"A decade ago, Republican voters, furious with their leaders... tossed out all conventional notions of presidential fitness to coalesce behind Donald Trump."

"Platner is still a contender because a similar alienation is building among Democrats, and party elites seem to have no idea what to do about it."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "I Thought Graham Platner Was Finished. What I Saw in Maine Changed My Mind" (NYT).

The headline doesn't say why Platner looks finished: He had a big Nazi tattoo on his chest. How does Goldberg get around that? She explains punk culture:

During the 1970s, some punks had deployed Nazi imagery for shock value, but in the 1980s white supremacists started infiltrating the subculture in earnest. The bands Platner loved — Dropkick Murphys, the Dead Kennedys — positioned themselves squarely in opposition to these fascist interlopers. He recalled going to hardcore shows in Bangor in the late 1990s and early 2000s at a time when there were still regular fights between antiracist punks and neo-Nazis. Ever since then, he told me, antifascism has been at the core of his politics.

Many of Platner’s most controversial Reddit posts stem from this antifascist ethos. In 2018, for example, he responded to a poster worried about how a roommate would respond to the purchase of an AR-15. “Tell them that if they expect to fight fascism without a good semiautomatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history,” he wrote. In another post he wrote, citing the socialist Eugene Debs, “An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.”...

 Republicans, who’ve been painting antifascists as a terrorist threat, would surely relish the chance to run against a man who once — jokingly, he says — referred to himself as an “antifa supersoldier.”

But Platner’s antifa-inflected online history cuts against the idea that he would knowingly sport a Nazi tattoo. As Platner tells it, he first learned that his skull and crossbones had Nazi associations this month....