Fraser Sherman's Blog

As I blogged about a week ago, a woman named Jenny Racicot reported that Gerald Platner, Democratic candidate in the Maine Senate race, raped her. Happily lots of Democrats yanked their support and called on him to drop out (not all). He has now done so; he has also formally submitted the paperwork that will allow Dems to remove him from the ballot. He is not, however, at all apologetic, presenting himself as a man unfairly persecuted. He wasn’t; as Scott Lemieux says, lots of left-wing candidates are running this cycle. The others didn’t get accused of rape.

Obviously he’s considerably worse than I realized. As I said in the post, I didn’t see much need to think about him deeply: I’m not in Maine, he was the candidate, and beyond the Nazi tattoo I didn’t pay too much attention. Other people did and they were clearly right to warn against him. As Courtney Milan says, “I just saw someone say that hindsight is 20/20 on Graham Platner, and let me just say that if you did not see this coming, your vision for such things needs to be checked.” Unfortunately some people aren’t 20/20 on Platner even in hindsight. (There’s also this WaPo podcast which explains how what happened with Platner is exactly like what happened to Biden in 2024).

Platner showed piss-poor judgment getting into a major race with so much baggage (I’m not implying rape results from bad judgment. It’s not bad decision-making, it’s plain evil). As Michelle Goldberg says, people “went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.” It didn’t help that Dan Moraff, his top strategist, didn’t want to spend money on an in-depth background check (one journalist says he previously asked her to delete candidates’ quotes from an article). Paul Campos lists other bad judgment calls.

Democratic operatives Moraff, Leanne Fan and Morris Katz all pushed Platner to run; the New York Times notes his campaign was a disorganized mess. I agree with Hilzoy: Katz, Fan and Moraff should be redflagged for future political work. I doubt they will be. To be fair, lots of other Democrats backed Platner as a white knight: “Many justified their endorsements with Platner’s so-called progressive values and the idea that the party must oust Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to have a better chance at winning a majority in the November midterms.” I’m sure Cheryl Rofer is right that Platner represents masculine stereotypes many people still find appealing.

I’ve read arguments over whether there are other, equally viable candidates with the right politics; like I said, I’m not following the Maine race closely enough to say. Regardless, I agree with Mother Jones at the last link that we cannot excuse rape in the name of the greater good: “This perspective considers only the good abusive men like Platner can contribute and dismisses the people they abuse. It treats survivors with disdain, devaluing what they add to their communities. It slams shut any pathway to speak out and denies survivors personhood by condemning them for even daring to exercise the right to speak.”

Stephen King makes an alternative argument: everybody’s doing it! We already have a Congress full of rapists! That’s not entirely true — I’m confident Ocasia-Cortez and Susan Collins haven’t raped anyone — but it’s entirely possible I’ve voted for rapists without knowing it. However that is not an argument for voting a known, or at least credibly accused rapist, into office. Adding another rapist doesn’t balance the scales. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Rape is a profound human rights violation, an act of dehumanization, and an act that says the rapist’s rights and desires are boundless and the victim’s rights and desires are nothing. It is incompatible with democracy.”

Besides, the everybody’s doing it argument, AKA “we are all sinners,” is fundamentally flawed.

It’s true, some compromises are necessary in politics; arrogance, ego, adultery all turn up in candidates. All can be forgivable, maybe Rape is not something to compromise on. As Steve Philips puts it, “If we are willing to look away from credible allegations of sexual violence whenever the political stakes are high enough, then we are not, in fact, the movement we claim to be.” Even though Republicans have no qualms about supporting rapists and accused rapists, “we’ll accept a rapist if they have better politics” is not an acceptable solution. Let’s go with “no rapists.” Rachel Cohen: “A version of this argument plays out now, as shocking numbers of people log on to defend Graham Platner’s candidacy, rapist or not, by pointing out that the President is a rapist with worse politics. They seem to have forgotten that we want to be different than the President.”

Over in a Lawyers, Guns and Money comment thread, my friend Karen points out another sexist aspect of this. Platner supporters hailed him because he was authentic, a working-class guy who’d served in the military and yet had progressive attitudes; by contrast Hilary Clinton in 2016 was often attacked as inauthentic. Karen replies Clinton was perfectly authentic: “She never pretended to be anything other than the hard-working honor student with the perfect resume.” And politically ambitious. And that’s kind of authenticity many liberal pundits despise: Clinton would be an example of what Ken Klippenstein labels “the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly.” See Cheryl Rofer’s link above about Platner’s appeal to a certain kind of man.

Of course Platner’s ambitious too. Nobody who starts out in politics running for the Senate can be anything else. But it’s more acceptable in a man. And if Clinton had his kind of authenticity — i.e., bad behavior — they’d be dumping on her for that. A woman can’t get away with inappropriate behavior the way a guy can (Echidne of the Snakes has an example).

Gender bias shows in other ways. Cohen points out that some people who initially insisted we have to support Platner as an the alternative is Republicans holding the Senate would probably have been outraged if someone made a similar case for Harris (e.g., however flawed her policies, Republicans will do worse). Solnit points out (at the link above) that “according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat.” It’s hard to imagine the people defending Platner’s acts as resulting from PTSD would be similarly kind to a rape victim.

As Fred Clark says, rape is a national emergency. It happens a lot, it happens every day. Like sexual harassment it derails the lives and careers of countless women, choking off their contributions to society. “How many? Too many. How often? Too often. That’s all the quantification we really need here.”