Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (D) said Monday his past Reddit comments were meant “to get a rise out of people.”
“That was me trying to get a rise out of people on the Internet,” Platner told Tommy Vietor on Pod Save America. “Those weren’t even reflective of my opinions back then.”
Platner, a veteran and oyster farmer, is running a populist campaign and has been backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Democratic youth-focused groups and multiple labor unions.
According to a review of his Reddit posts conducted by CNN’s KFILE, he used a slur that is offensive to those with special needs, referred to himself as a “communist,” and called “all” police officers “bastards” and said rural White Americans “actually are” racist and stupid.
Platner, in the Pod Save America episode, argued that Mainers will realize those are not his true beliefs as he travels across the state to campaign.
“People are [going to] recognize that this is not at all the person that they have come to know, and come to interact with in reality,” he said.
In 2013, Platner, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, also minimized issues that service members face in reporting sexual assault incidents and said those who are raped should “not get so f‑‑‑ed up that they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to,” The Washington Post reported.
He disavowed the comments in a video he posted to social platform X last Friday and said they stemmed from his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder after he returned from Afghanistan in 2011.
Platner added Monday that he “didn’t know what [he] was talking about,” regarding his remarks on sexual assault. In May, the Pentagon said it received more than 8,100 reports of sexual assault in fiscal 2024.
The Democratic Senate candidate said his infantry unit in Afghanistan was all-male. After he returned to the U.S. and took classes at George Washington University, he befriended female veterans, “all of [whom] had a story.”
“My frame of reference was that world,” Platner said, speaking of his infantry unit. “And that was not a world in which, frankly, I had [any] interaction with women in the service.”
Platner is part of a crowded Democratic field after Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) became the highest-profile candidate when she entered the race last week. Republican incumbent Susan Collins is vying for a sixth term in the upper chamber.
