Man who discovered Graham Platner turns out to be kind of rapey
By 
Probably not a coincidence?
In the postmortem of Graham Platner’s disastrous campaign for Senate, much of the blame has fallen on one man: Daniel Moraff. A progressive political strategist who recruits working-class candidates from outside traditional Democratic pipelines, he and his fiancée were convinced that the Maine oyster farmer had the juice to defeat the longtime incumbent, Republican Susan Collins. . . .
What would compel a consultant to dismiss signs that a candidate has contemptible views on sexual assault? Why would he shrug and look the other way as Platner’s wife and former girlfriends detailed multiple instances of duplicitous behavior, disrespect, and, in some cases, physical violence? Here’s one answer: Moraff identified with Platner because he has his own history of alleged sexual assault.
As Marisa Kabas reported this week in her newsletter the Handbasket, in the winter of 2019, Moraff was dating a woman in Pittsburgh he’d met through an app. One night, the woman told Kabas, he trapped her in a bedroom for several minutes by holding the door shut from the other side. The woman was disturbed, but Moraff reportedly played it off as a joke. When she saw him again, she said, he had sex with her after she repeatedly told him no. “It was the most disconnected from my body I had ever felt,” she said. Her account was corroborated by a friend in whom she had confided at the time, a person she subsequently dated, and Facebook messages from 2021 in which she and two other people discussed the alleged assault. (Through a spokesperson, Moraff denied that he had “committed a criminal offence.”)
Hmmm. What is “a criminal offense” anyway? I like beer!
Other allegations from Moraff’s past have affected his political work. In 2017 he recruited community organizer Summer Lee and managed her successful campaign for the Pennsylvania state legislature; five years later, he tried to get involved in her insurgent campaign for Congress, which led to the ouster of a 20-year Democratic incumbent. But after Lee’s campaign leadership received a report of six sexual misconduct allegations against Moraff—including at least one accusation of sexual assault—Lee’s team told Moraff to stop contacting campaign workers and stay away from campaign events. (His spokesperson told Kabas that he “unequivocally asserted his innocence” at the time and asked for a full investigation into the allegations.)
Maybe tbis guy just has really bad luck, although Thomas Bayes might have a different explanation.
Throughout Platner’s campaign, his backers maintained that every misdeed and red flag only made him more electable. His reported history of mistreating the women in his life was spun as both a boon to his everyman image and irrelevant to his politics. One of the people responsible for this narrative was Daniel Moraff, who appears to have a vested personal interest in pushing the left to normalize and accept men with sexual misconduct allegations in their pasts.
There is a particular brand of confidence required to assure party leaders and voters that one has no more skeletons in one’s closet, as Platner did before several more disquieting allegations emerged. It’s the same kind of confidence that would lead someone to show up at a campaign victory party from which he’d been explicitly banned, as Moraff reportedly did after Lee won her congressional race. It’s a hero’s mindset—a conviction that one is above the rules, impervious to consequences, and uniquely qualified to bring about necessary political change. Moraff and Platner have a lot in common. It’s no wonder they wooed each other.
I can’t find it at the moment, but when Platner was being forced out of the race a few weeks ago, some prominent “progressive” bro posted something about how if he’s sleeping in the same bed with a woman and he’s drunk and horny he’s going to have sex with her one way or another, because he outweighs her by 60 pounds, or something like that (somebody with better google-fu than me can no doubt find it).
ETA: Commenter Heckblazer found what I was remembering, although Adam Carolla is more of a loudmouthed celebrity dumbass than a progressive:
“This stuff sounds like drunken dude behavior,” Carolla said. “People get weird with this stuff, but I would say most every guy I know did what he’s being accused of at one point or another with their girlfriend at some point after a night of drinking.”
He continued, “It’s basically like: I’m drunk, I’m horny, I weigh 50 pounds more than you, we’re gonna have sex, it’s not really rape because we sleep in the same bed and I’m just gonna pass out and then the next day I won’t really remember what happened but I’ll buy you some flowers. It’s a basic drunken dude thing.”
An under-rated factor in the horseshoe version of the red-brown alliance stuff is that fascism and rape culture go together like peanut butter and jelly, and a lot of men really like that.