This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sandra Bonola, 56, who moved from Connecticut to Charleston, South Carolina, in 2021, then to Beaufort, South Carolina, in 2023, before deciding the South wasn’t right for her. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I am a native New Englander, born and raised in Connecticut. In late 2021, I started thinking seriously about moving. I’m an empty nester, and thanks to my remote job, I can work from anywhere in the country.

I was drawn to the South because people talked about it as if it were the promised land. The stories made it seem like it had better weather, cheaper homes, and a more affordable cost of living. I bought into that and told myself, “If I move to the South, I can have an easier life, and it won’t be as expensive.”

I decided to move to Charleston, South Carolina. I figured that there, I’d be outside more, near the beach, have a lower cost of living, and have access to the coast. I was also hoping for that small-town vibe and Southern charm.

I packed up the 2,500-square-foot Colonial I had lived in for 20 years and moved. I got rid of a lot of things I no longer needed and put the rest into storage.

I was really hopeful Charleston would be right for me. But about four months after moving there, I realized that almost everything I had hoped for was turning out to be the opposite.

I tested the waters in Charleston first

In Charleston, I stayed in a friend’s apartment and paid rent month to month while I decided whether I wanted to buy a home there. I’m grateful for that setup because it gave me a trial period. In those four months, I learned a lot about Charleston — and about what I actually wanted.

One of the first things I noticed was that everybody seemed to be moving there. The city was crowded, and navigating the downtown area was always challenging. Its streets were also full of traffic — it would take me up to an hour to try to get to downtown Charleston from John’s Island.

The city was also more expensive than I expected. I was somewhat insulated from housing costs because I was renting from my friend, but food, entertainment, and taxes were all much higher than I had anticipated.

The Southern charm I was hoping for also didn’t feel as I expected. Charleston has a big “going out” culture, much of which seems to revolve around where to eat or drink. That’s not really my thing. For me, the city lacked some of the creative flavor I was looking for.

The climate was another big factor. Everyone knows New England can have brutal winters, and I don’t like shoveling snow, so I was eager to get away from that. But after moving South, I realized I had traded brutal winters for brutal summers. It was just so hot.

At first, I thought I just needed time to adjust. But the more I explored Charleston, the more I realized the lifestyle I had imagined didn’t match my reality.

I was getting annoyed, then frustrated, and then I was done.

I tried the South again, but it still wasn’t for me

I didn’t feel like I had anything to lose, so I moved back to Connecticut in 2022. Instead of feeling defeated, I actually felt grateful that I had given Charleston a shot.

For a while, I rented a month-to-month beach house in Connecticut while I looked for a home to buy. But the homebuying search in New England felt bleak. I was trying to downsize, but even the smaller homes came with big-home prices. It made me feel like I might never find what I was looking for.

After house hunting for 14 months in Connecticut, I really wanted to put down roots. The idea of moving to a quieter, more affordable small town was still appealing. So in July 2023, I decided to try the South again — this time in Beaufort, South Carolina, a small town I had explored while living in Charleston.

There, I was able to purchase a beautiful three-bedroom ranch home for $425,000. It was a new build in a planned community.

The house checked a lot of boxes. It was beautiful, new, and far more affordable than what I could have bought in Connecticut. But I still didn’t feel at home in Beaufort.

Affordability is important, but you also need community

In Beaufort, it was so hot that I rarely saw or interacted with my neighbors. People would say hello and then quickly go back inside. I kept thinking, “How am I ever going to socialize here?”

I joke that I’m an OG remote worker because I started working remotely in 2008. Remote work gives you some social interaction, but you still need to get outside and make real connections with people.

I tried to put myself in situations where I could meet people. I looked for yoga classes, local events, and other activities I could join. But what I found was that many people had moved there for family or moved with a spouse, and they mostly kept to themselves.

It lacked the kind of community connection I was used to seeing in the Northeast. I kept trying to make those connections and stay open to it, but it just kept falling flat.

I tell people this story, and sometimes they understand it, and sometimes they don’t. But I knew I was done one morning when I woke up, looked at the ceiling fan in my bedroom, and thought, “I really hate that fan, and I’m losing hope for my life.”

I didn’t appreciate Connecticut’s beauty until I moved back

In 2024, I moved back to Connecticut. Right now, I’m living on the coast in an apartment inside a refurbished Civil War-era hospital. I’m on one of the top floors, so I can see the boats and the water.

I’m still searching for a home and making offers with more confidence. Home prices are high here, but prices down South are creeping up, too.

