Americans hate cheaters

Graham Platner is a scumbag Mainers should vote for

Graham Platner exchanged sexually explicit photos with women other than his wife as late as 2025. The vast majority of Americans consider that behavior cheating. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

I hope Graham Platner wins his election against Susan Collins because I think Democratic control of the Senate is the best path forward for shoring up our democracy.

Because this is a fairly boring view, I’ve refrained from writing very much on what’s going on in Maine despite the repeated scandals that have plagued Platner’s candidacy.

They range from revelations of a Nazi tattoo to various controversial Reddit posts to now — I hesitate to say finally — reports that the candidate cheated on his wife last year. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told the campaign that she had found “sexually explicit” texts between the Democratic nominee and several women. The infidelity all happened in early 2025, months before he entered the race for Senate and while the couple was struggling with infertility.

Remarkably, as of this week, Platner still had an active profile on Kik — an online messaging app that, unlike iMessage or Signal, has a greater focus on meeting new people. If there’s any doubt what Platner was using Kik for, his profile picture was a shirtless picture of him in a towel with his phone strategically covering the aforementioned Nazi tattoo for good measure. (The campaign claims that while he deleted the app a while back, he forgot to actually delete the profile itself.)

Many reactions to these revelations of infidelity were… bizarre.

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, argued that “nothing that has come out about Graham Platner is scandalous” insisting that the freak-out was due to “weirdo gaslighting from upper class ninnies.”

In another set of tweets, he distinguished between real scandals — like the Iraq War, attacking Iran, and the foreclosure crisis — and the pearl-clutching over Platner’s cheating. The latter being the result of “rule following perfect resume ladder climbing Harvard law grads” who are “lizard people creeps.”

Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, similarly argued that attacks on Platner were downstream of the establishment’s hatred for “real people who aren’t corrupted by the system. They never go after insiders like this, because they’re already good boys and girls who do exactly as they’re told.”

Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker similarly characterized the blowup as “desperate manufactured outrage around [Platner’s] personal issues” that was an attempt to distract from his platform.

Sen. Ruben Gallego said “we all know that he’s lived a very, you know, real experience.”

This strain of argument isn’t new. Morris Katz — a political strategist who works with Platner and is best known for his work on the successful campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani — argued back in March that supporting authentic candidates meant accepting their foibles: “When we talk about wanting real people in our politics, real people have said fucked up things online 15 years ago.”

What unites these reactions isn’t so much the defense of Platner as the staunch denial that there’s anything wrong here at all. Cheating isn’t a moral failing we can forgive; it’s a mark of rugged authenticity, and any qualms about infidelity are the prissy reflexes of an out-of-touch elite.

The fact that voters are forced into a limited set of choices regularly allows the messenger class to make broad pronouncements about what Real Americans believe. Many Trump voters in 2016 were uncomfortable with the “grab ‘em by the pussy” recording; they just made the decision that other issues were more important. Many Obama voters in 2008 probably had racist views, but they liked his economic message more than McCain’s. Voters, even loyal voters, are cross-pressured in ways that polling results don’t surface.

Platner’s behavior is scandalous. It’s morally wrong to cheat on your wife, and most people think so, regardless of whether they think it affects their vote.

Hating cheating is an American value

One thing I learned while getting addicted to short-form video content is how much anti-cheater discourse there is on the internet. There’s content where women try to catch their partners in the act of cheating, debates over whether liking hot Instagram models counts as cheating, men talking about how disrespectful it is for women to wear revealing clothing, skits where people act out underdog-cheater-comes-out-on-top fantasies, unverifiable story times about catching your partner in the act of cheating, and on and on and on.

Earlier this year, Pew Research Center released a survey looking at attitudes across 25 different countries on a variety of moral issues, and the issue where America was the most extreme outlier was on extramarital affairs. Fully 90% of Americans called stepping out on your spouse “morally unacceptable,” whereas the median was around 77%.

For context, even in the most accepting nation — France, duh — a slight majority (53%) thinks cheating is a moral failure.

Gallup has also asked Americans about a range of behaviors. There, too, extramarital affairs had the highest percentage of respondents calling the practice “morally wrong,” more so than suicide, cloning humans, abortion, gambling, and the death penalty.

While Democrats are slightly more likely to be chill with extramarital affairs, there isn’t that big of a gap: In Gallup’s May 2025 poll, just 11% of Democrats called cheating morally acceptable, while 9% of independents and 4% of Republicans said the same.

Interestingly, young people are more hostile to cheating. While 10% of 35- to 54-year-olds and 9% of people aged 55 or older said cheating was morally acceptable, just 4% of 18- to 34-year-olds said the same. I guess their minds were cooked in the short-form video content vat along with mine.

