Pod save Republican control of the Senate?

Graham Platner cancelled several appearances this week after being mostly absent from the airwaves during a long World Cup weekend in which Susan Collins very much was not, amid rumors that yet another shoe was going to drop. And here we go:

A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.

The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.

Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”

Platner denied the allegations.

“These allegations are troubling, serious, and false. Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue,” he said in a statement.

Racicot previously described “reckless” and “unsettling” behavior by Platner to The New York Times, but says she didn’t go public with the specific assault claim because she didn’t want to be known as a rape victim.

Racicot said she later felt compelled to go public about her experience because the reaction to the Times story was dominated by controversy about another woman, Lyndsey Fifield, who alleged Platner mistreated her and faced attacks because of her ties to the Republican Party. (Contacted by POLITICO, Fifield stood by the allegations she made to the Times and declined to comment further.)

I’m not even sure if it’s possible for Democrats to replace Platner with a candidate who could actually beat Collins at this point, which needless to say why he should have dropped out as soon as the Nazi tattoo story dropped. It’s a disaster.

In addition to his disqualifying personal baggage, it’s also worth noting that we have also already seen that the idea that you can win back white working class voters by offering Bernie’s policies in the form of a Burly Manly Man is condescending consultant projection on its face that was proving false yet again on the ground. Can we stop this now please?

The good news is that in this political context Maine Democrats don’t need to appeal to Trump voters; they just need to appeal to Biden-Harris-Collins voters. I hope there’s an available mechanism that will allow Platner to drop out and be replaced with someone like Jackson or Kleban. But I don’t know if there is, and nor of course can we even count on Platner doing the right thing even if it is.

…via Linneus in comments, apparently it’s not too late:

Maine election law provides a clear—though tightly constrained—mechanism for replacing a general-election nominee after the primary. Under Title 21-A, §374-A, a political party may name a new candidate if its nominee withdraws by 5 p.m. on the second Monday in July, which falls on July 13 in 2026.

If that happens, the party then has until 5 p.m. on the fourth Monday in July—July 27—to select a replacement nominee. The process is handled internally by the party, which must move quickly to settle on a new candidate and transition into the general election.

Platner needs to drop out absolutely ASAP.