{"id":14770,"date":"2025-10-23T21:32:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T21:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/platner-reshuffles-campaign-and-sends-out-ndas-as-he-struggles-to-get-ahead-of-controversies\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T21:32:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T21:32:08","slug":"platner-reshuffles-campaign-and-sends-out-ndas-as-he-struggles-to-get-ahead-of-controversies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/platner-reshuffles-campaign-and-sends-out-ndas-as-he-struggles-to-get-ahead-of-controversies\/","title":{"rendered":"Platner reshuffles campaign and sends out NDAs as he struggles to get ahead of controversies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Graham Platner is shaking up his campaign amid a swirl of controversy, bringing in a longtime friend to function as his Maine Senate campaign\u2019s new manager, hiring a compliance firm and sending non-disclosure agreements to staffers.<\/p>\n

Kevin Brown \u2014 who became the campaign manager this week and whose past campaign work includes the presidential bids of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, though he has not worked in Maine \u2014 is only one of the changes. The campaign has also brought on an in-house attorney, as well as compliance firm Spruce Street Consulting, which has ties to a constellation of buzzy progressives including Zohran Mamdani.<\/p>\n

Amid fallout from Platner\u2019s controversial years-old social media posts<\/u><\/a>, his campaign began sending non-disclosure agreements to staffers last week, according to his former top political director, Genevieve McDonald, who said she declined to sign one.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe campaign offered me $15,000 to sign a NDA,\u201d McDonald told Blue Light News in an interview. \u201cI did not accept the offer. I certainly could have used the money. I quit my job to work on Platner\u2019s campaign, believing it was something different than it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

A statement from the campaign referred to the $15,000 offer as standard severance. A Platner campaign spokesperson said the team recently hired Spruce Street \u201cto take over campaign compliance to institute standard practices that had yet to be put into place. Some of those standards had to be instituted retroactively but as a matter of course we do not require anyone previously involved in the campaign to do so. Genevieve McDonald was offered severance which is standard for all campaign employees and contractors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The moves to salvage a campaign months after its launch underscore how fast Platner took off and how imperiled he finds himself, in a crucial state for Democrats in their uphill quest to retake the Senate. Platner burst onto the scene with viral videos as a kind of progressive warrior poet, campaigning for Mainers\u2019 \u201cfreedom to live<\/u><\/a> a life of dignity and joy.\u201d But his promising bid has been beset by negative stories about his past over the last week, shortly after Gov. Janet Mills, favored by national Democrats to take on Sen. Susan Collins, entered the primary.<\/p>\n

Revelations of the staffing changes and non-disclosure agreements \u2014 which have not been previously \u2014 come as Platner\u2019s campaign is in damage control. On Wednesday, the candidate confirmed to The Advocate <\/u><\/a>that his Reddit posts included \u201chomophobic slurs, anti-LGBTQ+ jokes, and sexually explicit stories denigrating gay men.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Platner<\/p>\n

That follows Platner expressing regret over getting a Nazi symbol tattooed<\/u><\/a> on his chest 20 years ago, along with previously unearthed offensive Reddit posts, including one from 2013 downplaying sexual assault in the military and another since-deleted 2018 one suggesting violence is necessary<\/u><\/a> to enact social change. Platner has apologized for the posts and said they do not represent his growth in recent years.<\/p>\n

Brown, the new campaign manager, declined to comment on the record.<\/p>\n

The non-disclosure agreement first circulated among the Senate Democratic hopeful\u2019s campaign in the hours after he came under fire for those Reddit posts last week.<\/p>\n

The paperwork \u2014 sent electronically by a campaign contractor Sunday to McDonald, who resigned two days earlier \u2014 was voided by the campaign at 7:04 p.m. Wednesday, several days after she had already resigned and hours after Blue Light News requested comment from the campaign on its use of NDAs.<\/p>\n

The NDA \u2014 titled “Graham for Maine NDA.pdf\u201d \u2014 was sent by Victoria Perrone, a political compliance expert and Spruce Street\u2019s president and founder.<\/b> Peronne, reached by phone, confirmed Platner was a client but would not comment further.<\/p>\n

McDonald said she understood the financial offer to be conditional on her signing the NDA. She provided a screenshot of a text message from Perrone suggesting Monday that if McDonald could “get it back to me before the end of the day, I can get your payments out the door.”<\/p>\n

McDonald said that Daniel Moraff, who ran Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn\u2019s 2024 campaign, functioned as the de facto campaign manager prior to Brown\u2019s arrival this week. In a brief phone call, Moraff said he was never officially Platner\u2019s campaign manager.<\/p>\n

\"Then-state<\/p>\n

McDonald resigned last week, citing Platner\u2019s past posts.<\/p>\n

\u201cEither they didn’t thoroughly vet him or they didn’t think the things they found would be a problem,\u201d McDonald said in an interview. \u201cEither way, that was a poor calculus. You cannot say things like rural Mainers are \u2018racist\u2019 and \u2018stupid\u2019 or you’re a radicalized communist at 37, play them off as ‘you were a young man\u2019 and remain a serious contender against Susan Collins. This was four years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Platner campaign representative called McDonald a \u201cdisgruntled former employee\u201d to the Bangor Daily News<\/u><\/a>, before voiding her NDA offer.<\/p>\n

It remains unclear whether the controversy surrounding Platner\u2019s past will present a long-term drag on his campaign in this anything-goes era of politics for both parties.<\/p>\n

A poll<\/u><\/a> conducted over the past week \u2014 as some of Platner\u2019s Reddit controversies were making news \u2014 and released Thursday by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center found Platner leading Mills in a primary matchup, 58 percent to 24 percent among first choices for Maine\u2019s ranked-choice voting system, with remaining voters preferring other candidates or undecided.<\/p>\n

The poll was largely conducted after the first revelations about Platner\u2019s social media history had emerged, but before news of his tattoo. It found both him and Mills with positive favorability numbers among likely Democratic primary voters, with Platner\u2019s advantage driven by younger voters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Graham Platner is shaking up his campaign amid a swirl of controversy, bringing in a longtime friend to function as his Maine Senate campaign\u2019s new manager, hiring a compliance firm and sending non-disclosure agreements to staffers. Kevin Brown \u2014 who became the campaign manager this week and whose past campaign work includes the presidential bids […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14771,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}