Is he Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump? Protest vote complicates Graham Platner’s victory

Democrats have rolled the dice in Maine as they pursue a post-Trump future. Will it work? It was over the moment he received the endorsement of Maine’s most famous resident: Stephen King, the master of horror, who announced on Tuesday that he voted for Graham Platner. More than 100,000 Democrats in Maine agreed, making Platner, a marine veteran and oyster farmer, their nominee for the US Senate against the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in November. But many others did not, with Platner’s rival Janet Mills, who backed out of the race earlier this year after struggling to raise enough funds, seemingly on course to receive nearly one in five votes without even campaigning. That protest vote should set off alarm bells about the damage done to Platner by a steady drip of scandal over several months, including old incendiary Reddit posts, a tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, sexually explicit messages sent to other women early in his marriage and accusations from a former girlfriend that he was physically intimidating. The controversies have caused an existential crisis for the Democratic party of 2026, raising a series of questions with no easy answers. Shouldn’t the party th