Now, would all of these people count Platner’s behavior as cheating? Hard to say, but polling indicates that large majorities of people count online messages and secret emotional relationships as cheating.

Is there a silent, cheating majority?

The real difficulty is figuring out how many people who say cheating is bad are themselves cheaters. This is obviously a fraught area for surveys, since most people don’t want to admit to doing bad things, but we can glean some information.

For 34 years, the General Social Survey has asked Americans “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” That number has remained pretty stable, between 15% and 20% for that entire period (This is just for people who have ever been married).

I think some of the respondents are probably lying, and I think a good deal more have cheated without having sex. But, like most bad actions, I think a small percentage of offenders drive most of the behavior.

Even if I’m wrong, and the majority of Americans are cheating hypocrites, I think virtue signaling is good! Making a mistake that you know is a mistake, one you disavow publicly and show remorse for, is different from making a mistake that you pretend is actually fine.

Not all men are cheaters

That many men are standing up for Platner is unremarkable, but there’s a strange undercurrent that having a moral problem with cheating is soyboy behavior.

Leftist writer Ken Klippenstein subtitled his article on the whole affair: “And yet the era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end.”

The whole piece is a real case of telling on yourself:

“The question on Washington’s mind now is: Why can’t Maine just nominate an asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant as candidate rather than some tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff like Platner?

The answer is simple: That’s not what Maine voters want.

People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.”

There is obviously a grain of truth here. Appearing poll-tested or overly polished and incapable of interacting like a normal person is obviously bad. But the implication that one must accept Nazi-tattooed cheaters or else consign oneself to being ruled by sexless, repressed robots is bizarre.

Moreover, this entire line of argument undercuts Platner’s best defense: He knows what he did was wrong, and he is working to make it right with his wife. Gertner’s public defense of her husband, revealing their couples and individual counseling work, was proof that both of them view his actions as harmful, but not irreconcilably so.

Why is cheating bad?

Cheating is bad because lying is bad.

Freedom is predicated in large part on having accurate information. If a business lies to me about the safety of its products, or my husband lies to me about the nature of our relationship, that’s a form of stealing my freedom.

A choice I make because someone else lied to me isn’t really my choice at all. This is the old liberal point about why deception wrongs us — it’s not about the sex, it’s the theft of another person’s ability to make an informed decision about her own life.

In 2012, Platner, in one of his controversial Reddit posts, responded to an opinion article in The Washington Post on one of the Secret Service cheating scandals:

“I’ve heard that idiotic sentiment made within the confines of the the military [sic]. ‘If you can’t remain faithful to your wife, how can you remain faithful to your comrades?’ Well, I have many good buddies who lied and cheated with women, and yet were straight shooting hard men when it came to their work. I find it is a sentiment only held by moral relativists who need something to cry about, intelligent people realize they are not mutually exclusive.”

I find it a bit ironic to pat yourself on the back for being intelligent while completely inverting the definition of moral relativism, but I digress. More concerning is that Platner’s infidelity doesn’t appear to be a one-time indiscretion, but rather the result of a 15-year-old worldview that’s dismissive of the concept of having high moral standards.

All things equal, I would prefer a candidate who had not cheated on his wife. But on the macro point, Platner is straightforwardly correct that there are individuals who behave dishonorably in some ways but are still able to behave honorably in others.

Many right-wing commentators have been outraged at what they see as hypocrisy from left-leaning commentators, particularly feminists.

Alex גדעון בן װעלװל@JewishWonk

I like Jill so I say this as gently and respectfully as possible, this is the same motivated reasoning that got Republicans to line up behind Trump. Winning is not everything in democracy. Stand up for your values, admit he is not a good candidate, and focus on other races.

Jill Filipovic @JillFilipovic

The Graham Platner story is landing because it confirms a bunch of his critics’ prior concerns: unvetted, history of poor decision-making, the kind of light misogyny that tends to go along with male bad decision-making. Those are all problems! But it’s worth asking if they’re

3:19 PM · May 31, 2026 · 34.5K Views

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63 Replies · 97 Reposts · 829 Likes

But not all failings are made equal! While cheating is bad, cheating is not a crime.

It’s helpful to push beyond euphemisms like “personal issues” or “marital problems” when deciding whether moral transgressions cross the line. Trump has been accused of sexual assault and has joked about grabbing women by the pussy. Roy Moore was credibly accused of sexually assaulting minors. Anthony Weiner was convicted of a sex crime against a minor.

Platner’s most vocal defenders don’t just want him to win; they want to live in a fantasy world where there’s no reasonable criticism of their candidate. Instead of accepting that politics is about persuasion and reasonable disagreement, they want to make it about a dividing line between good and bad people. Platner is one of the good ones, so that means anyone criticizing him is immediately suspect. That also means anything Platner does is fine. Nothing has to be considered or weighed because nothing is ever in question.

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