The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack . As with so many of the worst things in American politics, we have the Nixon administration to thank for the term ratfucking . It entered the American political lexicon through the Nixon-era operatives who perfected its techniques: dirty tricks, sabotage, deception and (especially) bad-faith manipulation of the pliable political news media. Ratfucking isn’t just trying to hurt your political opponent’s campaign; that’s electoral politics. Ratfucking is a covert process built on plausible deniability, tactics that no establishment politician or campaign is going to publicly acknowledge as their work. Think of the planted story timed for maximum damage, the dirty trick disguised as spontaneous misfortune. The essence of ratfucking is not that the damaging material is necessarily false. It’s that the sabotage is engineered — sourced, timed and laundered through credulous media intermediaries to produce an outcome that the saboteurs could never achieve openly. By that definition, the cascade of media revelations now engulfing Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner is as pure and plain a case of ratfucking as I can remember … and almost certainly engineered by the Democratic establishment, which cares more about control of the party than winning the Senate. ( The Iron Law of Institutions wins again.)
For the record, I’m not a Maine voter and I’m not especially a Platner fan. He’s not my vision for the future of the Democratic Party and I haven’t donated money to him or anything. But this process has played out time and again, where the center-right faction of the Democratic Party has weaponized liberal media (like, say, The New York Times , The Atlantic and New York ) to do their dirty work, and inevitably against a more populist, left-wing candidate who represents a threat to the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party machine. And it sucks. This process has played out time and again. So, let’s start with motive. Graham Platner is not a generic Democrat; he’s part of the ascendant insurgent wing within the party that has begun to represent a real threat to the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers who have steered the party toward neoliberalism, capitulation to the right and pro-corporate policies since before I was born. Platner is an oysterman and Marine Corps veteran seeking to unseat five-term incumbent Susan Collins, running on a classic “throw the bums out” anti-billionaire, antiestablishment platform. Crucially, his rise was an act of defiance against the party’s Washington leadership. His platform, heavy on working-class rhetoric, pushed establishment-backed Gov. Janet Mills out of the race in April, to the dismay of top Democrats in Washington who felt the popular two-term governor was a safer bet. The establishment’s preference was never a secret: Chuck Schumer abandoned any appearance of neutrality, declaring that Mills “is the best candidate to retire Susan Collins” in what Axios plainly described as a full-fledged fight between the party’s establishment and its left wing. When a faction wants a candidate gone but can’t beat him at the ballot box, the incentive to remove him by other means is obvious. That’s the soil in which ratfucking grows. (That might be a mixed metaphor, idk.)
Then let’s examine the sourcing, the single most damning element. The most destructive blows against Platner didn’t come from Susan Collins or the National Republican Senatorial Committee or conservative media. Of course not! Populist left Dems are never killed by the right; they don’t need to be, given how relentlessly their own party establishment works to defeat them. And indeed the really damaging hits against Platner have come from inside his own party. The sexting story, which has detonated mere days before the primary, traces back to his campaign’s own internal files : Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, disclosed the texts to a campaign staffer last August during an internal opposition research review, in the earliest stages of Platner’s candidacy. This should go without saying: a year-old internal disclosure does not surface on its own; an “interested party” had to have gotten involved, and it almost certainly had to be a Democratic source that had knowledge of the internal oppo research that Platner’s campaign was developing. The subsequent New York Times story about former girlfriends — of course, of course, of course it’s The New York Times, the weapon of the Democratic corporatist establishment since time immemorial — was apparently driven by “rumors” that were floating around. (I wonder who floated them!) Meanwhile, former Maine state Rep. Genevieve McDonald, who previously served as Platner’s political director, resigned from the campaign and has publicly questioned his viability, reportedly describing him as unelectable. What’s in it for her? I don’t know, let’s see where she goes in the next few years! I have a funny feeling she’s going to get a cushy landing in D.C.
