Out of State: How Graham Platner’s Senate campaign vexed the national press.
On a rainy evening last September, I caught a ride with friends to an industrial section of Portland, Maine, where I live, to hear Graham Platner speak. After parking near a hardware store and picking our way through weeds and across railroad tracks, we arrived at a bar that resembled an airplane hangar. The space under the roof was already full, so we stood outside in the parking lot, clutching our hoods and umbrellas against the drizzle.
Platner, an oysterman and veteran of four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, won Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the Senate seat long occupied by Susan Collins, a Republican, by a wide margin. But that night in September, he was just a month into his campaign. What struck me most forcefully was that when some of the estimated fourteen hundred voters in attendance started asking questions, Platner, who has never held an elected office, didn’t regurgitate talking points. He appeared to be thinking in real time, forming coherent, precise answers on topics ranging from the human toll of America’s forever wars to the rising cost of housing and healthcare and the problem of oligarchy.
That same day, The New Yorker published a high-gloss profile of Platner by a Brooklyn-based writer. (She had his number because she had bought oysters from him during her summer holidays on Frenchman Bay, which lies between Mount Desert Island and Platner’s hometown of Sullivan.) It was the season for such stories, when media people, upon returning to New York and Washington, DC, from vacations along Maine’s coastline, publish pieces inspired by the perfect lobster roll they ate on a small-town dock or their local friend’s enthusiasm for an ostensibly MAGA-coded but actually progressive Senate candidate who appears to have fortuitously emerged from the misty sea. (I say this without judgment: I’ve written about many places I’ve visited, and it’s not always a bad idea.) Nevertheless, the warm glow of the early national coverage of Platner was notable for its contrast to what came next.
In October, the Washington Post revealed that Platner had written a spate of misogynistic Reddit posts, some of which also took aim at white rural Mainers, Black people, and police. Instead of doubling down, as Donald Trump and other MAGA types might have, Platner explained what had motivated him and said that he had evolved. “Feeling ‘utterly lost and isolated,’” the Post reported, “he sought community on sometimes ‘toxic’ corners of Reddit” while fighting untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. “I used to have opinions I don’t hold anymore,” he said. “I’ve said things I regret. I struggled immensely for years. All of that is in some ways how I got here.”
The cascade of coverage that followed zeroed in, for good or ill, on Platner’s contradictions. He looked and sounded working-class but had attended private schools. An anti-war protester who had enlisted in the Marines, he was also a progressive versed in social theory who, it soon emerged, had gotten a Nazi tattoo while drunk with his buddies in Croatia. In a column for the New York Times published on Halloween, Michelle Goldberg crystallized the national view in the wake of the early scandals: “From afar, the past week and a half looked so disastrous for Graham Platner, the upstart Maine Senate candidate, that I contemplated canceling plans to see him campaign in person,” she wrote. “It would be pointless to make the trip, I thought, if the whole enterprise was on the verge of collapse.”
Goldberg ended up coming to Maine, where she talked to many people who still supported Platner. But for reasons ranging from slim newsroom resources to the conventions of national political reporting, many other journalists waited until the days before last week’s primary to visit the state or didn’t come at all. The result: months of grinding dissonance between the stories national outlets were telling and the ground reality, at a scale I hadn’t seen since the media’s much bemoaned failure to understand rural Americans’ support for Trump in 2016. “It has been so bad that it has made me question a lot of the coverage I’ve done of states that I don’t live in,” Rebecca Traister, a longtime political reporter for New York magazine, whose family comes from rural Maine and who now lives in Portland, told me.
Alex Seitz-Wald spent a decade as a DC-based national political reporter for NBC before moving to Maine in 2022. He is now the deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, which launched in 2024. Seitz-Wald, who has been covering the Senate race, said the disconnect between national outlets’ growing certainty that Platner’s campaign was finished and the dozens of Platner yard signs he saw every day on his way to work sometimes made him feel “like I was taking crazy pills.”To help illustrate his case, Seitz-Wald pointed to the ill-fated campaign of Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, who entered the Senate race in October. Despite the backing of Chuck Schumer and other national Democratic Party leaders, her campaign generated only modest local enthusiasm. “I saw, throughout the course of the primary, three Janet Mills signs,” Seitz-Wald told me. “It’s the coldest take in the world, but living in a place helps you understand it better than anything else.”
