Anti-establishment candidate Graham Platner seemingly came out of nowhere to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Senate seat in Maine. But his campaign has been dogged by controversies.

There were the old, deleted Reddit posts in which he made racist comments and blamed sexual assault on victims. There was a now-covered tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. And most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women early in his marriage.

Taken together, they raise a big question. Does he have too much baggage to carry on? Or can his anti-establishment political message — that has generated SO much enthusiasm among the democratic base — carry him through?

In this episode of NPR’s Newsmakers, Platner addresses earlier controversies, the failures of his own party and calls Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “insecure.” Platner says he aspires to a version of masculinity different from the one embodied by Hegseth. “This idea that you're supposed to use your strengths to use power over other people or to offend people, be mean to people — that somehow that's manly. That's not masculinity,” he says. “That's the act of a coward.”

NPR sat down with Platner before news broke of the explicit sexual messages.

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