Indian American candidate announces bid to replace Graham Platner

Former Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Nirav Shah has joined Maine Democrats’ scramble to replace Graham Platner, who suspended his Senate campaign last Wednesday amid a rape allegation he denies and the party facing a July 27 deadline to pick a nominee.

Platner’s Senate bid unraveled last week when a woman he had previously dated came forward accusing him of raping her in 2021, eroding his support against Republican Sen. Susan Collins. The same day, the party’s state committee voted to convene a 600-person nominating convention. Platner, for his part, posted a video saying he was stepping aside because staying in the race threatened his movement.

At least eight Democrats have stepped forward to take his place, including former state Senate President Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and past Senate candidate David Costello. Amid pressure from progressive groups, Platner campaign manager Ben Chin said supporters and volunteers “deserve to have a real role in any nomination process.”

Shah, an Indian American physician, entered the race to replace Platner on Thursday. He ran Maine’s pandemic response as the state’s CDC chief, then served as the federal CDC’s No. 2 official before teaching at Colby College. In this year’s governor’s race, he topped the first-round vote by three points, then lost the ranked-choice runoff to Hannah Pingree, who ran to his left.

Shah has moved quickly to court Platner’s base. “To the movement that supported Graham Platner, my message is this: you have a place in this campaign,” Shah said. Beating Collins in her sixth-term bid, he said, would be the campaign’s central goal.

The search for Platner’s replacement comes months after disclosures that he wore a chest tattoo bearing a symbol adopted by the Nazi SS for 18 years, as we previously reported. While he denied knowing the symbol’s meaning, a former acquaintance disputed that account. Still, Maine Democrats nominated him in June with about 72% of the vote despite the unresolved questions.

Should Shah win the nomination, he would be among a small number of Asian Americans to run for U.S. Senate from Maine, where Asian Americans make up a small share of the electorate. His candidacy also gives AAPI voters a stake in a race already reshaped by questions of who represents the party, though Democrats, of course, have not said ethnicity will factor in.