Democrats' Maine Problem
Plus: NYC's construction boom, how the DSA was hijacked by communists, and more...
Rape allegations: Yesterday, Graham Platner—who is trying to unseat Susan Collins from her U.S. Senate seat, and who already won the Democratic primary, positioning him quite well to flip that seat from red to blue come November—faced the most serious allegations yet: that he had raped a woman.
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Jenny Racicot met Platner via a dating app in 2019, starting an on-again, off-again relationship with him. In 2021, she alleges that he assaulted her—allegations Politico broke yesterday, that Racicot discussed on CNN.
"I said, 'No, don't come over,'" Racicot told CNN. "Like, 'I'm not in the mood. Don't come over.'" When he didn't respond via text, she assumed "he got the message," she said, but "half an hour later, I heard a noise outside my door and then he came in. He just came into my house. It was unlocked." Platner "jumped on top of" her while she was lying on the couch and "indicated that he had intentions that were sexual in nature," Racicot added. "I remember just at first being like, 'Hey, I'm not into this,'" she said. "Like, 'Don't, I'm not in the mood.'" Then she saw a "look in his eyes" and the smell of booze. "I was like, 'This is different—he is heavily intoxicated,'" she told CNN. "And that blank stare was kind of like a photographic memory that I still have of that night."
She pushed Platner away, and he backed into her antique sewing kit, causing sharp objects to scatter all over the floor. "I remember specifically him grabbing at my chest, and I hit his hand and I said, 'Don't touch me,'" she added. Racicot says Platner forced himself on her. After the encounter, she says she cut off all contact with him.
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" to corroborate the account.
Racicot told Politico that "one of the reasons I didn't come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person….I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person."
The sexual assault accusations against Graham Platner by Jenny Racicot are really quite severe. She says that he entered her home in a blackout state after she had definitively told him not to come. Then he forced himself on her. She cut off all contact afterward.
Barging into…
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) July 6, 2026
This is in addition, of course, to the many other problems with Platner's character. As I wrote just last month:
"You might take issue with his Nazi tattoo—a skull-and-crossbones design called a Totenkopf, that he got with other Marines in Croatia back in 2007, that he has repeatedly claimed he didn't know the significance of. (His former girlfriend, Lyndsey Fifield, begs to differ, saying Platner used to frequently joke about his Nazi tattoo.) Or maybe the fact that he has a history of roughing up his girlfriends a bit. Or cheating on his wife by sexting other women. Or his weird Reddit comments, ("You don't have much experience with Latin American hookers, do you?") per The Wall Street Journal. Or the fact that he was a Redditor at all."
Fifield, for her part, spoke with The New York Times, serving as a source for a big piece on Platner's history of domestic abuse. Fifield—who is conservative—was unhappy with the way Times journalists portrayed her, and the lack of due diligence she claims they did when she was highly cooperative in helping them corroborate her story.
Platner's trainwreck of a campaign is an incredible wealth of data because it shows us exactly where the Democrat establishment line of tolerance is:
------ACCEPTABLE-------
- describing self as a communist
- being a fake working class nepo baby
- ACAB comments
- fantasizing…— nic carter (@nic_carter) July 6, 2026
"With so much at stake, the best path forward is for Graham Platner to step aside as the Democratic nominee and address these serious allegations outside this Senate race," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who had campaigned with Platner and boosted his image.
"With Republicans holding 53 seats, Democrats must defend all the seats they hold and flip four more to win control in November," reminds The New York Times. Flipping Collins' seat is a top priority for Democrats, but will pursuit of this seat delude Democrats into thinking they should just stick it out with Platner?
Platner can withdraw from the race anytime prior to July 13. The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to replace him on the ticket.
Scenes from New York: New York City "added 38,682 units to its housing stock last year—the most new apartments completed in a single year for the city since 1965, according to the Department of City Planning, when developers rushed to complete buildings before a new zoning resolution," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The city's residential push shows no sign of slowing down. New application filings indicate a robust pipeline, with 16,815 new units across 281 buildings proposed in this year's first quarter, a recent Real Estate Board of New York report shows."
QUICK HITS
- "By most measures, the Catholic Church is becoming less of a force in American life. Revelations of sexual abuse and official cover-up have taken a toll at dioceses around the country, as has the gravitational pull of secular society. Catholic-school enrollment has fallen by roughly a million students since the beginning of the century. Infant baptisms have fallen by more than half. Catholic weddings have dropped even more steeply. In most places, the story of American Catholicism is one of decline," writes Nate Weisberg at Intelligencer. "And yet Catholicism has never felt more powerful or politically salient in the places where American conservatism governs. Six of the nine Supreme Court justices are Catholic. So are more than a third of the members of [Donald] Trump's second-term Cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Prominent non-Cabinet figures in the administration including press secretary Karoline Leavitt and border czar Tom Homan are also Catholic. And then, of course, there is Vance."
- "A tragic irony of history is that the Democratic Socialists of America was formed in opposition to the very thing it has become," writes Jonathan Chait for The Atlantic (in "There's Nothing Democratic About These Socialists"). "The writer and activist Michael Harrington helped found the DSA in 1982. His goal was to build a socialist movement that would eventually pull the Democratic Party toward more humane domestic and foreign policies. He believed that a commitment to freedom of speech, elections, and other democratic norms was an absolute requirement for any socialist organization. And generations of bitter experience taught Harrington and his allies that socialist organizations had failed because they allowed communists to infiltrate them and take control of their organizing structures."
- "The Supreme Court on Monday declined to pause enforcement of a Texas law that restricts which apps children can download from online stores, in a case that involves the balance of online safety for kids and the Constitution's free-speech guarantees," reports The Washington Post.
