Is Platner too “authentic”?

0:01After winning Maine's Democratic Senate primary last night, Graham Platner thanked his parents. I want to thank my mom and my dad. Thanked his wife. Thanked the people of Maine and talked maybe a bit more than your typical politician about redemption. Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It's a journey. I've made mistakes in my life, mistakes that I regret, that I live with. and that I continue to learn from. And I'm still far from perfect. Plattner, who got around 72 % of the vote, will run against Republican Susan Collins in November. He has so far weathered an impressively diverse series of scandals, including did he know that was Nazi imagery tattooed on his chest?

0:47And why was he sexting women who are not his wife? And was he physically violent with his exes? Maine voters decided they can live with all that. Why, though? That's coming up on Today Explained. support for today explain comes from attio the ai crm for modern teams attio connects to your email calendar calls product data billing data and more so your crm is always complete always enriched and always in sync bye bye bye if you want a crm built for how you want to work you can check out attio you can go to attio.com slash today explain and you get 15 off your first year. That's attio.com slash today explained.

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2:09You're listening to Today Explained. Alex Seitzwald, deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine. What do Maine voters think about Grand Platinum? You live there, you talk to people, What's the read on him? I've been talking to Plattner voters since, you know, he jumped in as this totally unknown oyster farmer in August who no one had heard of running against a two-term sitting governor. And he instantly connected with people and developed this strong bond, people really related to him. And I think that helped him survive the first round of scandals in the fall with his tattoo. Plattner was saying that he did not know the tattoo's resemblance to a Nazi symbol at the time.

2:50He is saying that he had the tattoo covered with a new design. We went to a tattoo parlor in Split, Croatia, and we chose a terrifying-looking skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines, and, you know, skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing. And we got those tattoos, and then we all moved on with our lives. In the Reddit controversies. In other posts from 2013, he minimized challenges faced by service members in reporting sexual assault, writing, quote, you make a choice to consume enough of a substance to lose your self-control. So if you don't want to be in a compromising situation, act like an adult for F's sake.

3:34And then again, with this latest round, these later ones definitely hit differently. They didn't roll off his back the way the earlier ones did. There was a lot of concern. There was a lot of disappointment. But ultimately, Maine Democrats have been trying to get rid of Susan Collins and failing for so long. And they have tried running more traditional candidates and lost. And so I think they are willing to take a chance on him. It seems like a very pragmatic calculation that a lot of Maine Democrats are making right now, which is we need to beat Susan Collins. The stakes are too high. Supreme Court, control of the Senate, everything else.

4:14and we'll put aside any concerns we have with his personal life if he's our chance, our only chance, to beat Collins. You will know that outside of Maine, there is so much speculation about who Graham Plattner really is. Did he really know that that tattoo on his body was a Nazi tattoo? Did he really mean what he said in those Reddit posts? And this is something that people speculate about wildly. I definitely hear what you're saying. It's like, he's a Democrat. We want Susan Collins out. Are people in Maine speculating about who Graham Plattner really is? Yes and no. I mean, I think there's been a major disconnect between what I've seen and heard on the ground.

5:01When I drive my daughter to school every day, I pass dozens of Plattner yard signs that have been out every day for months. and between what the national narrative is, which is typically much more negative. This is not good for the grand plan campaign. This is a problem. If I were in a position to move pieces around here when this story first broke, that would have been the moment where you have a call with the governor, you have her step back into the race, and you have this candidate remove himself. His former political director, who quit the campaign in October, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post yesterday saying that Plattner should not be a U.S.

5:43senator. And she wrote that his flaws as a candidate would be impossible to ignore. So I think there are very legitimate questions about his past that a lot of Maine Democrats have been asking. but he is also just a type of guy that is very familiar in Maine and I think a lot of people kind of felt like they could connect with him could relate with him even if they didn't know exactly who he is and I think he also did a really effective job of kind of weaponizing this chip on his shoulder that Maine has about how it's viewed by the rest of the world there's this concept of you're either a Mainer or you're from away You have lifted me up.

6:29You have had my back. This is the state that raised me, and this is the state that saved me. and he is coded as extremely main and he was able to kind of use that to say all these attacks from the new york times or whatever outside world don't listen to them that's people from away trying to tell us in maine what to do i think a lot of folks at the national level misunderstand and the reason they keep getting everything wrong is they think this is a race about me, but it isn't. This is a race about us. And that's hitting deep in the core of a lot of the main psyche. It is notable that Plattner's scandals have unfolded over a long period of time, right?

7:26So it was late May that some news reports revealed that he'd been sexting with women. He's married, of course. The New York Times then talked to some of his former girlfriends who said he had been rough with them. Others of his ex-girlfriends defended him. But it's like the scandals have been rolling scandals. And it sounds like what you're saying is he's been able to push back against them with this, these are outsiders. Did the allegations in late May, I mean, I'm in D.C., not in Maine, and they felt huge to me. Are you seeing any shakiness after the most recent round? Oh, there's definitely a lot of shakiness and a lot of concern, a lot of disappointment.

