Supporters hold signs as Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner holds at a town hall the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine. | Laura Brett/Getty ImagesWhen Graham Platner met with Democratic senators last month to try to assuage fears that his troubled personal history would doom his Senate campaign, they pressed him on whether any additional allegations — such as those of sexual assault — were coming. Platner said there would be nothing credible.But on Monday, Politico published a lengthy, detailed report in which a woman who dated Platner accused him of coming to her house drunk and sexually assaulting her in 2021. Within hours, Platner’s support started melting away — with everyone from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) calling on him to drop out. (The deadline for him to withdraw his name from the ballot is Monday of next week; if he does so, Maine’s Democratic Party can name a replacement candidate.)To many critics and even some recent supporters, Platner looks in retrospect like a predictable disaster — one with red flags all over him (even tattooed on his body). Progressive commentators are asking themselves if they should have listened to those concerns earlier, and debating whether the left-wing operatives who recruited Platner to run almost blundered away a crucial Senate contest with magical thinking and poor vetting.Yet it’s also true that Platner captured a real, widespread desire among Maine Democratic primary voters for a different kind of candidate. His campaign took off like a rocket, and he looked so formidable that the sitting governor of Maine, Janet Mills, suspended her campaign before even making it to the primary.Amanda Litman is trying to balance these competing ideas as she surveys the wreckage. And she has unique insight: as the co-founder and president of Run for Something, her job is to recruit and assist promising first-time candidates for races around the country. She’s also had notably mixed feelings about Platner for some time.So I spoke to Litman to get her thoughts on the disaster that unfolded here. “It’s upsetting — as a person, but also as someone who works in politics,” she told me. “Because the people who believed in him will be disillusioned. I know people who were eager to move to Maine for the summer to volunteer for his campaign, who were inspired for the first time by him. What a fucking disappointment. What a betrayal of that hope.”Litman emphasized that Run for Something does not endorse candidates in federal races and that her thoughts here are her own. Below is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. The trajectory of Platner’s campaignCan you describe the trajectory of what you thought about Platner’s candidacy from when he jumped in, through the various waves of scandal revelations, to now?When he launched, I thought the launch video was compelling. I thought: It is good that someone is challenging Janet Mills because I do not believe that she is well-suited for this moment. I thought he gave off the bro vibes — that aren’t my favorite, personally, from a candidate. But I thought, this is an interesting generational challenge, I think it is good that we have a competitive primary here.The tattoo gave me some pause as a Jewish American. His story about being drunk as a Marine and not knowing what it meant — I could buy that, sure. He got it covered up. And the Reddit stuff, I think any 20- or 30-something who’s grown up on the internet has had some stuff online. I have seen this with candidates that I’ve worked with where they have posted stuff on social, and then you can see, 15 years later, they’re not that person. There was no indication [in the Reddit posts] that he was antisemitic or a white supremacist — it seemed he was kind of like an edgelord, that he liked to be countercultural. [After Mills suspended her campaign] I made a video about how the tattoo is not great, but we need him to beat Susan Collins, and he’s going to be the nominee. Which is the fundamental challenge of all of this — that Maine is so fucking important. If we do not flip Maine, it is much, much harder to imagine a world where we flip the Senate. And then [President Donald] Trump gets his Supreme Court nominees. That’s what’s at stake. Then the Times story dropped [in June] and I was like, No, I don’t like him. I don’t like people who are shitty to women, I don’t like people who assault women. But, if it is him against Susan Collins, and that’s the choice, I would prefer him.Then the most recent story came out, and this is not someone who can beat Susan Collins anymore, and it’s someone who so clearly should not be a United States senator.Does Platner’s fate show the dangers of unvetted outsider candidates?Platner was a candidate who clearly was deeply flawed, but who tapped into some real outsider populist energy and enthusiasm, and beat back the establishment favorite. But does being an outsider candidate come with certain risks? It is absolutely true that when you are seeking people outside the normal traditional candidates, they are not going to be perfect. They will have histories. That does not mean you have to accept someone who has credibly raped a woman, who has sexual assault allegations — like, there’s actually a spectrum here of what’s acceptable.Run for Something has worked with candidates who have shit in their past. The difference, I think, for a lot of them is that they can talk about how what they’ve done has shaped their leadership. You can make mistakes and then run for office. You have to own them and talk about them and grow from them. You can’t lie to people. You can’t hide things. More broadly, I was looking