Graham Platner wants Maine voters to know he's an inclusive guy. He just can't quite articulate what he's being inclusive of.

The Democratic Senate candidate — an oyster farmer and Marine veteran backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders — sat down with The Atlantic and promptly demonstrated that the left's ever-expanding identity acronym has outpaced even the people who campaign on it. Asked what the final two letters in LGBTQIA stand for, Platner offered a remarkably honest response:

That's actually a good question.

He guessed the "I" stood for intersex and the "A" for androgynous. His aide stepped in to correct him — it's "asexual." Platner recovered with all the grace of a man who just got bailed out in a spelling bee:

It's asexual, sorry. It's asexual.

And the plus sign at the end? Platner had that one covered:

Everything else.

At another point in the exchange, he offered what may be the most distilled expression of performative allyship committed to print:

I do love gays.

The Alphabet as Litmus Test

This would be a minor gaffe in a normal political environment. Politicians constantly fumble terminology. But Platner isn't running as a moderate who got caught flat-footed on culture-war minutiae. He told The Atlantic he's actively working to expand his campaign beyond the "material conditions that people are living in" to be more inclusive of social issues, the Daily Caller reported. He's reaching for the progressive lane — he just doesn't know the road signs.

That's the problem with the modern Democratic coalition. The acronym itself has become a shibboleth, a loyalty test that keeps growing precisely because the movement demands constant proof of allegiance. LGBTQIA+ is not a descriptive term anymore; it's a catechism. And Platner — a Sanders-backed populist running to the left of a sitting governor — couldn't recite it.

The moment reveals something conservatives have pointed out for years: the progressive stack of identity categories has become so unwieldy that even the politicians who kneel before it can't keep up. When your coalition's core branding requires an aide whispering corrections in real time, the branding has a problem.

The Race for Susan Collins's Seat

Platner is running in the Democratic primary against Gov. Janet Mills, who is 78 and has held office since 2019. Mills declared June as Pride Month in Maine in 2022 and participated in the 2025 International LGBTQ+ Leaders Conference. On paper, she has the institutional credentials on these issues that Platner is scrambling to fake.

Some recent polls have shown Platner up by significant margins against Mills, though other surveys have given the governor a lead. The primary is shaping up as a generational and ideological battle — Sanders-style economic populism versus establishment Democratic governance.

The winner will face Sen. Susan Collins, who has held her seat since 1997 and survived every Democratic effort to unseat her. Collins spearheaded the Respect for Marriage Act alongside Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin in 2022 — legislation ensuring that all married couples, including same-sex and interracial couples, are entitled to the rights and responsibilities of marriage regardless of their state. She is currently the only Republican senator representing a state Kamala Harris won in 2024.

Which puts Democrats in an awkward position. Their likely nominee can't define the acronym their base treats as sacred text. The Republican incumbent actually passed landmark legislation on the issue.

A Pattern, Not a Gaffe

The LGBTQIA stumble isn't Platner's first rough stretch. Over the past several months, he's been dogged by a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol — which he has since covered up — and unearthed Reddit posts that appeared to minimize sexual assault and encouraged fighting "fascism" with "a good semi-automatic rifle."

None of this is disqualifying in a vacuum. People get tattoos they regret. People post things online they'd rather forget. But stack it all together and a portrait forms: a candidate who hasn't thought carefully about much of anything, who is surfing populist energy without the discipline to sustain it.

Sanders's endorsement gives Platner grassroots credibility. It does not give him fluency in the language his own coalition demands. And in a Democratic primary, that language isn't optional — it's the price of admission.

The Deeper Irony

There's a conservative lesson buried in this farce, and it's not just the easy laugh. The Democratic Party has spent a decade insisting that language is power, that terminology is moral, that using the wrong word reveals something rotten about your character. They've built entire HR departments and media style guides around the premise that precision in identity language equals respect.

And then their Senate candidate says, "I do love gays," like a great-uncle at Thanksgiving, trying his best.

The left created a purity test so elaborate that their own candidates can't pass it. The acronym grows. The requirements multiply. The grace period shrinks. Eventually, the machine eats its own — not because they're bigots, but because the standard was never designed to be met. It was designed to be enforced.

Platner will probably survive this. Democratic primary voters in Maine care more about beating Collins than about whether their nominee can spell out every letter. But the moment lingers — a small, perfect illustration of a movement that has confused vocabulary with virtue, and lost track of both.