The absence of robust local newsgathering operations in Maine may also have played a role in the national media’s failure to understand the dynamics of the Platner-Mills race. Gone are the days when states had deep rosters of seasoned local political reporters whom national reporters could consult. “They would be compensated enough and have enough security that they could build that kind of institutional knowledge and be really trusted quality voices,” Seitz-Wald told me. That is no longer so much the case in Maine. The Villager has four full-time reporters and covers forty-three towns, some of which are accessible only by ferry. Most don’t stream their select-board meetings online, requiring reporters to attend in person or to find out what happened some other way. When resources are this tight, it’s an easy choice to focus on local events at the expense of major national races, Seitz-Wald said. But it comes at a cost. “It means that you don’t have this bubbling-up of coverage of Senate races and presidential races and stuff for the national media to draw on.”
The lack of local newsroom resources may also explain why the major scandals that have rocked Platner’s campaign—including, most recently, his history of sexting with various women while married to Amy Gertner, and allegations from several former girlfriends that he spoke and acted in ways that were threatening, disrespectful, and demeaning to women—were all broken by national outlets. “I have four full-time reporters, total,” Seitz-Wald said. “They’re covering small businesses and high school graduations and local politics and car crashes. We do not have the resources to just cover our local day-to-day, let alone take big swings on something like the Senate race.” Still, the Villager’s coverage of the Platner race has been admirable compared with that of other local outlets and many big national players, in part because it has focused squarely on the views of Maine voters.
Kate Cough, the editor of the Maine Monitor, a nonprofit news site, pushed back on the notion that the Platner campaign had been undercovered locally. She pointed to an extraordinary profile of the candidate by Josh Keefe, a government accountability reporter for the Monitor who went to high school with Platner, and noted that many other local outlets have covered the race exhaustively for months. Reporters have had an easier time covering Maine’s Senate race than its gubernatorial primaries, where the crowded field has made it hard for voters to distinguish between candidates, she told me in an email. “So I simply don’t see this as a case in which the feeding up of material is an issue. I would venture that it is less a case of ‘media blindness’ than it is of different audiences, framing, and differing reporting priorities.”
As more national reporters visited Maine ahead of the primary, Seitz-Wald noted, the national coverage improved. “There was still a lot of bafflement, but at least they had the facts,” he said. “It does kind of feel like a Whole Foods parking lot in Portland is the new diner in Ohio where you talk to voters to be baffled that they’re still supporting their candidate.”
The larger consensus among everyone I talked to here is that many of the conventions that shape US political reporting are outdated or should never have been employed at all. The horse race model of political journalism, which has only become more ingrained in the age of Kalshi and Polymarket, privileges reporting that is predictive, rather than descriptive, Traister noted. Even more troubling, the notion that scandals are disqualifying doesn’t align with the reality of our current politics. “I think it’s a collective delusion and failure of the press to be honest about who we actually have in office,” Traister told me. The press must hold candidates and leaders accountable for crimes, misbehavior, and saying and doing contradictory things without becoming complicit in the lie that such candidates will instantly flame out, or even that they should. “I really think if you’re using any assumptions from pre-2016 about how politics works or should work, you need to update your mental model, because Trump just changed everything or revealed the change that was happening underneath,” Seitz-Wald said. “He contradicts himself on a daily basis, and it still works for his supporters because there’s a deeper personal, emotional connection that people are feeling.”
These structural problems trickle down to local outlets, too. “At first glance, the prep school–educated oyster farmer with post-traumatic stress disorder is a lot to wrap one’s mind around,” a profile of Platner in the Portland Press-Herald noted. “His political opponents are hoping voters won’t be able to.” But that wasn’t the problem. Many Mainers are deeply troubled by some of Platner’s past behavior, particularly his professed ignorance about the meaning of his tattoo and his history of misogyny. Yet Platner won the Senate primary with 72 percent of the vote, a commanding victory even after Mills suspended her campaign, in April. Few Democrats, in the end, seemed overly troubled by the fact that he, like most of us, has led a complicated life and has not always been the person he is today.
I asked one of my neighbors, Emily Hill, a Maine native and family medicine doctor who treats many rural Donald Trump supporters, what her patients thought of Platner. “I don’t know,” she said. “But my hunch is that if there’s someone who can own up to his mistakes, verbalize accountability, publicly apologize, and still be able to go to the gun shop and buy ammunition, that is a candidate that there is a possibility they might get behind.”