like a real campaign. Under state law, the Maine Democratic Party has until 5 p.m. on July 27 to select a new nominee, and the plan right now is for a convention with about 600 delegates, including current state Democratic committee members and delegates chosen by county-level committees. Many of the candidates have barely wound down their campaigns for other offices after the June 9 primary, so expect to see town halls, potential televised debates and direct appeals to voters in the hopes of influencing the convention delegates — who are about to become 600 of the most popular people in the state.

Yglesias: Part of the hope for Graham Platner was that he was going to win back working-class voters for Democrats. And certainly there are a lot of Obama-Trump crossover voters up in Maine’s Second Congressional District (the geographically large northern district that covers part of the coast and the state’s inland). But based on all the polling I saw pre-scandal, that dream wasn’t panning out. Platner had a good chance of beating Susan Collins, but the basic shape of his electoral coalition was similar to the one Kamala Harris used to beat Donald Trump in the state — grounded in the young, college-educated and Greater Portland.

Is there anything to learn here about what it would really take for Democrats to change the class composition of their appeal? Representative Jared Golden (who represents Maine’s Second District but is retiring after this term), after all, does win these voters.

Goldberg: Many progressives were drawn to Platner because they believed that working-class voters abandoned the Democratic Party because it embraced neoliberalism. If you see things this way, then the key to reassembling a working-class coalition is left-wing economic populism. But I don’t think this theory entirely holds up.

There are definitely elements of it that are true. Many voters are furious about inequality and economic precarity. They hate Wall Street and billionaires and Big Tech. They don’t trust the Democratic Party or political institutions writ large. There is such a thing as a Sanders-Trump or a Trump-Mamdani voter, and inasmuch as such voters exist in Maine, I imagine Platner would have had a lock on them.

The problem is that a lot of working-class voters also dislike the left, especially when it comes to issues like police and immigration.

Part of Platner’s appeal came from the hope that he could win back some alienated working-class white voters with aesthetics rather than ideological concessions. (Though he did have heterodox views on guns, which might have made a difference. One benefit of candidates who have a lot of credibility with the left is that their base trusts them to be flexible on some issues.)

Seitz-Wald: It’s probably unrealistic to ask any single candidate to overcome education polarization, which is happening not just across the country but around the globe in other wealthy democratic countries. But that doesn’t mean Democrats can or should just write off these voters. They don’t have to win them outright, but Jared Golden proved Democrats can win some of them — in an extremely rural district that Trump won by 10 points — by being more culturally competent and breaking from the party on some issues like immigration.

Yglesias: Last one before we all go. This is clearly a “plenty of blame to go around” situation. But beyond Platner himself, who’s clearly responsible for his actions, how do we allocate blame for this mess between Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders? Between the establishment that pushed Janet Mills (who was clearly too old and didn’t have the fire in her belly) and the insurrectionists who enthusiastically pushed an unsuitable candidate with a ton of red flags?

Goldberg: ¿Por qué no los dos? Both sides screwed up. I put a lot of blame on the consultants who didn’t bother to properly vet Platner, and who apparently didn’t think it was worth doing a deeper dive when they found out about some, but not all, of his Reddit posts. But Maine voters really, really didn’t want to vote for Janet Mills, and Schumer made a huge mistake by trying to clear the field for her.

Seitz-Wald: There’s a lot of people with egg (lobster?) on their face here, including me and others in the press who found his narrative compelling.

I suspect many mainstream Democrats will blame the insurgent left and call it a day, but if they do, they’ll likely find themselves in a similar scenario soon. Chuck Schumer et al. created the opening for Graham Platner by clearing the field of better-qualified candidates.

The insurgent left wants to stand on principle, but they owe it to their supporters to make sure their candidates can actually live up to those principles.

Insurgents are going to insurgent, and the rest of the party needs a better plan to deal with it beyond dismissal and umbrage. The consultants and media figures who propelled him are going to keep looking for their idealized versions of left-wing working-class fighters and keep exploiting opportunities to challenge weak mainstream candidates in primaries. I suspect they’ll keep finding an appetite for those kinds of candidates, despite Platner’s spectacular implosion.

Everyone in politics seems to be waiting for that one climactic battle that will finally discredit their enemies forever, but it never comes and never will since almost every action in politics these days has an equal and opposite reaction.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990620)

i can only still feel anger at simps. men who still simp for women in 2026 are straight up ontologically evil

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5881410&forum_id=2).#49990666)