TDS Watch · Maine Senate · May 25, 2026 · 8:30 AM ET

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The Platner Campaign Asked Dave Portnoy
— a Jewish Man — to Boost Their Nominee. Portnoy Asked Why They’d Want a Jew to Play Footsy with a Nazi.

On Saturday, May 23, 2026, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy— who is Jewish, who is independent, and who is not Bernie Sanders — opened a cold email from Jeff Coote, a political strategist for Graham Platner (D), the Sanders-endorsed nominee in the 2026 Maine U.S. Senate race against incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). Coote was asking Portnoy to amplify a Platner ad attacking Boston Red Sox ownership. Portnoy’s reply, posted to X that afternoon, did not amplify the ad. It detonated the campaign for a 48-hour cycle and pulled every loose thread in Platner’s closet out into daylight at once.

The loose thread that mattered most: in October 2025, the Bangor Daily News and the Anti-Defamation Leagueidentified the chest tattoo Platner had been wearing since 2007 — a tattoo he has confirmed, on the record, that he chose during a Marine deployment-leave trip to Croatia — as the SS-Totenkopf, the death’s-head insignia of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS concentration-camp guard divisions. Platner had it covered with a new tattoo after the BDN story ran. He gave Jewish Insider the line “I am not a secret Nazi.” And then the Democratic primary — with Sanders, Warren, Gallego, Heinrich, Khanna, and Reich behind him — nominated him anyway, after sitting Governor Janet Mills (D-Maine) suspended her campaign on April 30, 2026.

And then, on Sunday, May 24, 2026— the same day RedState published the Portnoy thread, the same day the Maine Wire ran the “difficult week” recap, the same day the Reddit posts mocking a Purple Heart recipient and admitting to porta-potty masturbation were re-surfacing across X — Sen. Bernie Sanders stood at a podium at the University of Maine in Orono and rallied for Graham Platner anyway. This is what Maine is going to send to the Senate to replace Susan Collins, if the polls hold.

• 2007tattoo yearyear Platner inked the SS-Totenkopf chest tattoo on Marine deployment leave in Croatia · BDN/ADL identified it as a Nazi symbol Oct 2025; Platner had it covered shortly after
• +7platner over collins48-41 · Newsweek post-Mills-exit poll · Platner over incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in the general election
• +38primary marginPlatner’s lead over Gov. Janet Mills (D-Maine) in the Democratic primary polling before Mills suspended her campaign April 30, 2026
• $4.2M / $1.16Mplatner v mills ad spendPlatner outraised and outspent Mills by roughly 3-to-1 in the primary advertising window · Bloomberg / FEC summary reporting
• $2Mpro-collins pac spendPine Tree Results PAC anti-Platner / pro-Collins ad-spend targeting the Totenkopf tattoo and the Reddit posts · Bloomberg, April 27, 2026
• May 23portnoy detonationCoote cold-emails Portnoy to amplify a Platner anti-Red-Sox-ownership ad; Portnoy nukes the ask on X with the “I’m not Bernie Sanders / play footsy with a Nazi” thread · RedState, Daily Caller, Daily Wire confirm
• May 24sanders doubles downBernie Sanders rallies for Platner at the University of Maine in Orono — same day the RedState Portnoy story breaks — doubling down rather than walking back
• 0endorsement withdrawalsas of publication, no Democratic senator, House member, or former Cabinet official who endorsed Platner has publicly withdrawn that endorsement post-tattoo or post-Portnoy

The mechanism was, on its surface, mundane. A Senate campaign cold-emails an influencer with a large fan base in the relevant geography and asks the influencer to share an ad. Campaigns do this hundreds of times a cycle. They do it because it works. What made the Platner outreach different was that the influencer was Dave Portnoy — the Barstool Sports founder who has spent the past three years building a public-facing Jewish-identity advocacy lane on top of his existing sports-bro media empire, who walked Brown University’s campus to confront pro-Hamas encampments in 2024, and whose “No Mercy” series on antisemitism has the kind of ear in young-male media that Sen. Sanders no longer has.

The strategist who sent the email is named Jeff Coote. He works for the Platner campaign in a paid political-consulting capacity. The ad he wanted Portnoy to amplify was a Platner spot attacking Boston Red Sox ownership — an ad Sinclair-affiliated New England broadcasters had pulled from the air, per DNyuz reporting on May 25, giving Coote a populist hook he thought Portnoy might pick up. Coote evidently did not run the outreach by anyone who had read a single Bangor Daily News headline from October 2025. Or he did, and decided Portnoy would not have read one either.

“And I'm still wondering why your team thought I'd want to play footsy with a guy who is a Nazi?”

Dave Portnoy · X · May 23, 2026 · in reply to Jeff Coote · Platner campaign political strategist

“You reached out to a Jew to poo-poo a Nazi. I'm not Bernie Sanders.”

Dave Portnoy · X · May 23, 2026

“If your boy isn't a Nazi and can handle me 1-on-1 in a convo, set it up. If he can't, you should fire yourself for thinking I'd want to glamorize this clown.”

