The Outsider Perspective Issue 493 | The Beltway Outsiders

If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.

Good Friday Morning! Scientists in Italy went digging around in the guts of a 5,300-year-old mummy, found living yeast, and did what any reasonable person would do with a sample older than the pyramids. They baked bread with it.

The mummy is Ötzi the Iceman, who was crossing the Alps about the time the first cities were being built when somebody put an arrow in his back. He sat frozen in a glacier until two hikers found him in 1991. Researchers at Eurac Research in Bolzano discovered four cold-loving yeasts still alive in his gut, his skin, and the “brownish” water that melted off him. As the lead scientist explained the obvious next step, “If you tell anyone you have yeast, they immediately ask: can we use it for bread?” So they did. It flopped at first. Three months later, in his words, they “had a very, very good sourdough.”

Asked whether mummy yeast might also make beer, he said it was “on the list.” I admire the commitment. I just want it on the record that I will not be ordering the Iceman Lager. There is a line, and a 5,000-year-old man pulled out of a glacier is on the wrong side of it.

This week, I want to talk about the one Senate race that decides who controls the chamber, and the man the Democrats nominated to win it — who spent this week trying to outrun a story his own party fed to the press.

Quick Hits:

Rubio went after the people who bankroll Cuba’s American cheerleaders. This week the State Department sanctioned five Cuban entities under President Trump’s Cuba executive order, including ICAP, the regime’s “friendship” institute that Fidel Castro built in 1960 as a front for Cuban intelligence and that is now run by one of the convicted “Cuban Five” spies. The sharper target is the money behind Cuba’s fans inside this country. Rubio put the American nonprofits in the orbit of Marxist tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham on notice. Singham lives in Shanghai and, per the reporting, has poured $285 million since 2017 into outfits like The People’s Forum, CodePink, and Tricontinental, all of which work hand in glove with Havana. “Anyone providing services to these sanctioned actors is at risk of sanctions themselves,” Rubio warned. Federal investigators are now examining a web of 145 groups with roughly a billion dollars in revenue, asking whether they have been operating as unregistered agents for the Cuban and Chinese governments. I wrote a few weeks ago about how the Democrats’ favorite streamer, Hasan Piker, turned up in this story after his March convoy to Cuba. This is the follow-through. You do not get to launder a hostile regime’s propaganda through a tax-exempt nonprofit and call it activism.

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.

Democrats Bury #MeToo While Defending Graham Platner – Conservative Institute

Swatting a Justice Is an Assassination Attempt. The Left Built the Machine That Aims It. – Conservative Institute

Scott Pelley Wasn’t Canceled. He Set His Own Legacy on Fire. – Conservative Institute

Maine Is the Whole Ballgame

The New York Times spent two months vetting Graham Platner’s ex-girlfriends. The story it published this week is the first volley of his own party trying to get him off the ballot before July 13, and the reason they can’t afford to fail.

For most of this week, the political world braced for a story everyone knew was coming about Graham Platner.

The Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine spent the run-up doing damage control. On Tuesday he met Senate Democrats in Washington, then got home that night and started calling his ex-girlfriends. He had reason to. The Wall Street Journal had reported that his own wife flagged the sexually explicit texts he sent other women, Democratic senators were pressing him on whether anything worse was coming, and reporters were staking out his hometown. So Platner worked the phones, in the words of the New York Times, “rolling through calls to ex-girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.” Some of them did.

Then, on Thursday afternoon, the story landed. The Times published a long account of three women who had dated him describing volatile and abusive relationships, and it hit his campaign like a bomb. A few hours later, Platner went on Chris Hayes’s show to clean it up. Asked whether he had ever thought about dropping out, he said, “No, not once.”

A Senate nominee calling his exes for character references, then going on national television hours after an abuse story to say quitting had never crossed his mind. That is not a campaign; it is a man his own party is trying to remove, who refuses to go. And the seat he is holding is the one that decides control of the United States Senate.

What the Times Reported

The paper spoke with six women who had been involved with Platner. Three of them described relationships that were volatile and, in their word, “toxic.” He could be charming, they said, but he was demeaning to women, drank heavily, was regularly unfaithful, and in at least one case was physically threatening.

