Nate Silver Dumps on Internal Platner Poll Amid Sexting Scandal

(Christian Science Monitor via AP)

Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, released an internal poll showing him up four points on Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) on Wednesday — and polling guru Nate Silver wasn’t impressed.

The survey of registered voters found that Platner (49%) is still in the driver’s seat against Collins (45%). But Silver argued that should be cold comfort to Democrats.

“An internal poll showing +4 is not super reassuring given that internal polls typically exaggerate their candidate’s standing by 4 points or so. And that’s smaller than Platner’s lead in most public polls before,” wrote Silver on X.

“Not to mention the history of polls underrating Collins and other Republicans in Maine, as I discussed earlier this week,” he added, directing his followers to a Substack post in which he argued that “You can’t necessarily trust the polling in Maine.”

“In 2020, the last time she was on the ballot, Collins trailed former State Rep. Sara Gideon in almost every poll, but wound up beating Gideon by 8.6 points, making for one of the largest polling errors in our extensive polling database. One could argue that 2020 was an unusual circumstance… However, the tendency for polls to overrate Democrats in Maine has been fairly persistent. Since 2014, in Maine races with two or more polls in the final three weeks, Republicans have beaten their polls by about 4 points on average,” wrote Silver. “There wasn’t much consistent bias prior to 2014, though Collins substantially outperformed her polls in 2008, even as Barack Obama won the state overwhelmingly. She underperformed her polls in 2002 but still booked a 17-point win.”

Platner’s infidelity to his wife, whom he married in 2023, was reported on by The Wall Street Journal and New York Times over the weekend. He has previously muddled through scandals pertaining to the Nazi-linked Totenkopf tattoo that was emblazoned across his chest for almost two decades, as well as online comments in which disparaged rural Mainers, suggested that victims of sexual assault bear responsibility for what happened to them, and mocked an American soldier who was awarded a Purple Heart for his bravery was shot during a firefight with the Taliban.

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