Senate Republicans are warning that scandal-plagued oysterman Graham Platner could still defeat Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, if the party fails to take the race seriously.

Republicans are defending several seats in expectedly close races, including Nebraska, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas, while seeking to flip Georgia. Maine is different: Sen. Susan Collins’ seat is the only Republican-held Senate seat in a state won by Kamala Harris in 2024, making it Democrats’ most direct path to returning Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to the majority leader’s office, Republicans said in a memo circulated Wednesday.

“It is a fatal mistake to assume Platner is too damaged to win,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) memo obtained by Fox News — addressed to “Interested Parties” — read.

The NRSC agreed that Maine is the “linchpin” of the 35 seats up this year and that despite Platner’s Nazi tattoo, allegations of misogynist violence, arousal from biocide in port-a-johns, and his socialist policy platform, he remains a credible threat to the middle-of-the-road Collins.

SEE IT: MAINE VOTERS SOUND OFF ON PLATNER’S DIVISIVE CAMPAIGN AS CRUCIAL PRIMARY NEARS: ‘HE’S A DISGRACE’

“Senator Collins has won tough races before and can win this one, but only if we meet this moment with total urgency,” the NRSC said.

“Because Democrats cannot win the majority without [Collins’ seat], they have fully rallied around Graham Platner, an extremely flawed, far-left candidate who secured the nomination last night. Platner has captured his party’s financial backing, outraising Senator Collins in every quarter since entering the race. We must match both the energy and the money to retain the seat,” the memo said.

The NRSC said Democrats don’t view Platner’s race as being about the flawed candidate but rather about usurping power.

COLLINS SECURES GOP NOD IN MAINE SENATE BATTLE THAT COULD DECIDE GOP MAJORITY

The committee said any one of Platner’s multiple scandals would have ended most campaigns, but Democrats remain united around him. The NRSC reported that after former girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield’s allegations against Platner broke, Platner raised $200,000 in one day in what the campaign said was its best haul of the cycle.

“The political fundamentals in Maine remain challenging, and it is a fatal mistake to assume Platner is too damaged to win,” the NRSC said.

Collins is the last remaining federal Republican in New England and the only Republican in the Senate north or east of Pennsylvania.

The NRSC reported that Platner is beating Harris’ own margins by seven points while noting Collins has won tough races in the past, but this one is different.

Collins won her last race against former Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon by about eight points, and her last electoral loss was way back in 1994 when now-Sen. Angus King Jr., I-Maine, won the governorship in a four-way contest.

Republicans said in the memo that the biggest story in the past week about Platner is not his latest scandal, but the fact that Democrats are circling the wagons around him even more tightly and “propping him up.”

WATCH: DEM SENATORS EXCUSE PLATNER’S CONDUCT AT CRISIS HUDDLE WITH EMBATTLED MAINE CANDIDATE

They cited Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna visiting Maine to hold a gushy interview-slash-ad with Platner and the fact that Democrats keep claiming Collins and Trump are worse than the left-winger.

“Gotta do what you gotta do,” the NRSC quoted former Biden deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty, while noting that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse publicly claimed Platner’s foibles are a “lot of nothing.”

They also pointed to one of the most influential Democratic operatives claiming that Platner’s flaws actually bolster his qualifications.

Platner had disparaged former Pennsylvania lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Teddy Daniels after video of the Purple Heart recipient being besieged and gravely wounded by the Taliban surfaced several years ago.

“We’ve got a f—ed up guy who could be 100 times more f—ed up than he is and he’d never be as f—ed up as what we’ve got in Washington,” said 1992 Bill Clinton campaign architect James Carville, who suggested that Platner’s apparent PTSD should be a symbol on the Hill as to why neoconservatives have been wrong about war powers.

“This is not a party abandoning its nominee. This is a party rationalizing, accepting, and preparing to fight,” the NRSC said.

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“Republicans need to match that urgency immediately. Define Platner. Defend Collins. Resource Maine,” they said. “Senator Collins has proven time and time again, through her work ethic and commitment to the people of Maine and America, that she will prevail.”

“This race can be won, but it will not win itself.”

Fox News Digital reached out to the NRSC, DSCC, Platner campaign and Collins campaign for further comment.

By Hamed Aleaziz, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, Jon Hazell, Gilad Thaler, Stephanie Swart and Rafaela Balster

June 10, 2026

BLUE HILL, Maine – Graham Platner, the progressive left, and Donald Trump appear to be the big winners in Tuesday’s high-profile primaries in Maine and South Carolina.

Platner, the oyster farmer and military combat veteran who has been facing plenty of incoming fire amid mounting controversies, cruised to the Democratic nomination Tuesday in left-leaning Maine and will now face longtime moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a key race that is among a handful which will likely determine if Republicans hold their Senate majority in the midterm elections.

Meanwhile, in solidly red South Carolina, Trump-backed Sen. Lindsey Graham won a majority of the vote in the Senate GOP primary and will avoid a runoff against a primary challenger from the right.

And the candidate the president endorsed in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished on top of a crowded field of contenders and will advance to a runoff election in two weeks against longtime South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who came in second.