The most detailed account came from Lyndsey Fifield, who dated him in Washington a little over a decade ago. She was careful to say he never hit or punched her. But she said he grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, once yanked her out of a cab by the wrist, and during one argument twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut from the other side until she was, in his word, “calm.” She said he kept an AR-15 lying around his apartment and sharpened an ax while he watched television, and that he talked about violence in ways that frightened her. He told her rape was about power. If anyone ever broke in, he said, “I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.” He called women “hatchet wounds.” In a 2016 diary entry, Fifield called him “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.”

The Times did not take her word alone. It reviewed her texts, her chats, and her diary, and spoke with friends who confirmed the relationship had been volatile, though they could not vouch for the physical incidents themselves. The story also carried Fifield’s claim that Platner knew his tattoo was a Nazi symbol, which I will come back to. And it landed on top of last week’s revelation that he had been sexting other women while married.

The “Bias” Defense Makes No Sense

Let me deal with the obvious objection first, because Platner’s campaign has nothing else.

Lyndsey Fifield is a conservative. She has worked for right-leaning groups, did a short stint on Nikki Haley’s 2024 campaign, and worked for the Heritage Foundation before that. When she went on the record describing Platner as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions,” his campaign gave the only answer it had: “Let’s be very clear: This is a lifelong G.O.P. operative who’s dedicated her career to electing Republicans.”

Here is why that answer collapses on contact. A Republican who wanted Susan Collins to win this race would want Graham Platner to stay on the ballot. A wounded Democrat is the best thing that could happen to Collins. Every explosive Platner story helps the Republican. So look at who actually benefits from all of this surfacing now. It is not Republicans. The story ran in the New York Times. Democratic senators spent Tuesday grilling him in private. The people surfacing this material are the ones who need him gone before the ballot locks. The call is coming from inside the house.

And the material itself is not the work of a bitter ex inventing things. The Times spent two months on it, spoke with more than two dozen people, and reviewed contemporaneous texts, Google chats, Facebook messages, and Fifield’s own diary entries before printing a word. That is the paper of record doing the corroboration, not a campaign tracker.

Then there is what Platner chose not to deny. His campaign says he “strongly disputes” the physical altercations Fifield described, and “strongly disputes” what he knew about his tattoo. But the Times asked him about the worst of it, the remarks about raping an intruder to prove dominance, and a campaign official “did not dispute them.” A man fighting for his political life contests everything he can. The silence falls only on the parts he cannot.

For what it is worth, I know Lyndsey Fifield a little in a parasocial sense – we are mutuals on X/Twitter and I’ve listened to her on various podcasts over the years. I believed her before the Times spent two months proving it.

The Lie About the Tattoo

The most important thing Fifield said has nothing to do with how he treated her. It is about what he knew.

The tattoo on Platner’s chest is a Totenkopf, the death’s-head skull worn by the SS, the Nazi force that ran the camps. Last fall, after it drew national attention, Platner told reporters he had no idea it was anything but a scary-looking design he picked up during a night of drinking in Croatia in 2007. “It was not until I started hearing from reporters and D.C. insiders that I realized this tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol,” he said. “To insinuate that I did is disgusting.”

Fifield says he knew exactly what it was, because he taught her the word years before any reporter called. He “would joke about it being a Nazi tattoo,” she said. He told her his Marine unit chose it on purpose, because “they were like a death unit, they were killers,” and saw themselves in the SS that wore the same skull. Last August, months before Platner publicly acknowledged the tattoo, Fifield told a private group chat that her ex had “a Nazi tattoo on his chest.” “It’s a Totenkopf,” she wrote. “An actual one.”

She is not the first person to say he knew; she is at least the third. Back in October, CNN’s investigative team dug up Platner’s own deleted Reddit posts, written under the handle P-Hustle, in which he discussed the Totenkopf by name and defended SS lightning-bolt tattoos as military culture. A separate acquaintance, first quoted by Jewish Insider, remembered Platner calling it “my Totenkopf” more than a decade ago, the same words Fifield used, from a person who has never met her. His own former political director said she knew about the tattoo in August and that Platner admitted it “could be problematic.”

Then came the photo. The campaign’s whole defense is that he never hid the thing, that he lived his life with a skull and crossbones on his chest, shirtless at the beach and the gym. This week the New York Post obtained his selfie from Kik, the hookup app, posted under that same P-Hustle handle. He is in nothing but a towel. His torso is bare. Every other tattoo is on display, the script across his chest, both arm sleeves. And his hand is placed over the Totenkopf. He covered the one tattoo that was a problem. You hide what you know is damning. His former political director put it plainest: he “should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

The problem was never the worst thing Platner said fourteen years ago, which is how he likes to frame it. The problem is the lie he is still telling this year, and the hand over the skull in a hookup-app photo is the proof.

