Graham Platner has done a better job of hiding his privileged roots than the Nazi tattoo on his chest — a move which is by design.
The embattled Maine senate candidate is vocal about his disabled war veteran, rugged oyster farmer, “working class” persona; less about his attendance at an $80,000-a-year boarding school, lawyer father, or major architect grandfather.
That’s because he’s been coached how to present himself, molded to present a specific image and, in a sense, manufactured.
The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic Socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.
And for his champagne socialist handlers, the more scandals that engulf Platner and the more centrist outrage he can stoke, the better as it gets more stories written and drowns out his opponent in November, incumbent Susan Collins.
“For all we know, they’re leaking this stuff because they want to get more attention,” a former candidate who hired the same team behind Platner a few years ago told The Post.
That under-the-radar team are a couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancé, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.
The pair had originally met while working for Bernie Sanders in 2020 (I-Vt.) and are hardcore members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). They have previously been behind candidates Dan Osborn, running for senate in Nebraska, and Summer Lee, a member of the Pennsylvania State House since 2018 and part of the DSA ‘squad’, alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
In summer 2025, Moraff and Fan were in Maine scouting for a new candidate. They had settled on Union boss Chris Williams in Bath, but dropped him at the last minute due to “a skeleton in the closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain,” according to an interview they gave to Politico.
It remains to be seen if those skeletons were worse than Platner’s. Williams did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Moraff — who has his own Dark Forest consulting firm — and Fan had first got wind of Platner through the local DSA network, where he had been active in the local DSA-offshoot group Acadia Action and had been featured in a recent New York Times travel story about oysters in Maine.
They first entered Ironbound, Platner’s mother’s restaurant, just a few miles from where he lives in Sullivan and made contact. After talking with him, they felt they had their candidate.
“Daniel looks to work for candidates who are non-conventional, willing to go against the status quo. That’s what he aligns with, the type of folks that don’t live their life with the idea they’re going to run for office one day,” said the ex-candidate, who lost their election and asked not to be named.
Moraff cut his political chops in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he had moved after an undergraduate degree in engineering at Brown University. He became a prominent leader in the local DSA chapter, which underwent rapid growth after Donald Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 and advocates for aggressive action.
His efforts fundamentally remade the Democrat party in Pittsburgh, local politico Erin Koper told The Post.
“The DSA now is in every corner of local politics. They have been putting up candidates, getting them elected to county council, city council, state rep seats,” said Koper, who ran for city council as a Republican last year.
She claimed city council meetings suddenly got flooded with “90 percent” DSA members hounding officials, a process which continues to this day.
Moraff’s ideas were hatched as early as 2017, when he penned a now-deleted essay in the progressive magazine “In These Times” titled “Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries” where he argued socialists should run as Democrats rather than as independents or third-party candidates.
“We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to build our own forces — forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists,” he wrote.
Moraff’s first big win happened when he helped get fervently anti-Israel Democratic Rep. Summer Lee elected to the Pennsylvania State House in 2018, serving as her campaign manager. Lee is now a member of the so-called “Squad” of far-left minority women reps.
“The local Democratic committee, which typically leaned pretty traditional Democrat, has been taken over by progressive politics. You can’t even be a moderate now, [the DSA] will completely ruin your political career if you’re a traditional Democrat,” Koper added.
Moraff next foresaw that his movement needed white, working-class men, who were rapidly being lost to Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
He and Lee traveled to Nebraska, where they claim to have “stumbled” across Navy veteran and former labor union boss Daniel Osborn in his garage.
The Boston-based pair put their socialist theories to the test by putting up Osborn — also a Nebraska National Guardsman and industrial mechanic — as an independent candidate in the deep red state in 2024, accompanied by a political action committee literally called the “Working Class Heroes Fund.”
He narrowly lost out to incumbent Deb Fischer but, still backed by Moraff and Lee, he is running again this November against Sen. Pete Ricketts, with the latest polls showing a neck-and-neck race.
Osborn’s campaign has been under scrutiny for paying family members, including his wife,
Megan Osborn, and her consulting companies have more than $278,000. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Moraff and Lee also teamed up with Nathan Sage in Iowa, mounting a longshot bid to become the first Democrat since 2008 to win a Senate race in the state.
In a campaign video about himself, he told viewers he grew up in a trailer, worked as a mechanic and was deployed twice to serve in the Iraq War as a Marine.
“The economy is rigged, and those in power don’t give a damn,” Sage, who is now executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce, said in the video, adding: “They’re the ones doing it.” Sage dropped out of the race in February. Attempts to reach him by The Post for this article were unreturned.
When placed in the context of Platner’s rise this playbook sounds familiar. However, unlike the other candidates, the Maine hopeful has dominated national headlines in recent weeks, after scandals started to compound, including revelations he made Reddit posts which downplayed sexual assault, defended US soldiers desecrating Taliban corpses and alluded to familiarity with prostitutes.
“Everyday people don’t want the perfect candidate these days, right? They want someone who makes mistakes and owns up to them,” said the ex-candidate.
The revelations seem to be more than Moraff and Lee can handle alone, and the DSA network kicked into gear, with another figure, Morris Katz, stepping up as Platner’s adviser.
Katz is often cited as one of the main figures behind the rise of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — one of the DSA’ s biggest wins in recent times, propelled to office by a stream of videos relatable to Gen Z, which Katz took much of the credit for.
Aged just 27, Katz appears hardwired for the attention economy and to thrive on the controversies around Planter. He is also linked to the Pennsylvania DSA scene through the Fight agency he works for, which is based in the state and boasts in his bio how he “has never backed away from a fight.”
In a report published in Maine’s Bangor Daily News, messages show Katz threatening to accuse a former staffer, who left Platner’s campaign over his growing scandals, of spreading “explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Last week, Platner’s people went into overdrive after his extramarital messages were exposed, resulting in an awkward video made by his wife, Amy Gertner, bizarrely claiming the messages were a distraction from Platner’s policies. It later emerged that like Orborn’s wife, she is also on the payroll, receiving $30,000 since September of last year as a salaried staffer.
Katz was also explosive in his response, posting to social media: “It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office.”
It’s anyone’s guess whether Platner will go down as a product of chutzpah or gob smacking incompetence as chatter swirls in Washington circles of even bigger scandals to drop before November. On Thursday, he had a closed-door meeting with senior Democrats where he pleaded his case to stay in the race.
Were it not for his implosion, comparisons could likely be drawn between Platner and the rise of another unconventional Democratic senator, John Fetterman.
Famed hoodie wearer Fetterman was one of the most talked about success stories of the 2022 election cycle, narrowly beating out celebrity candidate Dr. Memhet Oz (now administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services).
Curiously, Fetterman’s campaign was helped by political consultant Rebecca Katz, who is no relation to Morris, but does work alongside him, running the Fight agency.
However, Fetterman— who became the senior senator for Pennsylvania in 2025 — has since parted ways with both the agency and a large swathe of the seemingly ever-radicalizing Democrat party.
While prominent politicians like Sanders and Chuck Schumer have made excuses for Platner, he pulled no punches.
“When I was growing up, if someone had a clear Nazi tattoo on them, you probably could conclude that they’re a Nazi sympathizer,” Fetterman told CNN Thursday, adding “What kind of a creeper has been on … a platform like Kik, and send a dozen explicit kinds of messages and who knows what else?”