8:07One voter told me they were heartbroken about it because they really thought that he was different, that he was not a typical politician. And especially the way he responded to these. That first round of scandals with the Reddit post and the tattoo, he really took ownership. As I read through them, I read things that I absolutely do not agree with. I read through and I see things that, words and statements that I abhor. I also see the trajectory of my life. And it was part of this whole redemption arc that he had built about how he was a combat veteran with PTSD in a really dark place. And then he came home to Maine, got involved with his community and his business, met his now wife, and was a different man.

8:54Coming back to Maine, moving back to my hometown, reconnecting with the community that I'm from, building real friendships, building real networks, real relationships with people, that helped cut my disillusion. I went from thinking that people were bad to knowing that people are good. But the latest round of scandals kind of punctured that narrative because he only got married in 2023. And those sex messages were, you know, from just a couple of years ago. He wasn't a young man in his early 20s. And so I did hear a lot of disappointment about that and also a lot of cynicism from people who thought he was different, thought he was a guy that they could really believe.

9:44and relegating him back to, oh, he's just a politician like the rest of them. And he also, the way he responded to those guys, he didn't really take as much ownership. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times ran stories without any evidence besides the gossip from a former staffer. I'm sorry, that's frankly journalistic malpractice. And that turned some people off. But ultimately, you know, partisanship is a very powerful force. and the stakes being what they are in a race that could tip control of the Senate, most Democrats are going to put aside their concerns, hold their nose. But, and this is a big but and the thing to watch, I think, heading into November, Susan Collins has a proven, almost unique ability in this day and age to win split ticket voters, to get people to vote for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket and then vote for her.

10:45So it would only take a relatively small number of defections from Plattner or people who have previously voted for Collins who would now be up for grabs, vote for a Democrat. It would only take a little, a small number of them to potentially tip things back into Collins' column, especially if there are more revelations yet to come. Do you think he can win against Collins? I do think he can win against Susan Collins.

11:19I mean, just to level set for a second, I think any Democrat would have a tough time beating Susan Collins. A lot of people look at Maine. It's New England. It's a blue state. We haven't voted for a Republican president since 1988. So they assume, you know, this is low-hanging fruit. It's really not. Susan Collins is a very effective politician, proven durability. So I think this race, no matter who the Democrat was, was always going to be a tight within the margin of error race. That said, Plattner's been able to raise the money. He's been able to hold the coalition together so far. He hasn't had really, despite all these scandals, any defections from elected officials.

12:00He's done these enormous number of town halls. This is a small state where retail politics goes a long way and connecting with voters face to face can really make a difference. And that's not something that Susan Collins does. And in 2020, Democrats ran a squeaky clean, well-qualified candidate who raised twice as much money as Susan Collins and still lost by nine percentage points. So I think there's a willingness or almost a sense of necessity among some Maine Democrats that we have to try something different. And, you know, there's a good chance we're going to lose anyway. So let's take a flyer on this guy and maybe he can do it.

12:56Alex Seitzwald of the Midcoast Villager Coming up, political consultants love authenticity But do voters, really?

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16:28Discover the allure of Today Explained. We're back with John Alsop. He's a contributing writer at The New Yorker. All right, John. So the people calling Graham Plattner authentic are largely members of a kind of consultant class. When they say that a candidate is authentic, what do the politicos mean? Yeah, it's a super interesting term because it's at once something that should mean something very simple, right? that someone is real or they're who they say they are or they sort of appear to be normal in some way. But actually, it's become loaded over a period of decades, at least, with a bunch of signifiers, right?

17:05So if someone's real self is that of kind of a boring political nerd who speaks in soundbites, that isn't generally what's considered to be authentic. Rather, it's someone who appears to be outspoken or spontaneous or an outsider, someone in the classic formulation who you'd like to grab a beer with. So those are personality traits. But with Plattner, there's also some like visual signifiers, aren't there? Yeah, absolutely. He's kind of gruff and gravel voiced and macho, you know, has a big beard, has tattoos on his arms, works on a boat on the water. What I love most about Man of the People, I have never met people who are more hardscrabble, even in a place that requires you to work like two or three different jobs.

17:52We have watched this state become essentially unlivable for working class people. And it makes me deeply angry. You know, he's also a white guy. The concept of authenticity as a political construction has been criticized many times for being kind of racially coded as well. being easier for white candidates to pull off in a way that's legible to this consultant class. He really sort of seems out of central casting in that regard. Is Graham Plattner authentic, for real, for real, in the way that the political class has kind of mapped onto him? I certainly think he is not a 2D stereotype of the gruff working class man who, you know, has sort of been plucked from total obscurity.

