Graham Platner withdrew his candidacy for US Senate in Maine on Friday afternoon, ending a campaign that had unraveled under a series of scandals and leaving Democrats with days to find a replacement nominee before ballots are finalized. Maine’s secretary of state confirmed that Platner filed paperwork to remove his name from the November ballot.
The withdrawal matters now because the party must move fast to challenge five-term Republican incumbent senator Susan Collins, and the calendar is unforgiving. Democrats are trying to settle on a new nominee before the 27 July deadline that locks in November’s ballots, a race against time that has already prompted several contenders to begin jockeying for the slot, including Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows and Nirav Shah.
Platner said earlier this week that he planned to leave the race, and in a letter shared on social media he pointed to the more than 156,000 votes he received in the 9 June primary. “My name may have been on the ballot, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine,” he wrote, framing his exit as a transfer of the race rather than a personal surrender.
He had tried to fight through the damage. In an 11-minute video posted on Wednesday, Platner denied the sexual assault allegations, saying, “This is all false,” and, “The things that have been claimed did not happen. It’s not real.” The force of that denial collided with a sharper response from the party’s own side: Devon Murphy-Anderson said, “Graham Platner dropping out today was the right thing to do,” and added that “the allegations that were brought against him were very real and they were very credible.”
The campaign had already been bruised by resurfaced old social media posts that included racist, sexist and homophobic language, which Platner linked to struggles with PTSD. He was also questioned about a since-removed tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi emblem. By Friday, the public case for keeping him in the race had collapsed, and the question was no longer whether he could survive the scrutiny but which Democrat could step in quickly enough to keep the seat in play.
That answer still has not been settled, but the deadline has. Maine Democrats now have a narrow window to pick a new name for the November ballot, and the party’s next move will decide whether the campaign against Collins is reset in time or forced into a scramble that begins too late.
