During its first two months, Democrat Graham Platner's upstart bid to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins had all the hallmarks of a juggernaut.
Then came revelations of his old social media posts and a tattoo associated with Nazi iconography.
It was enough to end most campaigns. But Platner continues to fill town hall events with enthusiastic supporters all while revealing more about his yearslong personal struggle to reconcile his pride as a competent soldier with his current view that the conflicts he took part in "might have been for nothing," fueling his current anti-war stance.
It seems to be helping make his campaign more resilient.
On Saturday, more than 200 people showed up for Platner's town hall in Farmington. Roughly half of them couldn't see him. They were filed into the basement of the American Legion hall to listen over the PA system.
So as he took the stage in the hometown of his Democratic rival, Gov. Janet Mills, he paused for a mic check.
"I think there are people downstairs who can hear me but can't see me, so ..."
Cheers traveled up the narrow stairwell into the main event room, an audible illustration of the curiosity — and in some cases devotion — the Platner campaign continues to elicit.
"Well, we heard ya!" he responded.
The enthusiastic reception at more than 30 town hall events Platner has held so far could also be viewed as a measure of survival for the 41-year-old oyster farmer who, in his own words, has written some stupid things on the internet.
There's also the now-infamous tattoo he got when he was a 23-year-old machine gunner in the Marines that has since been covered.
But the crowds haven't stopped coming.
Platner's message of economic populism has been consistent from the beginning, but there's been some changes in how he shares his personal story.
At a town hall in Collins' hometown of Caribou last month, and before all the controversy, he gave his usual account of returning to Maine after three combat tours in Iraq with the Marines, a fourth in Afghanistan with the Army and the abandoned pursuit of a college degree in between. Platner is a disabled veteran and his pitch for universal health care is tied to the free care he receives from the Veterans Administration.
In Caribou, he described his VA benefits as a pathway to personal liberty.
"That gave me an immense amount of freedom. That gave me an immense amount of material freedom to build a life that I wanted to build," he said, adding that every American should be able to pursue their life without worrying about healthcare.
But as he talked about how he "got blown up enough" to receive VA care, he choked up.
"I don't think that you should have to go fight in stupid foreign wars ...sorry...to get that kind of support," he said.
In that moment, the crowd was left to themselves to interpret Platner's emotional pause.
But more recently, as in Farmington on Saturday, Platner has been much more open about his struggles after leaving the military.
"After my combat deployments, I became deeply disillusioned with American foreign policy, with the wars I had taken part in," he said. "I was suffering from PTSD. I was not getting any help because I came out of the service at a time where you just didn't talk about it and you white-knuckled it through life. Doesn't work, it turns out."
To be clear, Platner has shared details with reporters about this post-combat experience in past interviews, as he did with Maine Public back in September.
"I was also dealing with...we call it moral injury, a realization that much of what you took part in might have been bad, might have meant nothing," he said. "And that's hard, when you dedicated years of your life to something so intense and so serious and then to leave it and realize that it might have all really meant nothing. That's a difficult thing to grasp."
Asked how he reconciled those feelings, he said, "I'm still reconciling. I mean, that's something I'm going to struggle with for the rest of my life."
But now Platner is talking more openly about that struggle on the stages of his town hall to explain a voluminous social media history that's complicated when reviewed in its totality, but potentially ruinous to his campaign when selectively highlighted.
And his approach appears to be resonating with many of those who are showing up.
In Damariscotta a few weeks ago, Platner was confronted by a young woman about an old but "unsettling" Reddit post in which he said he longed to have taken part in other military campaigns — a stark contrast to his anti-war stance now.
He took a solid five minutes to respond, revealing vulnerabilities rarely acknowledged by politicians.
"I know what is like to take part in violence that is being justified by a larger structure," he said. "I know what it is like to, in fact, take pride in your competence at that violence, thinking it makes you better, it fills some kind of hole inside of yourself. But it never filled that hole. In fact, it made that hole deeper and vaster. And I suffered a long time because of it."
The crowd of 700 people responded with warm applause. The audience member thanked him for "taking accountability."
Susan Carr was in the Damariscotta crowd.
"I thought he spoke in a very honest and personal way that you don't hear a lot of people in public life speak about at all," she said.
Chris Gosster attended Platner's town hall in Bath. He also appreciated the candidate's response to the controversies. It was his second town hall.
"For myself, I just want to demonstrate that I still have his back," Gosster said.
Navy veteran Sarah Christmas, who was also at the Bath event, shrugged off the controversy over Platner's now-covered tattoo.
"I think he's handled it with much dignity and had it covered as soon as he realized ... what else can you do?" she said.
In Farmington, the mere mention of Platner's tattoo controversy prompted Gisele Chenard to laugh out loud.
"Oh, who cares?! Who cares! That was done years ago. I mean, that's minor," she said.
Her friend Rosemary Corro was also unbothered.
"And one of the reasons is because Graham has come out and talked about it truthfully about what he was doing, how he was feeling and how feels now and what he's doing now," she said. "Politicians don't usually do that. Yeah, they hide. And he's not hiding. So, to me, that's a big deal."
Of course, there are plenty of Democrats in the state who have written off Platner entirely. They're not likely to show up at his events, much less vote for him.
But for many of those who do, Platner's openness about his past has become yet another reason to support him.
