Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy made quick work of a Democratic Senate campaign's attempt to recruit him as a social media amplifier, publishing the outreach emails on X and asking why anyone on Graham Platner's team thought he would help a candidate with a Nazi tattoo on his chest.
Portnoy's post, published May 23, included what he described as a string of emails from Platner's campaign seeking his help promoting an ad that attacked the Boston Red Sox over private equity. The Daily Caller reported that Portnoy not only refused the request but turned it into a public indictment of Platner's fitness for office.
Portnoy wrote on X:
"And I'm still wondering why your team thought I'd want to play footsy with a guy who is a Nazi?"
He also offered to sit down with Platner to discuss the candidate's tattoo and what Portnoy characterized as "him being a Nazi." The Maine Democrat, a first-time candidate now running as the presumptive Democratic nominee against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, has called himself a "lifelong opponent" of Nazism, antisemitism, and racism. But the tattoo, which resembles an SS symbol, has dogged him since it became public.
The Portnoy episode was not the only embarrassment for Platner that day. NESN, the New England Sports Network, stopped his campaign ad in the middle of a Red Sox game broadcast. The network said the ad broke station rules through "unauthorized use of third-party intellectual property."
Platner's camp offered a different explanation, suggesting that the ad's message, not a copyright violation, drove NESN's decision. The Daily Caller described that claim as "convenient," noting that the network's own stated reason undercut it. NESN's majority stake is held by John Henry's Fenway Sports Group, the same ownership group behind the Red Sox, the very team the ad targeted.
The full content of the ad has not been detailed publicly beyond its broad attack on the Red Sox and private equity. What specific intellectual property the campaign used without authorization remains unclear.
Platner has said he never knew the tattoo's meaning. The Washington Examiner reported that the tattoo is a Totenkopf symbol, which Platner got in 2007 while intoxicated and has since covered. He has also made now-deleted Reddit posts, including one referencing an "armed working class", for which he has apologized.
The tattoo controversy sits alongside a longer trail of troubling conduct. Platner refused to apologize to a Purple Heart soldier he mocked in a deleted Reddit post, and his explanation for those posts has raised its own questions.
Platner has invoked his own PTSD struggle to explain the deleted material, a defense that sits uneasily with his past record. He previously dismissed PTSD as a defense when others raised it, only to lean on it himself when his own words surfaced.
Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha put the double standard plainly:
"The reason why he gets away with this is because there's a letter next to his name, that's D. If you were a Republican, this would have been disqualifying."
Despite the tattoo, the deleted posts, and the campaign stumbles, prominent Democrats have lined up behind Platner. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland defended him publicly, telling Punchbowl News that "people should have second chances." Bernie Sanders, Hasan Piker, and Gov. Tim Walz have also endorsed Platner.
That support arrived after Gov. Janet Mills, the state's Democratic governor, abandoned her own Senate bid last month, leaving Platner as the party's standard-bearer against Collins. The decision handed Democrats a nominee carrying baggage that would have sunk most candidates in either party.
Platner's conduct extends beyond the tattoo and the Reddit posts. He has vowed to get "arrested" as a senator and use subpoenas to paralyze the White House, a posture that suggests his campaign is built more on confrontation than governance.
Political commentator Dick Morris, speaking to Newsmax, predicted Collins would win reelection comfortably despite a recent poll showing Platner ahead by seven points. Morris pointed directly at the candidate's liabilities:
"Having a Nazi tattoo and then defending it and saying women deserve being raped and they need to act more like adults, that stuff is not going away."
The decision to reach out to Portnoy, a Boston media personality known for his blunt, unpredictable public commentary, was itself a gamble. Portnoy's audience skews young and male, a demographic Democrats have struggled to reach. But the campaign apparently failed to anticipate that a man who built his brand on unfiltered candor might use the opportunity to spotlight the very issue Platner's team would rather bury.
Portnoy did not simply decline. He published the receipts and made the rejection a public spectacle, ensuring that the tattoo controversy, and the campaign's judgment, would cycle through social media all over again.
The pattern around Platner is hard to miss. A broader trend of Democratic candidates facing scandals involving inflammatory statements has tested the party's willingness to enforce its own stated standards. In Platner's case, the answer has been clear: the party letter matters more than the record.
National Review noted the inconsistency in media treatment, observing that news outlets extended "grace" to Platner while historically engaging in moral panic over alleged Nazi symbols associated with figures on the right. Platner got a new tattoo to cover the old one. The coverage moved on.
Platner remains the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine's 2026 Senate race. Collins, a four-term incumbent, is the target. The race matters to both parties, Maine is one of a handful of states where Democrats believe they can flip a seat.
But the candidate Democrats chose to carry that fight arrived with a Nazi tattoo he says he didn't understand, deleted social media posts he had to apologize for, and a campaign operation that just got publicly humiliated by a sports media mogul and had its ad pulled off the air for a copyright violation.
Dick Morris may or may not be right about the outcome. But the fact that Democrats looked at this field and decided Platner was the best they could do tells you something about the state of the bench, and the state of the party's standards.
When a party will tolerate anything as long as the letter next to the name is correct, voters are entitled to wonder what else that party is willing to overlook.
