One of Graham Platner’s high school yearbooks shows him babyfaced with a buzzcut, holding a sign proclaiming, in part: “Free Palestine.” The image is accompanied by a superlative his classmates bestowed upon him: “Most Likely To Start A Revolution.”
“Well see!” Platner wrote on X Thursday, posting a photo of the yearbook page, in a post that’s been viewed 4.5m times. Now bearded, burly and tattooed, with a sweep of dirty blond hair above a sunburnt face, Platner still believes in a free Palestine. He also thinks it’ll take something revolutionary to save the US, so earlier this week, when the oysterman announced his candidacy to be the next US senator from Maine, he pulled no punches.
“I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out,” he said in a campaign launch video, showing him chopping wood and at the helm of a small fishing boat.
“And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins. I’m not fooled by this fake charade of Collins’ deliberations and moderation.”
Platner’s video went viral, his message punching through in a crowded field of Democratic primary candidates, all vying for the chance to defeat Collins. Despite her protestations of being a “moderate”, Collins, a 72-year-old Republican senator, has often aligned herself with Donald Trump’s far-right agenda.
Democrats thought they had a real shot to unseat Collins in 2020. Sara Gideon raised $40m more than Collins, and polls showed Gideon in the lead, but she still lost by nine points in a state her fellow Democrat, Joe Biden, won handily.
Now, the Democratic party is trying again, seeing Collins’s seat as crucial to their chances of taking back the US Senate in 2026. Establishment Democrats have eyed Maine governor Janet Mills as a potential candidate, but Mills has yet to jump into the race.
Platner believes the party needs an outsider. He believes that pedigreed, establishment Democratic candidates have failed repeatedly to appeal to working-class Americans, hastening the rise of Maga.
“Most Trump supporters I know think that the system is screwing them,” Platner says.
“They think it is not working on their behalf. They think that they are being robbed by the ultra-wealthy. And these are all true statements. When I talk to them about these things, we are all in full agreement. And in many ways, this is at the core of why we are in the straits that we are in. The Democratic party has in many ways lost those people, not all of them, but some over the years, by not being clearly a party of the working class, representing the interests of the working class.”
Platner’s populist brand of politics grew, in part, out of his experience in the military. He enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and deployed to Iraq three times. When he returned home, he went to George Washington University on the GI bill, before deciding to enlist again, this time with the army national guard. He was deployed to Afghanistan.
“I witnessed the just horrific human cost of those wars,” he says. “Both for the young American men and women who were deployed, but also the people in the countries that we invaded.”
He grew disillusioned, eventually realizing that the US’s “military adventurism” was “a mechanism of moving taxpayer dollars into the private bank accounts of defense companies, all on the backs of frankly working-class men and women, and on the backs of the people living in societies that we took the wars to”.
Platner went from Afghanistan back home to Sullivan, Maine, taking a job on an oyster farm – across Frenchman Bay from Acadia national park – which he now runs. He got married and seemed to be settling down for a quiet life, but says he saw his friends and neighbors struggle with rising healthcare costs, shuttered hospitals and housing prices that forced many to move away.
“This isn’t a vanity project,” Platner says of his Senate campaign. If anything, he says, the campaign has thrown his life into “a bit of disarray”. He’s doing it because he cares about the community that has cared for him and believes in a type of politics that may have appeal across the political spectrum – one he believes has the ability to stop the rising tide of fascism in the US.
“Government can provide good things for people like I have been provided – a good life by the support I get from the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs], both in healthcare and in housing, and I don’t think that people should have to go fight in foreign wars to get those things. I think they should get those things just by being an American,” he says.
His policy proposals – Medicare for all, the return of “serious federal support for building housing” and a “billionaire minimum tax”, among others – may not sound too dissimilar from the platforms of progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders. But Platner is wary of labels, eschewing words like “liberal” or “leftie”.
It’s not only because he doesn’t present like your stereotypical progressive – he’s a veteran, an oysterman and a competitive shooter, spending his weekends at the local gunnery. He doesn’t like political labels, he says, because “we have far more in common with our neighbors than we do with anyone who’s up in the stratospherically wealthy elite … By trying to force people into these little holes, that keeps folks divided, and I don’t think there’s any value in that.”
Similarly, Platner sees “culture war” issues as distractions. His campaign platform – unlike a lot of establishment Democrats – is unequivocal in its support of marginalized groups. On immigrants, he’s called out the government for “kidnapping people off the streets and imprisoning them in hellish conditions” and says he “will support a path to citizenship and an end to the mass deportation machine”.
On queer people, his website states he’s tired of “politicians using small groups of people as a punching bag – be it race, or gender identity, or sexual orientation”.
“I will support passing, at last, federal LGBTQ anti-discrimination legislation,” it says.
As he surveys the American political scene, Platner is enraged by a Democratic party he sees as more interested in raising money than helping people, a party willing to appease Maga, to meet it in the middle, instead of fighting it.
“Nothing pisses me off more than getting a fundraising text from Democrats talking about how they’re fighting fascism…,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Because it’s such bullshit. We’re not idiots. Everyone knows most of them aren’t doing jack shit right now to fight back. People are being kidnapped into unmarked vans by masked police. There is a genocide happening in Palestine. Literal billionaires have taken over our government. And all Democratic leadership can do is send us another fundraising text?”
For now, Platner is an oysterman and harbormaster in Sullivan, diving into the water to moor boats so they don’t float out to sea in a storm, but he believes his next job will be in Washington DC.
“We need to give people hope,” he says. “We need to show them that there still is an element in American politics that wants to fight on their behalf and comes from them. That’s not something that comes from on high. We need to build the concept of working-class politics again, and I think that is very much the mechanism of how we move forward.”
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