5 highlights from Tuesday's elections: Platner wins in Maine; Trump’s candidates advance

2. Platner wins in Maine despite controversies, will face Collins

It did not take long to determine the matchup for the U.S. Senate election in Maine, seen as a must-win for Democrats in their bid to recapture control of the upper chamber. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, won renomination unopposed, while unofficial results show Democrat Graham Platner won the Democratic nomination with 71.9% of the vote.

The RealClearPolitics average of polls measuring voter sentiment in the U.S. Senate race in the light-blue state shows Platner leading Collins by 7.4 percentage points. However, all of the polls included in the database were taken before the June 4 publication of a New York Times report alleging that Platner was abusive in romantic relationships with women.

Although one of the women who spoke with the New York Times stressed that Platner “never hit me, never punched me,” the report discussed allegations that “he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.”

“During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm,’” the report stated. Platner’s former girlfriend also pushed back on his insistence that he did not know that a tattoo he received was a Nazi symbol, which had made headlines long before the New York Times report was published.