By admin 
In the postmortem of Graham Platner’s disastrous campaign for Senate, much of the blame has fallen on one man: Daniel Moraff. A progressive political strategist who recruits working-class candidates from outside traditional Democratic pipelines, he and his fiancée were convinced that the Maine oyster farmer had the juice to defeat the longtime incumbent, Republican Susan Collins. Though it’s unclear what Moraff knew and when, he barely vetted Platner and stood by him as a stream of troubling revelations emerged. When a credible rape allegation finally tanked Platner’s campaign, Moraff’s misplaced confidence in the guy looked like the thing that could cost Democrats the Senate.
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What would compel a consultant to dismiss signs that a candidate has contemptible views on sexual assault? Why would he shrug and look the other way as Platner’s wife and former girlfriends detailed multiple instances of duplicitous behavior, disrespect, and, in some cases, physical violence? Here’s one answer: Moraff identified with Platner because he has his own history of alleged sexual assault.
As Marisa Kabas reported this week in her newsletter the Handbasket, in the winter of 2019, Moraff was dating a woman in Pittsburgh he’d met through an app. One night, the woman told Kabas, he trapped her in a bedroom for several minutes by holding the door shut from the other side. The woman was disturbed, but Moraff reportedly played it off as a joke. When she saw him again, she said, he had sex with her after she repeatedly told him no. “It was the most disconnected from my body I had ever felt,” she said. Her account was corroborated by a friend in whom she had confided at the time, a person she subsequently dated, and Facebook messages from 2021 in which she and two other people discussed the alleged assault. (Through a spokesperson, Moraff denied that he had “committed a criminal offence.”)
Other allegations from Moraff’s past have affected his political work. In 2017 he recruited community organizer Summer Lee and managed her successful campaign for the Pennsylvania state legislature; five years later, he tried to get involved in her insurgent campaign for Congress, which led to the ouster of a 20-year Democratic incumbent. But after Lee’s campaign leadership received a report of six sexual misconduct allegations against Moraff—including at least one accusation of sexual assault—Lee’s team told Moraff to stop contacting campaign workers and stay away from campaign events. (His spokesperson told Kabas that he “unequivocally asserted his innocence” at the time and asked for a full investigation into the allegations.)
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It’s easy to imagine why a guy who has been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct might be inclined to overlook signs that the candidate he’s championing has a questionable history with women. Personal relatability is a powerful force; in a case of sexual assault allegations, Moraff seemingly has reason to relate to the accused. And in a chilling bit of symmetry, one of Platner’s ex-girlfriends told the New York Times about a situation that closely mirrors one of the allegations against Moraff: Platner reportedly confined her to a bedroom by forcing a door closed from the outside.
Throughout Platner’s campaign, his backers maintained that every misdeed and red flag only made him more electable. His reported history of mistreating the women in his life was spun as both a boon to his everyman image and irrelevant to his politics. One of the people responsible for this narrative was Daniel Moraff, who appears to have a vested personal interest in pushing the left to normalize and accept men with sexual misconduct allegations in their pasts.
There is a particular brand of confidence required to assure party leaders and voters that one has no more skeletons in one’s closet, as Platner did before several more disquieting allegations emerged. It’s the same kind of confidence that would lead someone to show up at a campaign victory party from which he’d been explicitly banned, as Moraff reportedly did after Lee won her congressional race. It’s a hero’s mindset—a conviction that one is above the rules, impervious to consequences, and uniquely qualified to bring about necessary political change. Moraff and Platner have a lot in common. It’s no wonder they wooed each other.
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