I’ve started thinking about owning in Connecticut more as an investment in both my future and my happiness. I’ve set a budget of about $800,000 for a home, though some of the homes I’ve been interested in have been closer to $650,000.

I’m seeing possibilities I didn’t see before, and that’s exciting.

Being back in Connecticut has been eye-opening. I don’t think I fully appreciated its beauty until I had something to compare it to.

There’s so much opportunity here. I love the energy and the people. I’ve been taking advantage of the location, too, doing things like hopping on a train to New York to see a show or making more of an effort to connect with friends.

When I think about whether I’d move somewhere else again, I keep coming back to something a photographer once told me in Massachusetts. He had lived in Bali with his family, and I remember asking, “You lived in Bali? Why would you come to Massachusetts?”

I’ll never forget what he told me. He said, “I can go anywhere in the world from an airport, but you really have to realize the ground beneath your feet is beautiful if you choose to see it that way.”

That stayed with me. It changed the way I think about Connecticut and made me realize I needed to take the blinders off. There was beauty right at my feet — I just needed to see it.

Almost exactly one year ago, Graham Platner, who has no political experience, was cherry-picked by out-of-state political activists.

According to a person familiar with the campaign, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who have made a name for themselves by recruiting populist candidates across the country, traveled to Maine and rented a house near Platner’s home in Sullivan to convince him to run for the US Senate. Throughout the process, Moraff became Platner’s “right-hand man”, the person described, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of backlash.

But homing in on Platner as a newcomer to oust long-serving Republican Susan Collins came at a cost. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper background check to be completed in a matter of days. The firm Moraff and his team contracted with also did not do a candidate interview or questionnaire, per the Journal’s report.

The fallout of those decisions happened on a colossal scale. In a midterm year with record spending across the country, the Democratic party had come to pin its hopes on Platner to help clinch Senate control with his meteoric campaign and ability to unite independent and progressive voters alike with a clear, anti-establishment message.

Controversies ensued, bringing with them straight-to-camera videos of Platner explaining and denying various scandals. Finally, an allegation that broke the dam this week: a woman he dated accusing him of sexual assault, of drunkenly forcing her to have sex with him after coming to her house uninvited. Asked in an interview on CNN whether Platner raped her, the woman, Jenny Racicot, replied: “By definition, yes, absolutely.”

His support collapsed. Platner waited days as calls grew for him to withdraw. Then on Wednesday, he released an 11-minute video announcing the end of his campaign that left Maine voters scrambling and betrayed, and the country wondering: how did this happen?

“It feels like some of the first rules of politics may have been broken here,” said Andrew Feldman, a national progressive strategist. “We were seeing rookie mistake after rookie mistake, and now we find ourselves in this situation.”

David Farmer, a Democratic strategist based in Maine, said the vetting process for Platner was tantamount to “malpractice”.

“I’ve had to have these conversations with candidates in the past – where you sit down and you ask them really tough questions,” Farmer said. “What drugs have you used? Have you ever had an affair? You ever cheated on your wife? You ever cheated on anybody? It’s really uncomfortable and probing, and a miserable event for everybody involved.”

The person familiar with the campaign said that Moraff and Fan “fell in love with an aesthetic without knowing the state” that ultimately did a “disservice” to Maine’s working-class voters.

Platner’s campaign did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment on the methods used to check the former nominee’s background.

A rising star and an early redemption arc

Platner’s early campaign days – after he announced his run in August of last year – saw a rare rush of grassroots excitement as he criss-crossed the state for town halls, with backing from Bernie Sanders and an ad produced by Zohran Mamdani’s 27-year-old media strategist, Morris Katz.

An oyster farmer and marines veteran, Platner issued plain-spoken warnings that Maine’s working class had been hollowed out – healthcare was unaffordable, young people couldn’t buy homes – and said he’d survived only because of the veterans’ benefits he receives from being “blown up” too many times in combat. His searing indictment of the political establishment matched the anti-Washington mood and anger many Democrats felt toward their party’s leaders.

“His tone, his look, his voice, his message captured a frustration with Washington, a frustration with economic injustice,” Farmer noted.

Democratic leaders had someone else in mind: the 78-year-old term‑limited governor Janet Mills. But Mills hadn’t yet announced her run. In the meantime, 41-year-old Platner positioned himself as the gruff local businessman hardened by tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing for generational change. Once Mills entered, he quickly framed her as emblematic of the status quo, arguing that a Chuck Schumer‑backed candidate would mirror Collins‑style “fake moderation”.