back at the interview that [the Wall Street Journal] did with the guy who recruited Platner, [Daniel] Moraff. There is a temptation to put together a Mad Libs-style candidate recruitment: “We are seeking X kind of person from Y community to run for Z office because that’s who we believe can win.” That is a fundamentally unserious way of thinking about who should be a leader. People say the problem is Platner wasn’t vetted well, but would sexual assault allegations have come up in a vet? Eric Swalwell had a very similar situation just months ago and he was a multi-term member of Congress. He was, sort of, the establishment choice for governor of California. So is this something more likely to arise because of the outsider-iness of Platner, or something that could happen across many different situations? I think that there are pieces of it that would have come up — the Reddit stuff would have come up sooner, the tattoo stuff would have come up sooner. Had he run for a smaller office earlier in his career, he would have had to explain it earlier. Some of his stuff wouldn’t come up in vetting, it just wouldn’t. But had he run for office sooner or early, had he been like part of the public eye a little bit earlier in his career? Maybe the women would have come forward sooner, although like with Swalwell, there’s no proof they would have, you know? Some of this stuff is — I won’t say “inherent to men seeking power,” but you know, I’ve said Platner still wouldn’t be one of the top 5 worst men in the United States Congress. That’s unfortunately probably still true.Did Democrats have their “red line” for Platner in the right place?Platner survived the initial reports about the tattoo and the Reddit posts last year. But the doubts about him were revived by last month’s Times story, which came out at a weird time — Mills had suspended her campaign, and Platner was pretty much unopposed in the primary, which was coming up. The Times story in June focused on an allegation that wasn’t rape or sexual assault, but involved being drunk, verbally abusive, and physically rough — including that he twisted [his ex Lyndsey Fifield’s] arm, he locked her in a room. My sense is that a lot of Democrats looked at that and thought, Oh, we don’t love this. But the Senate is really important, and if this is all there is, we’ll just stick with him. The consensus that emerged was: a credible accusation or rape or sexual assault is the red line. But now, with hindsight, was the red line in an appropriate place? Should those earlier accusations in the Times story have been enough to disqualify him?There is no good outcome here. That’s what makes this so hard. Which is the more morally right thing to do there? Is it more moral to say, at that moment, people should have called for him to step down? Knowing that, more likely than not, whoever replaced him might lose — and this is still true. They’re not going to have money, they’re not going to have support, they’re going to have to build a campaign from scratch. It’s going to be very hard. And then if Susan Collins wins, Trump gets to basically rip away LGBTQ equality and further destroy women’s rights and essentially codify the further destruction of democracy. Which is better — even specifically, which is better for women? Which is better morally? I don’t know. This sucks.More practically, it seems to me that, given what had come out — and not yet come out — in the Times story, Platner wasn’t going to voluntarily go. The real agency was with his strongest backers and validators, like Bernie Sanders. The establishment was never going to be able to pull the plug on Platner by their lonesome; Platner had already beaten them.And that story came out before the primary — which was kind of uncontested, but which he then won overwhelmingly. Especially in that moment, to call for him to drop out or to step aside — what about the voters’ chance to say how they felt?Can — and should — Democratic elites have stopped a candidate their voters loved?That’s another really big part of this, right? He struck a chord. We can talk about what the elites should do, but the Democratic primary voters of Maine clearly loved this guy. So how do the elites manage to say, “We see the red flags in this guy’s past and we know better than our voters do, so he shouldn’t even be on the ballot?”I think one of the correct takeaways of 2024 is: We cannot try and impose the party’s will upon voters. The voters are the party. We have to keep centering that as part of the conversation. The party does not exist distinct from voters. Voters are the party and the primary voters in particular are like the heart of the party. And if they decide that they were okay [with what was known then] — and not only okay, he won more than 70 percent of the vote — who are the “elites” to say that they know better? Graham obviously takes most of the blame here, but “the establishment” cleared the field for Janet Mills. This could have been a more competitive primary. They made the choice that she was the one they wanted, so clearly misreading the moment. It’s all villains across this story. How do you think they should go about replacing Platner if he withdraws — is there a fair way to do it, some kind of process?I would try as much as possible to find a way to give Maine voters — or at least Maine Democratic Party members — a voice. And I think there’s a bunch of different ways you could go about it, from a rapid-fire convention to a firehouse primary. But allow the voters of Maine — or at least the engaged people who you’re going to need — to be participatory. In order to beat Susan Collins, you want to make sure that they feel like they have some buy-in here.