Here’s what we learned in the key June 9th primaries.

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The left storms back

The convincing victory by Platner, who was backed by progressive champions Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, looks to be another feather in the cap for the left in their intra-party face-off with the establishment.

The primary in Maine was held a week after Iowa state Rep. John Turek, who was supported by longtime Senate Democratic Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, won the Democratic Senate primary and will face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in another crucial midterm showdown.

Turek, a wheelchair basketball player who won two Paralympic gold medals, defeated the more progressive candidate, state Sen. Zach Wahls. The divisive and expensive primary battle was viewed as a proxy war between the establishment and anti-establishment wings of the party.

Fast-forward a week and the ballot box performance by Platner, who promotes an economically populist agenda as he takes aim at corporate influences and advocates for the working class, gives a boost to the left.

“The Democratic establishment and powerful interests spent months trying to stop Graham Platner. Instead, they demonstrated that voters in Maine and across America want to elect shake-up-the-system outsiders,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green emphasized.

And Green warned that Platner’s victory “should be a wake-up call for a Democratic establishment that has spent too long underestimating the appeal of economic populism and outsider politics.”

EMBATTLED PLATNER WINS DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY TO TEE UP CRUCIAL MIDTERM SHOWDOWN

What controversies?

Platner in recent weeks has been facing one of the roughest stretches of his bid for the U.S. Senate.

The candidate has been playing defense the past month, amid multiple controversies. They include inflammatory online comments made on Reddit, a well-publicized and now covered-up tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol, recent reports that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women while married, and new allegations last week from ex-girlfriends of a history of rape fantasies, heavy drinking and violent episodes. Platner has called the latest allegations of violence untrue.

On Monday, a day before the primary election, a former high-level staffer from the Platner campaign wrote in the Washington Post that Platner “is not someone who would be good for Maine or for the country.”

While the mounting controversies triggered some Democrats in the nation’s capital to question whether Platner was damaged goods and needed to be replaced, the candidate this past weekend thanked Maine voters for continuing to support him.

“When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness of recovery and accountability and growth. Maine had my back,” Platner said at a rally Friday not far from his hometown in Down East Maine. “Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated, and weaponized, you have my back. And when politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me. Maine, you have my back.”

THE GROWING LIST OF CONTROVERSIES THREATENING DEMOCRAT GRAHAM PLATNER’S MAINE SENATE BID

And voters in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary seemed to shrug off the controversies.

“In trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all,” Platner said in his victory speech as he dismissed news reports about his past misdeeds as immaterial to the Senate election.

“This is a movement about us, about the far too many working far too hard and struggling far too much.”

Trump has a big night

The president wasn’t on the ballot in South Carolina, but he had plenty on the line in the GOP Senate and gubernatorial primaries.

One week after Trump’s endorsement-winning streak in high-profile Republican primaries was snapped, the president’s immense clout over the GOP was on the line again, this time in South Carolina.

And the president easily passed the test.

The candidate Trump endorsed in the Palmetto State’s GOP gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, finished first in a crowded field of candidates and clinched one of the two tickets in the race for the nomination.

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Evette, who repeatedly spotlighted Trump’s support, now advances to a Republican runoff election in two weeks against South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, the second place finisher, in the race to succeed term-limited GOP Gov. Henry McMaster. 

Since no candidate topped 50% of the primary vote to land a majority, Evette and Wilson will battle for the nomination in the June 23 runoff, and the winner will be considered the clear favorite in the general election in the solidly red southeastern state.

Meanwhile, in the South Carolina GOP Senate primary, longtime Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham did win a majority of the vote, and will avoid a runoff, the Associated Press reported.

Graham, who was endorsed by Trump, was facing primary challenges from five candidates, including conservative businessman Mark Lynch, who took aim at the senator over his support for the war in Iran. Lynch was backed by some MAGA leaders who have been critical of the president.

Graham’s campaign and allied political groups spent nearly $20 million to highlight Trump’s support. And the president joined Graham and Evette for a primary eve tele-rally.

The brute force of the president’s endorsement power has been on display in GOP primaries over the past month, with his candidates ousting incumbents he targeted in showdowns in Indiana, Louisiana, Kentucky and Texas that grabbed plenty of national attention.

But his 11th-hour endorsement of Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra of Iowa a week and a half ago — which came on the same day he also backed Evette — in the race to succeed retiring GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds wasn’t enough to muscle the three-term congressman to victory.

Feenstra was narrowly edged by Zach Lahn, a businessman, farmer and former political strategist who was backed by the political wings of MAHA — the acronym for the Make America Healthy Again movement aligned with Trump Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and Turning Point USA, the powerful conservative organization co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

In the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, the major contenders had long been highlighting their support for Trump and his agenda, in hopes of landing his support.

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Trump, after staying neutral for months, endorsed Evette, praising her as an “America First Patriot” and a “WINNER” in his announcement.

In her primary night speech, Evette thanks the president and touted that she’s a “Trump-endorsed businesswoman and conservative who’s going to take the fight to the radical left.”