The Democratic establishment was skeptical of Platner from the outset, concerned that he brought too much baggage to the race against a seasoned incumbent. But progressives say the party is also to blame for pushing Mills as an alternative. If she had been elected, Mills would have been the oldest freshman in Senate history.

Platner brushed off his earlier scandals: Reddit posts from 2013 to 2021 where – among other things – he called white rural Americans “stupid” and “racist”, questioned why “Black people didn’t tip” and said sexual‑assault survivors should “take some responsibility … and not get so fucked up”. While apologetic, he characterized the posts as side-effects of severe PTSD and disillusionment from combat.

He tried to get ahead of more controversy by revealing a covered-up skull-and-crossbones tattoo that resembled a Totenkopf, a symbol known for its use by the Nazi SS. Platner said it came from a night drinking with military buddies in Croatia 18 years earlier. “I’m not a secret Nazi,” he told the Pod Saves America hosts.

Platner and his allies in Congress argued the uproar was overblown. At the time, Platner told the Guardian that Mainers related to his struggle and didn’t see the posts or tattoo as disqualifying. Many voters also said they could look past his mistakes and viewed his redemption arc as genuine. “If what the voters wanted were people who were grown in vats and had never done or said anything that they might regret their entire lives, we’d have a very different country,” Moraff told the Journal in May.

But inside his campaign, cracks had started to appear. In October, Platner’s political director, Genevieve McDonald, and his finance director both left his team. The latter, Ronald Holmes III, said his “professional standards” no longer “fully aligned with those of the campaign”. McDonald said Platner’s failure to fully disclose the extent of his Reddit posts led to her departure. She went on to question whether Platner really didn’t know the meaning of his tattoo.

Bracing for the worst

There was lingering concern among Maine locals and political operatives that more would come out about Platner’s past. One voter at a town hall in April asked him – point‑blank – if there were examples of sexual misconduct in past relationships that could emerge and endanger his chances. Another said that she was extremely wary about how untested Platner was.

Ultimately, his star continued to outshine the septuagenarian governor’s lackluster campaign. Mills, citing dwindling financial resources, eventually dropped out of the race, giving Platner a glidepath to the nomination.

And then – 10 days before the Democratic primary – reports revealed that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had confided in McDonald about sexually explicit messages he’d sent outside their marriage, disclosures she made in an attempt to get ahead of any opposition research.

In extraordinary fashion, Platner was summoned to Washington DC to answer lawmakers’ questions about the latest controversy. Shortly after the meeting, the New York Times reported that previous partners described “unsettling” and “toxic” behavior. One of the women, Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative operative who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, alleged he frequently grabbed her by the shoulders, once yanked her out of a taxi by her wrist, and during one argument twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door shut until she was “calm”. Fifield also cast doubt on Platner’s claim that he was unaware that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol, telling the Times that he referred to it as “my Totenkopf”.

Platner rejected Fifield’s claims and branded them as “politically motivated”.

While some voters were deterred, Platner still ended up clinching more than 70% of the vote in the primary. National Democrats, however, were left to grapple with a catch‑22: what would be an insurmountable scandal? And would it be worse than if Collins, who had helped overturn Roe v Wade and backed several key Trump policies, was re‑elected to a sixth term?

“It’s like a frog being in a pot of boiling water. If you raise the temperature slowly, you don’t know it’s boiling until it’s too late,” said Farmer.

The final straw

When Politico published their story on Monday, outlining Jenny Racicot’s claims that Platner raped her nearly five years ago, the condemnation came hard and fast. Endorsements evaporated and calls for Platner to withdraw were immediate. As he denied the allegations in a lo-fi self tape, it became clear this would be the red line for those who had stood by him until this point.

“The messenger was not the right person to match the inspiring message,” said Adam Green, executive director of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “It is really unfortunate for the overall project of trying to challenge corporate power and shake up a broken political system.”

It would be another two days before Platner published another video announcing his decision to end his campaign, claiming the allegations against him were part of a coordinated political attack.

Troy Jackson, who campaigned alongside Platner while running for the Democratic nomination in the Maine gubernatorial race, and is now one of several candidates running to replace him, told MS Now: “Graham told me point-blank that there was nothing in his past that I had to worry about. And he lied to me. And he lied to a lot of us.”

Now, as Democrats battle with the feeling of deja vu from Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, it’s left some unnerved about whether the Maine Senate race is still winnable. “It’s so upsetting because it feels like we’ve been completely bamboozled by a candidate that so many people believe in,” said Feldman.