Not One Bitter Ex

The jilted-Republican story falls apart the moment you meet the second woman.

Jenny Racicot is a Maine Democrat who says she agrees with much of Platner’s platform. She dated him off and on in Maine. When the old comments surfaced, she was not surprised. “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with,” she said. “This person does not respect women.” A third woman, an anonymous Maine Democrat who was involved with him for years, summed up the relationship in a line: she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”

The record runs the same direction every time you check it. In 2024, after he was married, women compared notes about him on an “Are we dating the same guy” Facebook page. Last week the Journal reported that his wife, Amy Gertner, warned his own campaign staff about the explicit texts he was sending other women. The campaign did not deny the texts. It confirmed them: “Graham isn’t saying the texts to other women at the start of the marriage are not real. They are.”

One conservative, one Democrat, one anonymous, a Facebook thread, and his wife. The only women vouching for him are the ones he called on Tuesday night.

The Move to Remove Him Is Real, and It Is His Own Side

Watch the direction the fire is coming from. Every blow landing on Platner comes from the left and the mainstream press. The Times did not spend two months on his ex-girlfriends for sport. It ran the story now because Democrats have a deadline, and the deadline is close.

Under Maine law, a candidate who wins the June 9 primary can be replaced on the November ballot only if he withdraws by five o’clock on the second Monday in July, which this year is July 13. After that the party can name a substitute only through the fourth Monday, July 27. Miss those dates and Platner is the nominee, locked in, whether the party wants him or not. So Democrats have about a month, from the primary to mid-July, to get him off the ballot.

The replacement is already standing there. Governor Janet Mills suspended her own Senate campaign in April over money, which is what handed Platner the nomination. This week, as the scandal broke, Mills reminded everyone of a detail she had been careful to keep alive: “People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.” Allies are urging her to un-suspend. The party’s escape hatch has a name, and the name is still printed next to Platner’s.

People are comparing this to Eric Swalwell, and the comparison is close. Swalwell was running for governor of California this spring when sexual-misconduct allegations surfaced, and Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries leaned on him until he folded. But Swalwell was not winning. Platner is. He is the presumptive nominee with a primary victory in hand, and that changes the whole equation. The party can leak to the Times, stake out his house, and grill him in private. It cannot make him quit. Pressure is not power.

That is what makes this Biden all over again. The party knows the candidate is a liability. The clock is short. The replacement is right there. And it still comes down to the one thing the party cannot control: whether the man himself will walk. Joe Biden had to be talked off a ticket he had already won. It took a disastrous debate, three weeks, a donor revolt, and nearly forty members of his own party before he stepped aside. The Democrats are about to run that movie again, on a tighter schedule, and they bought the whole package before the bottom fell out. Bernie Sanders endorsed Platner last summer. Elizabeth Warren followed in the spring. Chuck Schumer, who had recruited Mills, came around only after she dropped out: “I endorsed Graham Platner. We’re going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate.”

This Is Not the End

The hits are not over, and his own party knows it.

In that Tuesday meeting, Sanders asked Platner directly whether any more allegations would emerge. Platner said there were none. Then Warren, one of the senators who had endorsed him, drew a sharper line. There is a big difference, she told him, between marital issues and allegations of sexual assault. Platner agreed, and denied that any credible allegations of assault were coming. His own supporters, behind closed doors, had stopped asking about texts. They were asking about sexual assault, and they were asking because that is what the rumors are. Senator Peter Welch, leaving the meeting, was asked whether more shoes would drop. “I have no idea,” he said.

A day later, on Chris Hayes’s show on MS NOW, a friendly network, Hayes put a question to him that no Senate candidate should ever have to answer. He asked whether the messages Platner sent were consensual. Yes, Platner said. “And you confirmed that,” Hayes went on. “You knew their age?” “Oh God, yes,” Platner answered. “Yes, of course.” That question only gets asked when the platform is Kik, an app the New York Times flagged as a haven for predators back in 2016. Platner joined it that same year, kept the account active until this week, and posted the towel selfie to it. There is no evidence Platner ever messaged a minor. The point is narrower and still damning: the cloud over him is now dark enough that a man running for the United States Senate had to sit on television and swear he knew the ages of the women he was messaging.

