Graham Platner listens to his mother, Leslie Harlow, introduce him during a town hall at the Leavitt Theatre on October 22, 2025, in Ogunquit, Maine.
Photo: Sophie Park/Getty Images
Things had been going well for Graham Platner.
The military veteran and oyster farmer’s bid to dethrone Republican incumbent senator Susan Collins has continued gaining steam. Polls — though they are sparse — generally show him with a sizable lead over his Democratic primary challenger, Governor Janet Mills, and a series of potentially campaign-ending scandals had appeared firmly in the rearview mirror.
But Platner complicated his apparent path to November this week when he amplified an antisemitic conspiracy theorist online and fumbled a response to a question about his controversial tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol.
Jewish Insider reported on Thursday that Platner shared a social-media post from Stew Peters, a far-right conspiracy theorist with a history of espousing racist and antisemitic beliefs including the promotion of Holocaust denial. On X, Peters shared a clip of President Trump speaking during his State of the Union address about the possibility of a military conflict with Iran. The footage appeared to show both Democratic and Republican members of Congress clapping, prompting Peters to write, “War with Iran is the only thing republicans and democrats have both given a standing ovation for. Let that sink in.”
Graham initially shared Peters’s post, adding his own comment. “As always, there’s one thing that brings Republican and Democratic politicians together: sending other people’s children to die in stupid wars in the Middle East,” he wrote. The post was later deleted from Platner’s campaign account. In a statement to Jewish Insider, a Platner spokesman suggested Peters’s post was shared in error. “We were reposting a C-Span clip of Trump speaking about the potential war with Iran and didn’t realize that the video had been posted by a despicable account,” they said. “When we learned who the poster was we immediately deleted the post.”
The social-media incident emerged as Platner was once again confronted with a past controversy surrounding a skull tattoo that the candidate once had, which critics say resembled the Nazi death’s head symbol known as a totenkopf. Last fall, Platner explained that he had gotten the tattoo following a night of drinking while on leave with his fellow marines in Croatia and he had been unaware of its origins for the years he had the tattoo. He later had the image covered up.
During an appearance on the call-in show Office Hours Live With Tim Heidecker on Thursday, Platner faced tough questioning on the tattoo from a caller who pressed the candidate on his assertion that he had no idea of the symbol’s Nazi associations and his lack of an apology for having such a tattoo. “I’m not going to apologize for something that I didn’t know about or do,” Platner said. “The moment that it was clear and I was putting it in that context, I got it covered because I don’t want that on my body,” he said.
Platner’s rough couple of days was capped off by a report from the Portland Press Herald that found that while Platner has positioned his campaign as hyperlocal and largely grassroots, his team has spent about $2.5 million on out-of-state consultants with $2.25 million of that amount going toward consulting firms based in Washington, D.C.
Despite this week’s headlines, Platner still appears to be well positioned for the fall. A University of New Hampshire poll released on Tuesday shows Platner leading Mills 64 percent to her 26 percent. In a head-to-head matchup with Collins, the survey found Platner besting the veteran senator 49 percent to Collins’s 38 percent. As noted by the Press Herald, the poll oversampled younger voters, a notable move in Maine, which has a significant older population. An internal Platner poll from December showed him leading Mills by 15 points.
Mills, one of the most high-profile recruits for the Democratic Party’s fight to win control of the Senate, has received criticism for running a seemingly lackluster campaign. The 78-year-old governor was notably out of town when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement began its extensive campaign in Maine; Axios reported that she left for high-dollar fundraisers in California the same day federal agents entered the state. And on Thursday, NBC News reported that prominent union leaders are advising Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the DSCC, Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, to stop supporting Mills over her allegedly poor record of supporting labor.
The Maine governor weighed in on Platner’s recent hiccups on social media:
