Associated Press Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks during a primary election night watch party after winning the Democratic nomination Tuesday, June 9, 2026, in Blue Hill, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) I am not a voter in Maine. Which is fortunate, because if I were, I don’t know what I would do.
Last week, Planned Parenthood, an organization whose entire mission is protecting women, endorsed Graham Platner for the U.S. Senate. He had just won the Maine Democratic primary with 72 percent of the vote, and the party moved quickly to consolidate behind him. What no one seemed willing to pause for were the women who had stepped forward — without consultants, without a campaign apparatus, without anyone standing behind them — to say, simply, “This is what happened to me.”
I have spent weeks following this story. I have watched allegations, denials, explanations, interviews, and competing narratives unfold in real time. What has stayed with me is not the politics. It’s the women.
As someone who has survived manipulation, intimidation and emotional abuse, I know what it feels like when a story lands somewhere deeper than politics. And I know what it feels like to hear descriptions of behavior that sound painfully familiar: The grabbing of shoulders during arguments. The atmosphere of intimidation. The volatility fueled by alcohol. The feeling of constantly questioning your own reality.
People who have lived through these experiences recognize certain patterns immediately. That recognition is not proof. But it is not meaningless either. What troubles me most is how quickly our public conversations shift away from what women are saying and toward questioning why they are saying it.
Why now? What is their motive? What do they stand to gain? As if public scrutiny, ridicule and accusations of dishonesty are rewards. As if being disbelieved is painless. The truth is that many women remain silent precisely because they know what comes next — their careers questioned, their credibility dismantled, their private lives turned into public fodder.
Platner himself has spoken about how difficult and exposing it is to open your life when you run for office. I don’t doubt that. But he chose to run. He filed the paperwork, hired the consultants, and walked onto the stage. These women chose none of that. The courage that requires does not diminish the political stakes for those of us watching. If anything, it raises them.
I have spent much of my professional life in politics. I am a Democratic strategist. I appear regularly on television to discuss campaigns, candidates and public policy. I have dedicated much of my career to advancing causes I believe make our country stronger. But I have never believed that a candidate deserves my vote simply because they have a “D” next to their name. In fact, there have been races where I chose not to vote for the Democratic nominee because I could not reconcile the candidate’s values, conduct, or character with my own conscience.
Maine is not an abstract political battleground to me. My parents were born there. Much of my family still calls it home. I spent my childhood summers there, picking blueberries and strawberries, long afternoons at Stanley Pond, bean suppers at the local firehouse, and county fairs that smelled like fried dough and late August. The kind of summers that become the geography of your soul.
I love Maine. Which is precisely why this conversation matters to me. I want Democrats to succeed. I want thoughtful policies. I want effective leadership. I want a government that protects rights, expands opportunity, and serves ordinary people. But I also want what is best for Mainers. And sometimes those two desires exist in tension.
Perhaps that is what troubles me most about this moment: the growing expectation that we should be willing to set aside questions of character when the stakes feel high enough, for the sake of electoral victory.
I can’t do that. And I don’t think women should be asked to. Because elections come and go. Majorities rise and fall. Political fortunes change. But character remains.
I was married to a combat veteran. I have seen firsthand the sacrifices military families make. I understand that service can leave lasting impacts, including trauma, grief, hypervigilance, addiction, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. I worked at the Pentagon developing active-duty military policy, including the Transition Assistance Program that prepares soldiers for civilian life. Within that work, I focused directly on TBI, PTSD, rape and sexual assault.
I have studied how these experiences fracture lives, how they strain families, and how they can be exploited when accountability becomes inconvenient. That knowledge is precisely why I take seriously both the gravity of what veterans carry and the limits of what service can excuse.
But I also know countless veterans whose character, integrity and treatment of others remained intact through those struggles. Which is why I bristle at the suggestion — intentional or not — that intimidation, volatility, manipulation or harmful behavior toward women should somehow be viewed as a predictable feature of military transition.
Our veterans deserve better than that narrative. And women deserve better, too. The overwhelming majority of veterans navigate extraordinary challenges without threatening, intimidating, degrading or harming the people they love. To suggest otherwise risks reinforcing stereotypes that do a disservice to both veterans and survivors. Military service can help explain a chapter of someone’s life. It cannot automatically excuse it. And it should never be used in a way that implies harmful conduct is simply what military transition looks like.
I left a marriage where this dynamic was present. I know how these patterns are framed and reframed, minimized and normalized, until the woman questioning them begins to wonder if she is the problem. She is not. And neither are the women in Maine who are asking the same questions. They deserve to be heard — not dismissed, not managed, not told that a Senate seat matters more than their experiences.
Character is not a luxury we indulge when the stakes are low. It is the thing that holds when the stakes are highest. That is the only kind of leadership worth sending to Washington.
Laurie A. Watkins is a political strategist, former presidential campaign policy adviser to Barack Obama, and former U.S. Army policy official at the Pentagon. She is the author of “The Nerve!” on Substack.
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