The reporting is still circling. The Journal noted that rumors of more misconduct stories are moving through Democratic offices in Washington. The operative who broke the Swalwell sexual-assault story a day before the press says more is coming on Platner, and the Washington Post is chasing it. None of that is proven, and I am not going to treat it as proven. But the man asking everyone to trust his denials has a problem: the one denial we can actually test is false. He said he did not know the tattoo was a Nazi symbol. His own posts, two people who knew him, and the hand over the skull say otherwise. His deleted Reddit account even played down sexual assault in its own posts. A man whose checkable claims keep turning out false does not get the benefit of the doubt on the ones we cannot check yet.

His own people are not waiting to find out. His political director quit in October, refused a fifteen-thousand-dollar payment to sign a nondisclosure agreement, and said the United States Senate “is not a training ground for redemption.” His campaign’s own internal poll now shows him four points ahead of Collins, down from six to nine before the sexting story broke. Internal polls usually flatter the candidate who pays for them by a few points, which makes a four-point lead a tied race.

The same Tuesday the senators were asking him about sexual assault, Platner went to a fundraiser with Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s former chief of staff, then bolted home when reporters surrounded his in-laws’ house. The Democrats are back in the bunker, and they even brought Biden’s bunker staff. The choice in front of them is the 2024 choice: force the man out, or buck everything and run with him. And right now this is the face of the Democratic Party’s drive to take the Senate. The lies, the Totenkopf, the towel selfie, the on-air question about ages, the stories still loading.

Why Maine Is the Whole Ballgame

Two months ago, in these pages, I laid out the arithmetic of November. The short version was that the House looks gettable for Democrats but the Senate was the harder call, and the reason was candidate quality. You can see the candidates now.

Start with the environment, because it is real. The RealClearPolitics average on the generic ballot, the plain question of which party’s candidate you would vote for, has Democrats up almost seven points. Sabato’s Crystal Ball still has the House leaning Democratic even after Republicans redrew maps in Texas and elsewhere to pad their margin. The wind is at the Democrats’ backs.

The Senate is a different test, because the Senate is decided one seat at a time, and a national breeze does not save you from a bad candidate. Republicans hold the chamber fifty-three to forty-seven. Democrats need to flip a net of four seats to take it. The Cook Political Report, counting the map honestly, puts the likeliest Democratic result at a one-to-three-seat pickup, just short of the four they need. Which means they have no margin. They have to win nearly everything in reach.

And here is the fact that turns Maine into the whole ballgame: Maine is the only Republican-held Senate seat in a state Kamala Harris carried in 2024, and she carried it by almost seven points. There is no Democratic majority that does not run through beating Susan Collins. Even the Journal, reporting the senators’ crisis meeting, called Maine “one of Democrats’ best pickup opportunities and key to their chances of recapturing a majority.” Lose it and the math is dead. That is why Washington went to its highest alert the instant Platner started to implode. This is not one race among many; it is the keystone, and you do not get to drop the keystone.

Collins is the wall they have to get through, and she is a hard wall. In 2020 she beat Sara Gideon by more than eight points while Maine voted for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, the only state in the country that year to split its Senate and presidential winners. She trailed in nearly every public poll and won anyway. A wounded Democrat does not beat a senator like that. A pristine one might, barely. The Republican campaign committee is not hiding the plan, either. It told Mark Halperin it intends to go so negative on Platner that “he’ll have to leave the state.”

The Oldest Problem in Senate Politics

The Senate punishes bad candidates even when the map says you should win. This is the most reliable lesson in American politics, and both parties keep relearning it the hard way.

In 2010, in the middle of a Republican wave, the GOP blew winnable Senate seats on Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Ken Buck in Colorado, and missed the majority. In 2012, favored in red-leaning Missouri and Indiana, Republicans lost both, because Todd Akin started talking about “legitimate rape” and Richard Mourdock called a pregnancy from rape “something God intended.” They handed away two Senate seats over how their nominees talked about rape.

Then there is the cleanest case of all. In 2017, in the reddest state in America, the Republican Party could not lose a Senate seat in Alabama, and it lost one. After the Washington Post reported that Roy Moore had pursued teenage girls when he was in his thirties, Doug Jones won it for the Democrats, the first time in a generation. A scandal candidate cost his party a seat that should have been unloseable. Maine in 2026 is that story run backward: a scandal candidate threatening a seat the Democrats cannot afford to lose.

