Should Graham Platner’s personal life matter?

Opinion>Opinions - Campaign The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill Should Graham Platner’s personal life matter? Comments: by Austin Sarat, opinion contributor - 06/22/26 9:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Austin Sarat, opinion contributor - 06/22/26 9:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied

Robert F. Bukaty, Associated Press Graham Platner, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, speaks at a news conference April 30, 2026, in Lewiston, Maine.

Remember Gary Hart? He was the clear front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, until a photo surfaced of a woman named Donna Rice sitting on his lap, sailing on a yacht appropriately named Monkey Business. Hart, a married man, was forced to withdraw from the race a week later.

Remember Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)? The comedian had to resign from Congress after news broke that he had made unwanted sexual advances on several women.

At that time, progressives led the charge in calling for Franken’s resignation. For example, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said, “I’m shocked and appalled by Sen. Franken’s behavior. It’s clear to me that this has been a deeply harmful, persistent problem and a clear pattern over a long period of time. It’s time for him to step aside.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) a longtime friend of Franken, also joined those insisting Franken had to step down, as did her progressive colleague, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Now, almost two decades later, many of those same people are supporting Graham Platner, who was recently chosen as Maine’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate. They are doing so even after revelations that Platner exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women soon after he got married former partners describe him as “volatile and unfaithful.”

Add to that revelations about his tattoo with a Nazi SS symbol and Reddit posts containing remarks homophobic and critical of sexual assault victims, and one might assume Warren and Sanders would want nothing to do with him. Yet Warren has called Platner her “kind of man,” and so far she is sticking with him.

It is more important, in her view, that Platner recognizes “when the system is this broken, when there are this many billionaires who have this much control over our country, it is no longer time to make little change at the margins, it is time for big, structural change.”

Sanders’s reaction to the revelations about Platner has been similar to Warren’s. Voters understsand that “nobody’s perfect,” he says. People want senators “who will focus on the needs of working-class people, who are tired of a corrupt political system in which billionaires buy elections.”

Sanders adds that no one should be talking about Platner until they stand up to President Trump’s “morality and corruption.”

The Hill reports that Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), another progressive icon, acknowledged that Platner’s personal behavior is “hard to stomach.” But, in a bit of political realism, she framed the Maine senatorial contest as a “choice … between that and a senator who has voted to take healthcare away from millions of Americans.”

What Warren, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are saying reflects a post-Trump recalibration of the standards of conduct required of our political leaders. It also reflects the fact that, at a moment when the future of American democracy is at stake, progressives believe they need all hands-on deck.

But something else is also in play. Progressives and others are today recalibrating the emphasis on personal character that drove Hart and Franken from the political scene. Americans have done that many times throughout our history.

Our history has been marked by cycles in which concerns about the personal character of leaders were ascendant, followed by others in which a more tolerant cosmopolitan attitude has prevailed. Writing in the midst of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in September 1998, commentator Andrew Sullivan offered an example of the former when he warned of the danger of treating “characterological concerns” as separate from a consideration of “whether … (a politician) can do the job.”

Sullivan suggested that political leadership in a constitutional democracy was “an exacting and delicate and always moral job.” It should only be entrusted to those whose personal character was exemplary.

On the other hand, people like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy would never have led the nation if Sullivan’s view had prevailed throughout history. In our current moment, people on all sides of our political divides are not buying Sullivan’s view.

Professor Suzanna Krivulskaya at California State University San Marcos suggests Americans “have grown more likely to believe that an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

“This shared willingness to overlook the private moral failures of public officials suggests that the tumult of the past decade may have convinced many Americans that political expediency can trump personal integrity,” she says.

That may help explain why, on June 9, 71 percent of Maine’s Democratic voters cast their ballots for Platner. For them, as for Warren, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, his beliefs about the kind of country America should be are far more important than any mistakes he has made in his personal life.

In the end, Army veteran Daniel Barkhuff gets it right when he says of Platner, “a person does not have to be flawless to be worthy of trust.” He warns all of us that “A democracy that insists on perfection will eventually find itself represented only by people skilled at hiding their flaws.”

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.