Andrew Shuttleworth Fowler lives in Westbrook. He is a former supporter of Graham Platner’s campaign for U.S. Senate.

I don’t know what happened between Graham Platner and Jenny Racicot at her house in 2021. I do know what happened last week, in front of everyone, in an 11-minute selfie video in which he finally suspended his campaign.

The allegation raised a question about who Platner is. The exit video answered it.

In a screen capture from a video posted to X, Graham Platner announces his withdrawal from the U.S. Senate race against Sen. Susan Collins.

I was one of Graham’s true believers. I walked the equivalent of several marathons, often in the rain, knocking on doors for him across Cumberland County. I volunteered at rallies and town halls. When the tattoo story surfaced last fall, I accepted an explanation that asked for more generosity than it deserved, and then I spent the spring on strangers’ porches saying so: his critics have him wrong.

I was the one who had him wrong.

Jenny Racicot and Politico didn’t show me that — Platner showed me himself in that video. Count the moves: A blanket denial in the opening breath. “Large forces” arrayed against one regular guy. A “corporate media system” acting as “judge, jury and executioner.” A rigged structure, back-room decisions, a party that would “rather see Susan Collins win.” And no mention of Jenny Racicot or his other accusers. In his telling, the women exist only as instruments of a vast centrist conspiracy.

It’s a familiar playbook. Donald Trump has run it in public for at least 10 years: deny everything, admit nothing; name a shadowy enemy; declare the system rigged; and if you have to leave the building, leave it burning. Graham was supposed to be the remedy to that style of politics. His exit was that politics, undiluted.

I believe Jenny Racicot, but you don’t have to in order to see the problem. Platner recorded his video when he had nothing left to win: no votes left to count, no donors left to court. What he chose to perform with the stakes gone is the truest thing he showed us. The man he claimed to be had one job left: to exit in a way that ensured his movement would survive his campaign. Instead, he tried to make his supporters feel his wounds as their own.

He says the Democratic establishment would rather see Susan Collins win than see him seated. But in his exit, Graham Platner did more for Susan Collins than anyone else has, spending his final minutes as a candidate telling his advocates and volunteers that the fight was rigged and the thing they built was stolen from them.

It was a selfish farewell that almost felt engineered to send them home and keep them there in November. If Platner can’t have the prize of unseating Collins, no one can.

He was right about one thing: the ballot line belongs to the people of Maine. It never belonged to him, and it doesn’t belong to his grievance now. We don’t owe him electoral arson. Everything this movement was for will still be on the ballot in November: healthcare, housing, an end to needless wars and the very Maine idea, Frances Perkins’ idea, that a better world is ours to build now.

Susan Collins is counting on our anger to do what no attack ad could. Well, I’m angry. She can’t have it.

Graham Platner closed his video by telling us to keep fighting, saying that, someday, we’re going to win. On that much we agree. But “someday” has a date, and it hasn’t changed: it’s Tuesday, Nov. 3.