Graham Platner in an old video, showing off his Nazi tattoo.
I was a big Graham Platner skeptic from the beginning. Even before the news came out about his Nazi tattoo.
Read more Soccer: The Preferred Sport of the Credentialed Progressive Elite
And I was skeptical of James Talarico for very similar reasons, reasons before the GOP released a single opposition research video attacking him.
On one of my group chats, an occasional sparring partner expressed surprise that I had known from the beginning that Platner would produce a disastrous collection of scandals.
But I really have no special insights that most people don’t have—save one.
Let’s call it the Platner Paradox.
- The Democrats perceive that they need to run candidates who are straight white Christian men to win in certain jurisdictions—and maybe even nationally.
- No normal straight white Christian man today would want to be deeply involved with the Democratic Party.
Even many Democrats embrace the first part of the paradox.
AnAxios piece in March that got a lot of attention was entitled “Some Dems’ 2028 Strategy: a Straight, white, Christian Man.” And that, according to Axios, is “Their fear, divulged with dismay in group chats, at cocktail parties, and increasingly in public, is that parts of the electorate are too biased to support a woman or other diverse candidate for president.”
The Axios article noted the following:
Former first lady Michelle Obama fueled such talk recently, saying the U.S. is “not ready for a woman.”
Democratic strategists have put it bluntly, with several saying a version of “It has to be a white guy.”
Now, I happen to be fairly confident that, just as they are wrong about most things, they are wrong about this. They are projecting their own racism, which is omnipresent, onto the electorate. But what’s important for understanding Democrat behavior is that they think it’s true.
One could only look at the 2024 election to falsify their claim. Trump’s gains, which led him to victory over Harris, as opposed to “Scranton Joe” Biden, were overwhelmingly concentrated among minority voters. He won Hispanic men—the first time a GOP candidate has done that in modern history. By contrast, Trump had only very small gains among white voters. White voters were just as happy to vote for Harris as they had been for Biden—minority voters weren’t—and not because of her sex or the color of her skin but because of the content of her character.
The reason, of course, that normal straight, white Christian men won’t become leaders in the modern Democrat Party is simple. The Democrats hate straight white Christian men—organizing against them, and their interests as a class is essentially a requirement of participating seriously in Democratic Party politics.
There wasn’t a single, straight, white Protestant man among Biden’s 25-person cabinet. Of the 97 federal judges confirmed under Biden during his first two years, five were white men, and 22 were black women. Being a Democrat means endless genuflecting to George Floyd, condemning America as a “white supremacist” society, etc. Normal, healthy, white men are not going to sign up for that environment.
Part two of the paradox also isn’t really so mysterious either. Trump carried nearly three-quarters of white male self-identified Christians. Timothy “Sarah” McBride appears to be the only white male Christian Democrat under 40 in the House—and he’s a “transgender woman.” New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy are the only white male Christian Democrats under 55 (barely) in the Senate. Only California Governor Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear of Kentucky (son of a previous governor) are white male Christian Democrats under 60 in governors’ mansions. (Interestingly, the Democrats have five white Jewish governors under 60—a group that could become much more endangered over time with the Democrats’ strong anti-Israel turn.)
Read more Politics Isn’t Fair (Bianco Should Have Won)
Now, having stated the Platner Paradox plainly, let me qualify it a bit. The paradox is really more of a Millennial and Gen Z phenomenon. Gen X and older voters (age 45+) came of age at a time before the Democrats went completely insane with anti-white (and in particular anti-white Christian male) rhetoric. People develop political patterns and affiliations in their youth that don’t just break immediately even when party ideologies shift. It took maybe 130 years before the Democrats’ hold on the “solid South” was really broken, despite that region being conservative the entire time. A small percentage of Republicans abandoned the party when Trump took it in a new direction, but far more stayed.
Older politically active Democrats have networks, relationships, and careers—so many of them are not just going to walk away from those; they will grin and make the best of the disaster that is the modern Democratic Party. Thus, you can have a superficially somewhat sane, normal Democrat like Roy Cooper in North Carolina, who has served as governor and is now running for senator. His father was also a state leader in the Democratic Party. But he’ll turn 70 years old this year, and people like him are not being newly minted.
Simply put, normal, psychologically healthy people do not join organizations dedicated to hating them and demeaning them and people like them. Therefore, the Democrats can only recruit certain types of white men for leadership roles: (1) Sociopathic opportunists willing to lie repeatedly and say anything—and very skilled at doing it without ever making mistakes—these sorts of people don’t go on trees; and (2) people with very strange and otherwise disqualifying character flaws and secrets that make them either hate themselves or their own community—or at least tolerate those who do. This type is much more common.
So for Platner, it’s the Nazi tattoo, and the woman-beating, and the vulgar behavior in bathrooms and group chats, etc., and the cheating on his wife, etc. The Democrats are trying to sell the story that “he’s a veteran,” “he’s an oyster farmer,” “he’s working-class.” But of course, he’s an ex-Blackwater mercenary, he lives mostly on disability benefits, and his “oyster farming” is more of a hobby with all of the sales going to his mom’s fancy restaurant. He has a fancy prep school background, and his grandfather was a distinguished architect. He’s not a working-class hero. He’s a classic downwardly mobile elite. It’s all as predictable as it is tiresome.
We saw a similar phenomenon in a very different manifestation with Talarico in Texas. Democrat organizers who presumably have little interaction with normal white people think those people will like Talarico because he is “Christian” and a seminarian. They have no theory of mind for white conservatives, so they expect we will somehow find this impressive. But Talarico’s heresies are worse for actual Christians because he commits them under the Christian banner. It’s one thing to shout your abortion. It’s another to shout your abortion in the name of Jesus, as Talarico wants women to do. Everything about him is incredibly weird—the self-loathing of his white skin, his past vegan campaign, his love for “trans kids,” etc. An actual candidate with mass crossover appeal in Texas would be something like a Hispanic male, pro-gun veteran with relatively centrist politics. But instead we have oddballs like Talarico because that’s what liberals falsely think will appeal to the center-right.
This isn’t to say that Platner and Talarico can’t win. In a good enough national environment for the Democrats, even very bad candidates can be dragged over the line. But it will be despite their qualities as candidates, not because of them.
Now Democrats do have a potential white male savior candidate for 2028. Gavin Newsom is an utter sociopath with some political talent—he will say or do anything shamelessly. But his act really doesn’t work on a lot of people. And ultimately, he won’t be able to run from his disastrous record of failure—California has led the nation in outmigration during his tenure. And that’s not a record that even a smooth talker can run away from easily. And for every plausible Newsom the Dems trot forward, there are a hundred Platners and Talaricos.
There is, of course, an easy answer to the Platner Paradox for the Democrats—I wrote a book suggesting what both parties could do to increase their appeal to white voters. In the Democrats’ case, they could begin by just stopping with the anti-white racism and then really appealing to the legitimate interests of the white electorate.
If they did, they might find that they no longer needed to nominate sociopaths just to try to win elections.
Until then, the Platner Paradox will continue to plague them.
* * *
This article was originally published on June 8, 2026, on Substack.