18:33his grandfather was a leading architect and designer who sold these kind of quite high-end tables and chairs for example Donald Trump actually owned a set of the chairs which was a delightful detail if that's the right word that I found while I was reporting this piece you know as has been widely covered and discussed Platner went to a couple of elite schools he said that one of those was with help from a you know from a financial aid package I know that they're trying to frame me as some like silver spoon rich kid but i'm sorry like i it's anybody that like comes down here and asks around about how i grew up and my like everybody in here knows it's nonsense his dad's a lawyer in maine platter himself um you know studied in dc worked in a bar on capitol hill so not totally divorced from those circles albeit as i mentioned earlier i don't think really connected to them in a professional sense and so yeah he's he's not a guy who's worked on the water of his whole life.

19:29At the same time, I think he is someone who is complicated and complication in someone's life is in some ways a claim to authenticity. I think in another sense also, he stands for authenticity in what I see as a slightly different sense to that which is signified by the word as it's often used in political media, in that he is a guy who has lived not an unblemished life. There have been these scandals that have come out. He sort of stands for the idea, at least to him, tell it that he has worked through those issues and become a better person and gone to therapy and worked on himself. If there's one thing I can say, I went to therapy for years.

20:09I still go to therapy. Super helpful. It's great. More people should do it. Makes you a better person. Makes you all around happier. Gives you a lot more tools to engage with thoughts and feelings that you otherwise don't have tools for. It's this kind of broader, I guess, sort of more romantic idea in many respects of searching for his real self and kind of coming closer to finding it, which I think taps into sort of a different current of what is understood by authenticity than the one that the political media might mean. Where do our current ideas about authenticity in politicians, where do they come from?

20:48Several historians trace the idea in its modern form really to Jimmy Carter's presidential candidacy in 1976. Years ago, as a farm boy, sitting outdoors with my family on the ground in the middle of the night, gathered close around a battery radio connected to the automobile battery, and listening to the democratic conventions in far-off cities, I was a long away from the selection process then. I feel much closer to it than I. And there are several reasons for that. An important one, I think, was that it was the first presidential election after, you know, the Watergate scandal really blew up.

21:32That was obviously an episode that dented Americans' trust in politicians' character and integrity and honesty. And so there was more of an appetite to learn about the character of candidates. It was also, you know, television by that point wasn't new, but had become a sort of ubiquitous medium and kind of allowed for that intimacy of getting to know someone or seeming to get to know someone. And Carter sort of took advantage of that. He had this, you know, these kind of ads that were almost cinema verite in the way that he was filmed, just sort of at home, I think, doing normal things. We need a sunshine law in Washington to open up the deliberations of executive and legislative branches of government to the public.

22:11So we can understand what decisions are made about our own lives. What went on behind those locked doors. Presented himself as, you know, a man of the South, a man who, you know, got his hands dirty on his farm. Jimmy Carter knows what it's like to work for a living. Until he became governor, he put in 12 hours a day in his shirt sleeves during harvest at his farm. Can you imagine any of the other candidates for president working in the hot August sun?

23:01and is an honest, reliable person who is kind of legibly all-American, even if they were very much insiders or in the case of someone like George W. Bush, the scion of a kind of Yankee elite and an oil dynasty, they would try and appropriate those codes for themselves, right? Just a regular guy who sort of talks in a normal way and is relatable. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive. But I think people got sick of or started to perceive or become more aware of the superficiality and fakeness of that. And I think Trump was kind of both the logical end point of that style of politics, but also kind of smashed it to smithereens as he has done with so many other things.

23:55On the one hand, you could kind of read him as incredibly authentic, someone who is unconstrained, completely disinhibited, always seemingly speaks his mind, even when it's to his political detriment or the cost of things that people will say about him in polite society, and certainly a complete outsider to normal political structures. At the same time, he lied and continues to lie all the time, which is not a great thing if you're trying to use the word authenticity to describe someone. And so, yeah, I think Trump was simultaneously someone who benefited from the decades-long construction of these sort of authenticity norms.

24:34and at the same time benefited from telling people with a wink and a nod, these are hollow, people call me a fake or a phony or whatever, but this system doesn't work for you and I can come in and maybe kind of outfake and phony in them and smash it to pieces. And I think in his wake, you know, he has shifted the meaning of the concept somewhat as well. You said this has been going on for generations. You cited Carter. Do you think it changes our politics? Do you think it changes ultimately who ends up in office and therefore how the United States, the sort of path that the United States ends up on?

25:11I think that the way that authenticity has been constructed since Carter, which we talked about before, this idea of politicians you'd rather have a beer with. Yeah, I think that has fed into a much broader political culture that is obsessed with quite superficial sort of image construction over policy. in structures, you know, who gets into politics in the first place and how those people behave during elections. And then, you know, if they win in office, that being said, I think my piece was about, you know, two different connected, but different definitions of authenticity in politics, right?

25:52This one that we've discussed, which is a construction of the consultant class, but another one that taps into i think a much like longer term and more deep-seated desire for people to like connect with what is what you know what they believe is real either in themselves or in the world around them and i kind of think there's something in that that's like an innate part of of being a human and i don't think you could sort of expunge that from politics

26:28John Alsop writes for The New Yorker. Danielle Hewitt produced today and Amina El-Sadi edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore are our engineers. And Gabriel Donatov checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.

26:58Thank you.