Can Graham Platner survive another controversy? | NPR’s Newsmakers

Hi. It's Leila Fauldin here with a special episode, a conversation from our sister show, NPR's Newsmakers, where we interview some of the most influential people of our time. Today, Graham Plattner, Democratic senate candidate from Maine. You can hear more interviews like this one on newsmakers. Follow or subscribe to the show on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you watch or listen. You can also find it in the NPR app. And now here's our episode with Graham Plattner. The path to turning the senate blue runs in part through the state of Maine, and that hinges on the presumptive Democratic nominee, Graham Plattner. Plattner. But Plattner's controversial past keeps catching up with him. On May 30, reports emerge that Plattner exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women early in his marriage. His wife, Amy Gertner, defended him in a video posted on X. I think it's shameful behavior to spend time and energy and resources on negative ads and negative stories on Graham when all he's trying to do is improve the lives of people who work for a living. The controversies around Plattner don't end there, and they raise a big question. Does he have too much baggage to carry on, or can his anti establishment political message that has generated so much enthusiasm among the Democratic base carry him through. I spoke to Grant Plattner in Maine before news broke of these explicit messages. We offered him a follow-up interview to discuss the latest scandal. His campaign said he was too busy. But Plattner provided a statement that read in part, I've learned throughout this campaign that people don't care about gossip or headlines. They care that you're fighting for their hospitals, their paycheck, their kids. Thank you so much for sitting down with me. Of course. Thanks for having me. So we're sitting here. This is Maine Carpenters Union. Yep. I wanna talk about why we're having the conversation we are here at this place, what it means to you. I firmly believe that reempowering organized labor is gonna be one of the keys to building the power necessary to really take back our democracy from from corporate interests, honestly, from the interest of money, from the interest of billionaires. Historically, organized labor has always really been the kind of foundation of any kind of real movement politics that is able to advocate for working people. Mhmm. And so being able to build a close relationship with labor, being able to go be an advocate for labor in the United States senate, this is a pretty, I don't, core part of my politics. And so the relationships I've been able to build with the unions here in Maine, I mean, it's been an absolute honor. And it also is, I think, kind of core to the project we're undertaking, which is turning the Democratic party back into the party of working people, back into the party that represents the interests of those who work and, frankly, …