“Do any of you have a Nazi tattoo?” “Have any of you ever said that women deserve to be raped and should take accountability for being intoxicated?” “How about that black people don’t tip well?”
US Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican from Ohio, put those questions to Trump administration nominees during a hearing on 17 June. They were aimed at Graham Platner, 41, who has just captured the Maine Democratic nomination to challenge the seat held by five-term Republican Senator Susan Collins, 73, in November's midterm elections.
Platner is a progressive favorite with no electoral experience, unless you count a failed bid for high school student body president. He rose to fame after speaking at a rally for Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.
The new Maine Senate hopeful is prone to scandals. Thousands of comments he made on the social network Reddit have proven a treasure trove for his opponents.
He has also admitted that he had a Nazi death's head tattoo on his chest for almost 20 years (since "covered" by more ink) and that he sent sexually explicit texts to several women.
The Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America began its primary endorsement of him by admitting: "Look – Platner isn't the perfect candidate."
Changing Political Terrain
Republican attacks on Platner are part of the warp and woof of American politics in an election year. Republicans want to hold onto that Senate seat in a tough midterm election fight. Polling currently favors Platner over Collins. The race is close and still winnable by either party.
Yet it is not only Republican knives that are out. John Fetterman, the outspoken, idiosyncratic, somewhat hawkish Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, has been a critic. "Who wants to defend those things?" he asked a reporter, then answered his own question: "I don't know, but I wouldn't."
Platner's campaign has attracted wider interest because it sits on a major fault line of US politics. Democrats historically have been sympathetic to the state of Israel. In recent memory, Jewish Americans were a key part of the Democratic coalition.
Lately, that fellow feeling has waned. "The majority of Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinians than with Israel in a shocking reversal that took place over less than a decade", reports journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book The Jews and the Left.
Democratic primary results leading up to the midterms have been mixed. Self-styled moderates have clinched a number of races "under the premise that we need to start winning again". That is what Ryan James Girdusky, host of the podcast It's a Numbers Game, told Statement. Yet the party's progressives are also "claiming scalps and a big part of it is over Israel".
Successful progressive anti-Israel upstarts in the Democratic Party include Adam Hamawy in New Jersey's 12th US House District, Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania's 3rd District and Analilia Mejia, who won a special election in New Jersey's 11th District and currently serves in Congress. New York City's recent primaries were also, on balance, good news for the Palestinian cause.
This has left many American Jews who have some fondness for their ancestral homeland eyeing the exit signs from the Democratic coalition, Ungar-Sargon reports. The results in Maine and many House primary races could speed their exodus.
Pro-Palestine, anti-Israel candidates and their supporters thus face accusations that they are fanning the flames of anti-Semitism. They have responded in various ways, including disputing the data and countercharging Islamophobia.
Platner’s Impressive Primary
Platner may have pioneered a new defense by going on air and declaring, "I am not a secret Nazi!" It was such an unexpected and bold thing to say that many supporters bought it and repeated his excuses.
The litany: he was much younger, in the Marines, intoxicated and just thought that skull design looked cool. Sure, the Nazi thing is regrettable, but many people regret tattoos they had inked when they were younger and have since had them covered. Why make a federal case out of it?
Supporters asked Maine voters to overlook a Nazi tattoo that was made popular by a unit of the SS that guarded concentration camps during World War II and was later embraced by neo-Nazi groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Moreover, they asked voters to overlook this symbol on the body of a candidate who regularly accuses Israel of genocide and its leaders of war crimes. And, at least on the first tilt, they succeeded.
Platner did not simply win the Democratic Party's Senate nomination. He beat out Maine's sitting Democratic Governor Janet Mills, 78, for the party's nod handily, receiving 71.9% of the primary vote to her 19.3%.
Mills had stopped actively campaigning but let it be known that she was still on the ballot as Platner's controversies multiplied leading up to primary day. Democratic voters bought into Platner as a more convincing challenger to Collins and to Republican control of the Senate and the federal government.
Who Is Platner Running Against?
To hear Platner tell it, Mills was hardly the issue and neither is the "spineless and corrupt" Collins. Rather, he is running against US President Donald Trump, foreign wars, the financial "oligarchs" that he believes are the world's real kingmakers and especially against longtime Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Less than a week after his 9 June primary triumph, the Maine nominee for Senate wrote on X that the Israeli prime minister is an "international fugitive" who is "charged with" war crimes including forced starvation and intentionally targeting civilians, as well as the "crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts".
"Charged with" is legal language. Platner's words closely echo documents from the International Criminal Court. That legal body issued a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest over the war in Gaza, which was ignited by Hamas's surprise massacre of Israeli targets on 7 October 2023. Hamas fighters made incursions into Israeli territory and killed about 1,200 Israeli residents that day. For scale, that body count is roughly the population of Platner's township of Sullivan, Maine.