By 2022 the lesson was so familiar that Mitch McConnell said it out loud. Asked why Republicans might not take the Senate in a favorable year, he answered: “Senate races are just different. They’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.” Republicans underperformed a red environment and lost seats they should have won. And this spring it was the Democrats’ turn to watch a candidate, Eric Swalwell, driven out of a race before he could become the same kind of liability.

So the parties have traded the problem. In 2012 and 2017 it was Republicans losing Senate seats over rape comments and sexual-misconduct allegations. In 2026 it is the Democrats’ Maine nominee on the record, uncontested by his own campaign, saying he would “rape them to show I’m dominant.” Same disease, different jersey. A blue national breeze does not cure it. Roy Moore ran in the reddest state in the country and lost. The Senate is where the wind dies down and the candidate is left standing alone.

What a Good Candidate Looks Like

Candidate quality cuts both ways, and the disciplined campaigns in both parties are the ones surviving.

Look at Jon Ossoff. He is a Democrat up for reelection in Georgia, a state Trump carried, and his race has already moved to lean Democratic. He is scandal-free and relentlessly on message while Republicans fight a runoff to decide who gets to lose to him. I will be honest about my own side here: I do not see the GOP winning that seat. If you asked me how to run a Democrat in this environment, I would point at Ossoff. No Totenkopf, no deleted Reddit account, no Tuesday-night calls to old girlfriends.

Look at Susan Collins, the mirror image on the other side. She is running the same kind of disciplined, low-drama campaign that carried her through 2008 and 2020 while her state voted the other way at the top of the ticket. The only reason Maine is winnable for Democrats at all is the national environment, not a Collins stumble. She is doing everything right, and the Democrats just handed her the one thing that can save her: an opponent who cannot survive a second look.

Now look at the two candidates carrying the Democratic offense. In Maine it is Platner. In Texas it is James Talarico, and Talarico is a problem of a different kind. He is a seminary-trained progressive with a viral following whose own positions, the ones Ted Cruz loves to quote, may not survive a state as red as Texas, and his race is close only because his opponent, Ken Paxton, is uniquely damaged. Platner’s problem is personal conduct. Talarico’s is fit. But the result is the same: the Democratic offensive map rests on two candidates who can lose races the map says they should win.

The tell is John Fetterman. He was the one Democrat who refused to back Platner, and he saw exactly what the rest of the party talked itself out of seeing. The party’s best instinct on this whole mess came from the senator everyone else treats as the problem child.

My Forecast

My view of the midterms has not changed much. I still think Democrats take back the House. But I am shifting toward Republicans holding their Senate majority. Platner is deeply unqualified, and he will taint the party in the one race it cannot afford to lose. Talarico is strange, and his radical views on what he calls Christianity, beliefs that contradict every scripture I am aware of, hand that race to Ken Paxton. Michigan, another seat Democrats have to hold, could give them a weak nominee of its own depending on how its primary shakes out. Jon Ossoff is a great candidate, but he is the exception across these races, not the rule. The Democrats are struggling.

And the whole forecast bends back on Maine. If Platner is the nominee in November, Susan Collins survives the way she survived the Democratic waves of 2008 and 2020, and the Democratic dream of a Senate majority dies on the one seat the party cannot replace.

The Clock Says July 13

The Democrats spent a year building their Senate hopes on Graham Platner. Sanders endorsed him, Warren endorsed him, and Schumer fell in line. This week the same party began trying to take it all apart, through the Times, through Mills keeping her name on the ballot, through a Republican committee that wants him gone almost as badly as they do.

But it is still his call, and on Chris Hayes he gave it: not once. The women have texts, chats, and a diary. His own posts and his own former staff say he lied about the tattoo. And I will tell you plainly what people who have watched this race already expect: there is more coming on Platner. This is not the end of the story.

The party has until July 13 to talk him off the ticket. After that, the man with the Totenkopf is the Democratic nominee for the one Senate seat that decides who runs the chamber.

Joe Biden had to be talked off a ticket he had already won. It took a disastrous debate, three weeks, and forty members of his own party. Graham Platner just looked into a camera and said it never crossed his mind. Maine is about to relive 2024, with less time, worse texts, and a candidate who will not take the call.