Dave Portnoy · X · May 23, 2026

The three quotes above are the spine of the thread. RedState, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, and Maine Wire all embedded screenshots of the original posts in their reporting; the thread crossed the 48-hour mark before Coote or the Platner campaign issued a public response. Portnoy’s thread is not, on its own, dispositive of anything. He is not the ADL. He is not the Bangor Daily News. What he is, in this story, is the man the Platner campaign chose to ask — and his answer makes the campaign’s strategic judgment, not the tattoo itself, the news of the May 23 cycle.

Graham Platner got the tattoo in 2007. He was a U.S. Marine on deployment leave, in Croatia, with a group of fellow Marines. By his own account — given to Jewish Insider after the BDN broke the story — the group walked into a tattoo parlor and chose a skull-and-crossbones design from a wall of flash sheets because, in Platner’s words: “we were Marines and skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing.”

The design they chose was not a generic Jolly Roger. It was the SS-Totenkopf — the death’s-head insignia worn by the Waffen-SS units that ran Nazi Germany’s concentration-camp system. The Anti-Defamation League’s hate-symbols database has documented the Totenkopf as a recognized Nazi symbol since at least the mid-1990s, and it remains in active use by neo-Nazi and white-nationalist communities today. ADL spokesperson Jessica Cohen, in a statement to the Bangor Daily News in October 2025, framed the identification carefully:

“This appears to be a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo, and if true, it is troubling that a candidate for high office would have one.”

Jessica Cohen · Anti-Defamation League spokesperson · Bangor Daily News · October 2025

Platner kept the tattoo for nearly eighteen years. He ran for U.S. Senate in 2025 with the tattoo on his chest. He sat for campaign photographs with the tattoo on his chest. According to CNN’s KFile reporting (October 24, 2025), Platner knew the tattoo was a problem before the BDN published its investigation: Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former political director, told the BDN that Platner had identified the Totenkopf issue internally weeks before the story ran. After the story ran, Platner had the tattoo covered with a new design. He has not had it removed. He has not provided a contemporaneous explanation of why a Croatian tattoo parlor in 2007 was offering a Waffen-SS death insignia on a flash sheet, or why a U.S. Marine chose it from among the other available designs.

“I am not a secret Nazi.”

Graham Platner · Jewish Insider · October 2025

“We chose a terrifying skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines and skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing.”

Graham Platner · explanation of the 2007 Croatian tattoo-parlor choice · October 2025

The tattoo was not the only thing the Platner campaign had to survive. In October 2025 the Washington Post documented a cluster of deleted Reddit posts from Platner’s confirmed personal account in which Platner had argued that sexual-assault victims should “take some responsibility” for what had happened to them. EMILYs List — the Democratic pro-choice fundraising network that has historically been generous with Maine Democrats — published a “Sound the Alarm” advisory on those posts the same week. Fox News documented a parallel cluster of posts in which Platner praised vulgar graffiti and admitted to masturbating in a porta-potty.

The week before the Portnoy email, RedState surfaced an additional Reddit post in which Platner mocked a Purple Heart recipient. That post is the one the Maine Wire bundled into its “difficult week” recap on May 24. The Purple-Heart post is itself the kind of conduct Platner’s Marine-Army veteran biography would normally make politically unsurvivable inside a state where the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion still organize. It did not, in 2025 or 2026, prove unsurvivable.

The Democratic primary in the 2026 Maine U.S. Senate race was, from the moment Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) endorsed Platner on August 30, 2025, a race between an outsider oyster-farmer veteran with a Sanders machine behind him and the sitting governor of the state. By the polling that surfaced in early April 2026, Platner was beating Gov. Janet Mills (D-Maine) by roughly+38— a gap so wide that Mills suspended her campaign on April 30, 2026 rather than spend down her remaining resources for a losing race. Platner outraised and outspent Mills by roughly 3-to-1 in the advertising window, per Bloomberg / FEC summary reporting ($4.2M to $1.16M).

All of that happened with the BDN Totenkopf story already in the public record. All of it happened with the Washington Post Reddit-cluster story already in the public record. Sanders knew. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich all endorsed Platner during the primary anyway. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) went on Fox News to defend Platner on the tattoo, citing PTSD and the principle that “second chances matter.”

One important nuance: the endorsements list is a roll of Bernie-aligned populist progressives, not a formal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) endorsement. Platner is not a DSA chapter-endorsed candidate of record; he is a candidate the Sanders-Warren wing has thrown its institutional weight behind. The distinction matters because the institutional Democratic establishment — DSCC, DNC, Jewish Democratic Council of America — has not endorsed Platner. JDCA put out a statement (per JNS reporting) that it would “not support a Democrat who doesn’t represent the views and values of the vast majority of American Jews.” Jewish Insider, the Forward, and JTA have run continuous coverage of the resulting split.

“We won't support a Democrat who doesn't represent the views and values of the vast majority of American Jews.”

Jewish Democratic Council of America · via JNS · 2026 · on the Platner nomination

The juxtaposition of May 23 and May 24 is the editorial center of this story. On Saturday afternoon, Dave Portnoy posted a thread that did, briefly, what most accountability journalism does not: it put the words “Nazi,” “Jew,” and the name of a sitting Democratic Senate nominee in the same X timeline, in the candidate’s own back yard, in front of a young-male sports-fan audience that Sanders no longer has. By Saturday evening, the thread was the top political conversation on the platform in the Northeast.

