Graham Platner has had anything but a placid run at a Senate seat in Maine, where he had been threatening Susan Collins’s decades-long tenure. There was the apparent Nazi tattoo—a not-small problem, you’d think, that a candidate couldn’t withstand, but he did. Then there were some initial allegations of misconduct, but his momentum didn’t seem much blunted. This week, when Politico reported a rape allegation, he still did not immediately withdraw from the race. As our Washington correspondent Aidan McLaughlin reports, even as his circle of advisers urged him to close up shop, Platner tried to stay in, denying the allegations and fighting with his team. The details are here, and Aidan will have more in the coming weeks on how the Democratic Party is handling this new challenge.
Elsewhere in discomfiting news, Savannah Walsh has fresh insight into a new ad campaign that the Department of War has been rolling out during Love Island and other prime-time TV shows, but they swear there’s no AI involved (the Stefon of newsletter sentences).
