Is Graham Platner the modern David Duke?
- snitzoid
- Jun 29
- 3 min read
It's not the same, but it's close.
Graham Platner and the David Duke Precedent
What happened when a GOP candidate had a Nazi history.
By Peter Kovacs, WSJ
June 28, 2026 2:59 pm ET
Democrats are contorting themselves to look the other way now that they have chosen a U.S. Senate nominee from Maine, Graham Platner, who has a Nazi tattoo carved into his flesh.
But you don’t have to look far back in history to find a party that took a more principled stand when one of their number turned out to have a Nazi past.
The Republican runoff candidate in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election was David Duke, a onetime Ku Klux Klan leader who had famously paraded around the Tulane University campus wearing a swastika. Like Mr. Platner, Mr. Duke claimed to have left all that youthful foolishness behind him.
Mr. Duke outpolled the incumbent Republican, Buddy Roemer, in the state’s jungle primary. His runoff opponent was Democrat Edwin Edwards, a three-term former governor who had survived two federal criminal trials featuring embarrassing testimony about high-stakes gambling. Most voters thought he was corrupt, and they were right. The grim choice gave rise to a bumper sticker: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”
Republican leaders rejected Mr. Duke like a donated organ. President George Bush denounced Mr. Duke’s “ugly record of racism and bigotry.” Roemer said he would vote for Edwards: “I cannot, will not, must not vote for David Duke.”
Their response stands in stark contrast to the see-no-evil stance of today’s Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer tried to defeat Mr. Platner in the primary. Now he’s fallen into line. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who supported Mr. Platner all along, said, “I’m not overly impressed by a squad of media running around saying, ‘What do you think about the tattoo on Graham Platner’s chest?’ ”
On Election Day 1991, I found myself at a rest home near my house, waiting in line for an hour to cast my vote. The crowd was sullen, and the only levity came from my boys, 2 and 3, running up and down the hall, hiding and entertaining themselves with a wheelchair. The scene was repeated across the state as turnout reached 78%. Edwards beat Mr. Duke with 61% of the vote.
It turned out that both candidates were crooks. Edwards’s fourth term was his most corrupt, and he was convicted of shaking down applicants for casino licenses. Mr. Duke pleaded guilty to fraud and tax charges, accused of diverting campaign contributions to personal use and gambling.
Republicans gave up the Louisiana governorship, but they achieved something more important: David Duke faded from the scene, though he kept running for office until 2016, when he finished seventh in a U.S. Senate jungle primary.
Democrats and journalists kept trying to tie him to Republicans. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Mike Pence: “There are some supporters of Donald Trump and Mike Pence who—David Duke, for example, some other white nationalists, who would fit into that category of deplorables, right?”
Democrats may wish they had followed the GOP’s 1991 example. Mr. Platner could win, but Republicans and their media supporters will make Messrs. Sanders and Schumer—and their party’s presidential nominees—wear that tattoo for years.
Mr. Kovacs is a retired editor of the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Advocate of Baton Rouge.
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