A campaign’s own oppo research, flagged internally, leaking to the national press thanks to vague and unattributed “rumors” at the decisive moment … these are the textbook signature of sabotage from within. It’s ratfucking, folks. A year-old internal disclosure does not surface on its own. It gets stranger. One of the women central to the Times story isn’t a random Maine voter. Lyndsey Fifield, who described a roughly two-year on-again, off-again relationship with Platner, has worked for conservative groups and was part of Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign. When the case against a progressive Democrat is partly built on testimony from a Republican operative, laundered through the paper of record, the line between journalism and opposition research has effectively dissolved. And if you want to ask, well, if a conservative operative is involved, isn’t it the Collins campaign behind it, I would make two points. First, revealing the information now makes little sense when Mills is still on the ballot; if this is about winning the general instead of scuttling the primary for Platner, why do it now? I promise the Collins campaign sees sensible establishment figure Janet Mills as a stronger opponent. Second, even if this info dump was designed to help Collins, that doesn’t exonerate Schumer or the NYT in the least — I promise, both Chuck Schumer and the Dem leadership he represents and the political reporters at the Times would prefer Susan Collins get another term than have Platner secure the seat for the Democrats. Collins, who has proven to be one of the most consequential enablers of the horrors of both George W. Bush and Donald Trump , is a Very Serious Centrist of the kind that both the Democratic leadership and the NYT assume should rule the world.
And we should take care not to give short shrift to the timing, which is everything. Ratfucking lives and dies by the calendar. The pattern here isn’t the random arrival of inconvenient truths but a metronomic sequence engineered for cumulative effect — what worried Democrats themselves call a “drip, drip, drip” dynamic. (Again, quintessential ratfucking.) The inflammatory Reddit posts surfaced just a few days after Mills announced she was running … precisely when the establishment most wanted to hurt Platner. The texts, known about internally since 2025, broke in the final days before the June 9 primary. The oppo sat dormant for the better part of a year, then erupted at the one moment calculated to inflict maximum harm while denying voters time to absorb it. Do you really think that just … happens?
Finally, there’s a quirk of Maine primaries that makes this all particularly gross. Why release devastating material now , when Platner is the overwhelming primary favorite and cannot realistically be stopped at the ballot box? Well, one theory would have to be “because costing Platner the primary was never the actual goal.” Under Maine law, a candidate who wins the June 9 primary and subsequently withdraws by July 13 may be replaced by a nominee selected by (drumroll please) “party officials,” who would then choose a replacement. Think about it, friends! If you’re Chuck Schumer and the NYT and everyone else who will do anything to make sure that the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party stays in control, what could be a better outcome than Platner winning the primary but being forced to step down during the period when the party establishment can choose a new nominee? The damaging revelations seem perfectly timed to land when Platner can no longer be defeated by Maine voters but can still be pressured into withdrawing afterward … at which point the party committee, not the electorate, gets to choose. Is that the scheme here? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put it past anyone involved. I do know that the party sat on its own opposition research for the better part of a year, then released it in the final days before the primary, at the precise moment when Platner can no longer be stopped in the primary but can still be removed afterward. That’s all very convenient. One theory would have to be “because costing Platner the primary was never the actual goal.” Sen. Bernie Sanders , who endorsed Platner early and has refused to abandon him, named the underlying logic directly: The reason the establishment wants Platner gone is not the tattoo or the texts but that the oyster farmer represents a movement within the party that’s a genuine threat to the billionaires who control our political system. Strip away the moralizing and the cynical corporate HR politics and the sequence is obvious: an inconvenient insurgent, internal material weaponized by his own side, a Republican-linked source, a calendar tuned to a removal statute …. That is ratfucking by any honest definition.
Look, Platner’s campaign confirmed he sent multiple women sexually explicit texts at the beginning of his marriage. You are free to have moral misgivings if you’d like. If you vote on those moral misgivings, rather than on the fact that Platner is the only Democrat who can defeat the 73-year-old Collins and in doing so help stop Trump’s agenda, I think that’s very childish — and if you’re one of the vast majority of centrist Dems who have excused constant accusations of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton (which are so numerous they have their own Wikipedia page ), you’re a raging hypocrite. Sure, voters deserve whatever information there is to give them before they vote, and unflattering oppo dumps before primaries are ordinary, not sinister. But a coordinated effort by all of these establishment media entities, launched with suspiciously similar language and at this exact moment in the campaign cycle, drawing on information that could only have come from Democratic sources, against a candidate uniquely hated by both the Democratic establishment and the wealthy whose interests they represent … I would like a little transparency at least, please.
I’ve been getting the classic “That’s crazy”/“Everybody knows that” routine on this story — I’ve been told by all manner of savvy people that there’s no coordinated anti-Platner effort, but also that of course there’s a coordinated anti-Platner effort and I’m naive to believe that I could ever live in a world without ratfucking. It would be cool if people picked one or the other, if they’d settle on “that’s not happening” or “of course that’s happening lol” and not give me both at the same time. And it would particularly be cool if the establishment media stopped acting as unpaid political operatives for the center-right Democratic Party establishment — but, well, I guess some things are beyond hope.
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