On Sunday morning, the senior senator from Vermont arrived at the University of Maine’s Orono campus and rallied for Graham Platner anyway. He did not address the Portnoy thread from the podium. He did not address the Purple Heart-mocking Reddit post that had broken the previous week. He did not address the cover-up tattoo. He talked about oligarchy, about Wall Street, about the working class, and about the urgency of replacing Susan Collins. The rally was the same kind of Sanders set he has run a hundred times since 2016; the difference was the timing.

Approximately twenty-four hours separated the Portnoy detonation from the Sanders rally. In that twenty-four hour window, no Democratic senator, no Democratic House member, no former Democratic Cabinet official, and no Democratic committee chair issued a statement asking Platner to withdraw, asking Sanders to reconsider the rally, or distancing themselves from the campaign. The closest thing to a public break was Jordan Wood, a Maine Democrat who had been calling for Platner to drop out since October. Wood was the same Maine Democrat who had been calling for it then. Nothing in the public record from a sitting elected Democrat shifted between Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon.

The Jewish Democratic Council of America statement — that it will “not support a Democrat who doesn’t represent the views and values of the vast majority of American Jews” — is, in the post-October-7 political environment, a noticeable break. JDCA has been the Democratic Party’s primary Jewish-electorate-facing organization for the past decade; its endorsement carries money and turnout in the Northeast and South Florida. JDCA declining to endorse a Democratic Senate nominee in the cycle’s #1 target seat is, by the organization’s own standards, a five-alarm signal.

Jewish Insider has documented Platner’s anti-Israel posture independently. The Algemeiner and the Times of Israel have run parallel pieces. JNS noted the tattoo specifically. The Forward and JTA both ran stories on April 30, 2026 framing Platner’s nomination as “a candidate Jews are concerned about” becoming the presumptive Democratic standard-bearer. The split inside Jewish Democratic institutions is, at this point, on the record across the Jewish-press spectrum.

The reason none of this has shaken the Democratic establishment off Platner is the topline number: Newsweek’s post-Mills-exit poll has Platner up +7 (48-41) over Sen. Susan Collins. Collins is in 2026 what she has been since 2020 — the marginal Republican incumbent in the bluest state with a Republican senator, the senator Democratic strategists have wanted to defeat for two cycles running. Pine Tree Results, the billionaire-backed PAC supporting Collins, is spending the roughly $2M Bloomberg documented in April specifically on the Totenkopf tattoo and the Reddit cluster. If a $2M PAC ad campaign on a chest tattoo had moved the topline, Collins would be ahead. As of publication, she is not.

Which is the political calculation, on every Democratic endorser’s desk, that the Platner campaign is counting on: the Maine general electorate has either decided the tattoo doesn’t matter or hasn’t fully metabolized it, the Reddit cluster reads as adolescent stupidity rather than disqualifying conduct, the Sanders machine is delivering Maine’s small-college and ex-urban progressive base, and Collins’s ceiling in 2026 was always going to be near 41%. The Portnoy thread is a problem for the campaign’s day-to-day message discipline; it is not, at this moment, a problem for the campaign’s topline polling.

What is in front of every Democratic senator who has endorsed Graham Platner, as of the morning after the Sanders Orono rally, is a clean decision tree. They can:

• Withdraw the endorsement. No senator has done this. The political cost is fracturing the Sanders coalition in their own state primaries. The reputational benefit is being on record before the general election that the Totenkopf, the cover-up, the Reddit cluster, and the Portnoy outreach are individually or collectively disqualifying.
• Defend the endorsement publicly. Only Sanders and Van Hollen have done this on the record. Van Hollen framed his defense on the PTSD-and-second-chances line. Sanders did it by showing up at Orono. Everyone else has chosen silence.
• Stay silent.The current default. The bet is that the topline polling holds, that Pine Tree Results’ $2M ad spend doesn’t move it, that the Maine electorate decides the tattoo is in the past, and that a Democratic senator is worth the reputational risk of having endorsed a candidate with a covered-up Waffen-SS chest tattoo in the year Dave Portnoy detonated the campaign on X.
• Ask Platner to drop out. Only Jordan Wood has done this, and he was doing it before any of the past week happened. There is, as of publication, no organized Maine-based or Senate-caucus-based effort to force a replacement on the November ballot.

The site’s editorial position on this is straightforward and follows the same rule we apply to every story on Civic Intelligence: the political geography of the conduct is part of the conduct. The Democratic Party of Maine picked Graham Platner over its sitting governor. The Sanders-Warren wing endorsed him with the tattoo and the Reddit posts already in the public record. The Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate has chosen, by silence, to ride out the storm rather than condemn it. Dave Portnoy — an independent Jewish sports-media figure who is not a Democrat, not a Republican, and explicitly “not Bernie Sanders” — was the one in the room asked to help amplify the campaign, and he said no, on the record, in language nobody’s communications director can spin. That is the story. We document it. The Maine general election in November will decide whether the country agrees.