The fighters made off with more than 250 hostages and kept them in tunnels that honeycombed much of the Gaza Strip. It also took years of fighting and bombing, and some aggressive US diplomacy, to recover the living hostages and the bodies of the dead.
The casualty numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry are disputed. It is clear that tens of thousands of Gazans died during the fighting, and many of those were in fact civilians. Israel maintains that it did what it could to minimize civilian casualties in the conflict. Opponents in Gaza and elsewhere disagree. Many go so far as to label the military action genocide, and Platner has been willing to go there.
His social media dig was consistent with what he had already said about Netanyahu, though the timing was noteworthy, coming just days after his primary win, when candidates typically begin pivoting toward the general election rather than sharpening their most divisive lines. His campaign did not return a request for comment from Statement asking how widely Platner believes his view is shared in the Democratic Party.
A Bipartisan Reckoning on Israel
The Israel question can cut both ways, and US progressive opposition to Israeli policy priorities does not always shade into antisemitism or even antizionism. Opposition to the attacks on Iran conducted by Israel and the US, for instance, is widespread among American Democrats, independents and even a non-trivial number of Trump's own party.
Opposing the military action in Iran through words and peaceful protest is likely to help the Democratic Party's prospects. This is true even among American Jewish voters, a majority of whom opposed America's involvement in the attacks.
The US following Israel's lead into Iran has almost certainly hurt Republicans and many other people around the world. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggered by the conflict, made it harder for farmers to get fertilizer and spiked world oil prices.
Yet the hardening anti-Israel stance among Democratic Party voters is having adverse effects of its own. These effects could hurt the party's broader appeal and create problems for the midterms and for the 2028 general elections for Congress and the White House.
The Democrats' shift on Israel threatens to hurt the party in three ways. First, it narrows the choice of candidates for president and other lesser offices. Second, it cuts off a good chunk of their donor base. Third, it makes Democrats less appealing to voters in the midterms and in the next presidential tilt.
For instance, two reasonably strong candidates for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2028 are Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Rahm Emanuel. Shapiro managed to flip control of the state House of Representatives and worked hard to win a few contentious state Supreme Court elections. Emanuel is former chief of staff to President Barack Obama and a two-term Chicago mayor, which is no mean electoral feat.
They are also both Jewish and broadly pro-Israel. This has made them targets of derision with the party's burgeoning pro-Palestinian wing. In Shapiro's case that targeting was literal. The Pennsylvania governor's mansion was firebombed on 13 April 2025, with him and his family inside, by a mentally ill man who blamed Shapiro for what was happening in Gaza.
In national polling of Democrats, Shapiro currently registers in the mid-single digits while Emanuel does not even show up yet. The overall inclination of the Democratic electorate will likely make it very difficult for either of them to secure a place on the presidential ticket in 2028.
Lessons from the Campus Bubble
For a preview of why the Democratic Party's hardening stance against Israel could become a larger problem, consider what has happened on America's college campuses, with their growing anti-Israel protest echo chambers.
Some Jewish students complain, with evidence, that they have been targeted with bullying and harassment, which is understandable, given that a lot of the chanting could plausibly be taken as calls for violence against Jews.
Progressive campus activists who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats have picked up the Palestinian chant "From the river to the sea", for instance. Sometimes they stop there, and sometimes they add, "Palestine will be free". The chant calls, in practical effect, for the annihilation of the state of Israel and the attendant bloodbath that would ensue.
Two related popular college campus chants are "There is only one solution / intifada revolution" and "globalize the intifada". Intifada is an Arabic word that roughly translates as an uprising, with obvious violent overtones.
Elise Stefanik, a Republican representative from New York, grilled several university presidents about this in a series of congressional committee hearings. "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university's code of conduct or rules on bullying and harassment?", she asked them, repeatedly.
The congresswoman put that question to the university presidents in December 2023. This came at a time when American university speech codes were at their zenith. Students at many schools could get into deep trouble for accidentally misgendering someone on campus, which means using a different pronoun than the one a person prefers. Many Republicans scoffed, however, noting that when it came to calls for the genocide of Jews, the academy had suddenly rediscovered academic freedom.
The presidents equivocated, so Stefanik kept insisting: "Yes or no?" Then-Harvard President Claudine Gay said that calls for intifada were "hateful speech" and "personally abhorrent to me", but she thought the right to protest would trump discipline in most cases. Then-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill said any decision on whether or not to punish students who called for the genocide of Jews would be a "context-dependent decision".
Many university donors were livid over those answers. Magill was quickly out of a job. Gay initially resisted calls for her resignation, but it wounded her badly. Charges of plagiarism forced her ouster about a month later.
By all accounts, both college presidents were hurt by being trapped in an anti-Israel campus bubble. When that was popped by the normal rough-and-tumble of American politics, things did not go well for them.