After President Donald Trump gained ground with young men and rode his ascendant, aggressive brand of masculinity into a second term in the White House, a group of progressive Democratic strategists bet big on a new kind of candidate: aesthetically masculine men who could run economic populist campaigns and speak like regular people.
Their arguably biggest get was Graham Platner, a military veteran and oyster farmer who was challenging Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. Platner galvanized an enthusiastic base of supporters and weathered months of controversies surrounding his personal life by selling a story of redemption and what he called “healthy” masculinity. An October profile in GQ Magazine declared him “the virile, earthy working man many male politicians wish they were.”
But that bet blew up spectacularly when Platner dropped out of the race Wednesday, less than 72 hours after Politico reported on allegations of sexual assault from an ex-girlfriend. He has repeatedly denied the allegations.
The stunning implosion of his campaign has shaken the Democratic Party and left Maine Democrats scrambling to find a replacement — and feeds into an existential debate as to how Democrats should campaign on a vision of masculinity. It also highlighted what many see as double standards that elevate White men candidates and grant them flexibility to be flawed and have a redemption arc.
Democratic strategists told The 19th that Platner’s flameout is a consequence of two broader dynamics within the Democratic Party: an implicit assumption that White men who check certain aesthetic and demographic boxes are inherently electable and an overcorrection after the loss to Trump in 2024.
“Democrats always, number one, overlearn the wrong lessons, and number two, they’re always fighting the last war,” said Tré Easton, a vice president at the Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank.
Voters, he said, don’t dissect candidates’ identities and attributes the way political professionals do.
“I’ve seen lots of focus groups, and I haven’t seen one that says, ‘I really want a guy, a White guy who cusses a lot, and who has a military background, and just sort of tells like it is,” he said.
Amanda Litman, co-founder and president of Run for Something, an organization that recruits young Democrats to run for office, agreed.
“Having now done this for a decade, playing Mad Libs the way that the folks who recruited him to run seem to have done is not going to always yield the best results,” she said.
The consultants and advisers who recruited Platner and supported him in his run for office have said they want to support outsiders, candidates who will shake up the Democratic Party and excite voters — candidates who aren’t practiced politicians.
Litman said an untested woman candidate or candidate of color “would have been seen as too risky in a race with these consequences.’
“There was a certain sense of aesthetics, and I think it was a direct response to, ‘The Black woman candidate couldn’t do it, so what is the opposite?’” she added.
Trump won the 2024 election after being found liable for sexual abuse, campaigning on an aggressive vision of masculinity that’s continued to define his second term.
It was the second time Trump beat a woman candidate. In the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss and the across-the-board erosion of the Democratic base in 2024, some commentators argued the Democratic Party brand had become too feminine and off-putting to the men, especially young Black men and Latinos, who swung for Trump.
Easton argued that position is “a very elite, online conversation” that doesn’t fully explain the swing to the right among men of color and young men. “The Democratic brand is still in the toilet, but I don’t think it’s because of the gay staffers who were doing the tweets from Kamala HQ,” he said.
Mini Timmaraju, president of abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All, argued that just because masculinity is central to Trump’s brand doesn’t make it an effective strategy for Democrats.
“We didn’t lose because we didn’t have masculine candidates,” she said. “We lost because people didn’t believe Democrats were going to fight as hard as we were trying to persuade them we would.”
The majority of Democratic nominees in competitive Senate races this year are men. Michigan’s primary and Maine’s process to replace Platner will determine whether any women join Alaska’s Mary Peltola as Democratic nominees in the nine most competitive races this year.
In some competitive races, Democratic men running for Senate are engaging with the masculinity debate.
In Texas, Republicans have attacked Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico as “low T,” a term with origins in the manosphere referring to low testosterone, and falsely labeled him as being transgender.
In a recent interview with MS NOW, Talarico said he “welcomed” a debate on masculinity, saying: “That seems to be what they want to talk about, so let’s talk about it.”
“Real men serve others, weak men serve themselves,” Talarico added. “I’m looking forward to having this debate about what it means to be a man.”
Michigan Democrats’ Senate pick will be either Rep. Haley Stevens or Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and public health official who has posted lifting and workout videos on social media. In Tuesday’s primary debate, El-Sayed took a dig at Republican candidate Mike Rogers’ campaign posting an AI-enhanced image of their candidate.
“Right now, people are scared to death that there’s going to be this giant data center put in their backyard so people like Mike Rogers can make gender-affirming videos about how buff they really are,” he said.
The dynamics of the race in Maine were unique. Taking on Collins, the last remaining Republican senator from a blue state, is no small task, and it’s one with high stakes as Democrats aim to recapture control of the chamber. Many Democratic elected officials opted to run for governor instead. Gov. Janet Mills entered the race months after Platner and dropped out in April after her campaign failed to take off as Platner drew crowds and enthusiasm.
Unlike Talarico and El-Sayed, Platner courted controversy throughout his campaign amid a steady drip of revelations of a tattoo of a Nazi symbol (he said he was unaware of its origins and got it covered up); since-deleted social media posts where he appeared to blame sexual assault survivors, which he apologized for; and issues in his relationships with women.
But to the consultants who recruited Platner, being rough around the edges was seen as asset and not a liability. Dan Morraff, one of the political consultants who recruited Platner to run, told the Wall Street Journal prior to the sexual assault allegations that he believed “none of this will or should stop him from becoming a U.S. senator,” arguing that people “do not want their candidates grown in vats.”
Easton saw a clear double standard.
“If a non-White straight male candidate had presented with any of that sort of stuff at the vet, they wouldn’t have launched the campaign,” he said. “That is the most galling thing, and I think no one really wants to admit that out loud, because that would just be an indictment of lots of things in our politics. Everyone knows it’s true.”
Christina Reynolds, a veteran Democratic communications strategist and former spokesperson for former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, argued that too often, pundits and operatives conflate “working class” with White men.
“If you’re now expanding electability to be ‘can appeal to working class,’ but you’re taking a narrow view of it, you’re still punishing certain people as not electable who don’t fit in your narrow archetype,” she said. “And it’s just interesting to me that those archetypes are so rarely women and candidates of color.”
She noted that those candidates face a double bind, receiving less media attention and fundraising while being held to higher standards than White men.
“It’s not certainly not universal, but most often the ones we expect perfection of are the women and the candidates of color, and the ones that we will make allowances for tend to be the men,” she said. “I think that’s worth looking at.”
Trump’s election in 2024 came amid a backlash to the peak of #MeToo movement that his first election helped spur. But this year, two high-profile men, including Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales, resigned from Congress amid sexual misconduct allegations, bringing the issue back into the spotlight and spurring a bipartisan push to reform the system.
“We have a larger gender reckoning issue within our party,” Timmaraju said.“I feel like on the heels of Eric Swalwell, folks should have been looking at Platner more seriously and carefully. The signs were all there.”
Reproductive Freedom for All didn’t endorse Platner, and Timmaraju said his controversies related to his treatment of women, which came out in the final months of the campaign, put many women voters and advocacy groups in a difficult position. The Senate nominee who replaces him, she said, will have to work to rebuild trust with women voters.
“It’s very challenging for organizations like ours to be able to go to voters, particularly women voters and say, ‘trust Democrats,’ when we have flawed candidates like this,” she said.
