After Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign for Senate, it leaves the way open for Democratic candidate Graham Platner to run against incumbent Senator Susan Collins in the state, with Democrats lined up to back him. This is all despite Platner having a Nazi tattoo on his chest and allegedly knowing it was antisemitic. 

On Friday, after Mills dropped out and Platner became the presumptive nominee in the race for the Democrats, a post from Platner’s ex-campaign manager resurfaced online where she claimed that he knew it was linked to the Nazis.

“Graham has an antisemitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff,” the ex-manager Genevieve McDonald wrote in a post on Facebook in October. “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

The primary had been a place of tension between more progressive portions of the Democratic Party and those that are more moderate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Mills, along with other party leaders. However, that did not stop Mills from dropping out the race, citing that she has had issues with raising money for the election.

Without Mills, Democrats have lined up to back Platner as the candidate in Maine to take on Susan Collins despite all the controversy surrounding his past comments, as well as the Nazi tattoo.

“Democrats are dedicated to fighting back against the chaos of the Trump administration by defeating the Republicans who enable his harmful agenda and that includes Susan Collins. After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her,” Chuck Schumer said.

Platner apologized in October, claiming that when he got the tattoo in 2007, it was not his intention to get a Nazi tattoo that resembled a Totenkopf, a skull emblem used by Hitler’s SS troops during WWII.

Now, however, in a recent interview with Zeteo, he said it was just a simple skull and crossbones and that it is an “eminently reasonable thing.”

“I had a meeting in New York not that long ago with a number of Jewish leaders, we started talking about it, and when we started, somebody was like, ‘Wait a second. We thought you had a swastika,’” Platter said. “When I explain the actual story, pretty much everybody’s like, again, ‘That seems like an eminently reasonable thing.’”