Photo: grahamforsenate.com

When Senator Susan Collins of Maine appeared at a ribbon-cutting in the small town of Searsport this week, protesters awaited her. A now-viral video of the event shows Collins, a moderate Republican, at something of a loss. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” protesters shouted at her, until she said, “I have a suggestion. Would you listen to the suggestion?” One protester had an idea of their own. “Vote Graham Platner!” they replied.

Platner was national news by the time Collins arrived in Searsport. On August 19, he announced that would  run as a Democrat to unseat Collins, who has been in the Senate since 1996 and chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee. The state of Maine has become “essentially unlivable” for working-class people on her watch, he said in a campaign video, and he was “deeply angry.” In interviews, Platner has avoided labels, including “liberal” or “leftie,” but he also hasn’t shied away from topics that Democratic leaders often avoid. “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?” he recently posted on X.

Though Platner is new to national politics, he’s familiar to the residents of Sullivan, Maine, where he was raised and lives currently. He is an oyster farmer and the town harbormaster, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army who served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is still a competitive shooter. He entered the race against Collins at a vulnerable moment for her with her popularity declining — though she has defied expectations and polls in the past.

Platner’s pitch to Maine voters is not solely about Collins. He is a critic of “oligarchy,” as he said in his campaign video, and has focused much of his energy on a cost-of-living crisis that is making Maine unaffordable for many of its residents. Platner has a long road ahead — he already has primary competition, and state Democratic officials hope Maine’s septuagenarian governor, Janet Mills, will enter the race. Nonetheless, he has achieved startling momentum during the first week of his campaign. On Labor Day, he’ll appear in with Senator Bernie Sanders and Troy Jackson, a former state senator who’s running to replace Mills as governor. I spoke to Platner on Thursday about his new campaign and how he arrived at a platform that includes Medicare for All.

**I want to start with Susan Collins. She’s been in the Senate since 1996, and conventional wisdom says that because she has that seniority, it’s important to keep her around. What’s your take on her legacy and what it has meant for the people of Maine?**I think at its core, one of the reasons I’m running is that in the 30 years that Susan Collins has been in the Senate, things have gotten materially worse for working-class Mainers. For me, that’s the baseline. If you’ve been there for that much time and you’ve accrued as much power as I continue to be told that she has accrued, then where is it when it comes to doing things for working-class people in the state of Maine?

Because things are worse now. Our hospitals are falling apart. We have an affordability-and-housing crisis and it is not just ours; it’s nationwide. But frankly, that’s what being a U.S. senator is all about: fixing larger systemic problems. The Senate is one of those places where you can accrue an immense amount of power through seniority. She’s waited a long time to be head of the Appropriations Committee, and she’s there now. And yet what has it given us? I think if you went around the state of Maine and asked people, “Has your life gotten materially better since Susan Collins became head of the Senate Appropriations Committee?,” they’re all going to say, “Absolutely not.”

**Can you say more about Maine’s housing costs in particular?**I live in a small town on the coast. We have some very, very nice summer homes. We also have a lot of people living hardscrabble lives in a prefab or a mobile home. Eastern Hancock County is poor. People struggle real hard. People work really, really hard. There was a time, though, when that kind of hard work could still keep you in your house. It could put good food on your table. You could even save. You could send your kids to college. I know guys who are clammers who sent their kids to college with the money they made. Those days are over.

The housing-affordability crisis is such a systemic issue. I would love to just tie it to Maine, but it’s obviously not the case. A friend of mine works at the store where I get my breakfast, and she’s born and raised here, and wants to stay here, but she is thinking about leaving because she spends more than 50 percent of her monthly income on rent and can’t buy a house. She’s looked at going elsewhere, and she’s not sure where she can go because it’s the same problem everywhere else. So the problem manifests itself clearly in the rising cost of goods and the fact that wages have remained stagnant.

I know a lot of guys who have construction gigs or are contractors. The tariff uncertainty has driven prices for them up 20, 30, 40 percent. So now there are projects that were being done that aren’t being done because essentially we have a self-made supply-chain crisis and it is impacting people in material ways. Deleterious isn’t even the right word for it. People can’t live around here anymore. It’s getting effectively unlivable and that’s not even talking about the health-care problem, which is its own disaster in the making as we speak.

**Maine also has an aging population. In your view, what would need to change in order for Maine to be the sort of place where a working-class person can comfortably retire?**One, we need to fix retirement in this country. There was an age when there were three legs of the retirement pedestal. You’ve got social security; you had pensions, generally built out from strong labor unions; and you had 401ks, which are supposed to be supplemental. Social Security has been attacked for decades. Benefits have been reduced. To me, it’s all insane because if we just remove the cap, then we fund Social Security forever and always and expand benefits.

Here in eastern Maine, if we had Medicare for All and we had accessible health care that people at the moment of care did not have to pay money for, people could take care of themselves and be healthier for longer. It’s also a whole bunch of money that you could use that to save and save for retirement. What would eastern Maine look like if everyone in eastern Maine didn’t have to worry about paying for health insurance or work a job they hated to give them access to health insurance?

You could have an economy that is booming and that is full of people that want to live here and move here. We have none of that right now, and that’s why this place is in many ways dying, and it’s not through any fault of the people that live here.

**You enlisted in the Marine Corps and later served in the Army. Why did you decide to enlist? And how did your experiences in the military shape your views?**I’d always felt a real sense of duty. I always wanted to belong to something that was bigger than me, and here in the United States, military service, certainly for younger people, that’s a place that you get to do that. I also grew up in eastern Maine and I wanted to see the world. I wanted adventures, and I read too much Hemingway when I was in high school. I wanted to be Robert Jordan.

So I joined the Marines and I joined the infantry and deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. Wound up in the Army. My experiences in many ways shaped my disillusionment. I was already skeptical. I protested the war in Iraq before I fought in it. I still went because I felt like I had some kind of duty to go. I tried to stop it. We couldn’t stop it. I had some feeling that maybe it was better that I go than somebody else.

In my time overseas, I began to become very, very critical of American foreign policy, which in many ways began to make me deeply critical of our system. And I began to look at things through this lens: If we continue to not accomplish the things I thought we were trying to accomplish, then I have to reframe the question and start to wonder, Well then, what are we trying to do? And the answer I came to for American foreign policy and a lot of other things is that we have a system that is built to make a very small number of people very wealthy and powerful. And we will expend an immense amount of capital, we will shoulder an immense amount of human suffering, in the service of that. That made me very, very angry for a long time. I still am in many ways, although I’ve definitely found better places to channel it. Hence this.

**Can you say more about your transition out of the military and how it influenced you politically?**When I got home from my fourth tour, I was suffering from all the stuff that you would expect infantrymen to suffer from. I definitely self-medicated. About six weeks to two months after I got back from my fourth tour, I got a DUI. I was in this place where not only was I having all of the normal responses to that kind of trauma, I was also going through this immense emotional disillusionment where I began to realize that everything I had done, everything I’d taken part in, all this violence and horror had quite possibly been in the service of nothing good.

And that was very hard. To this day, honestly, it makes me emotional. Even saying these words out loud. This still is a thing that I struggle with deeply, in the sense that trying to tie something I’m very proud of, which is my military service, to the fact that I felt like I was in many ways taken advantage of by the larger system. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way. A lot of guys I served with have very similar problems and very similar feelings.

Then I finally got to the VA and got care, and I got treated for PTSD. And through that, I got access to health care, I got access to a lot of foundational support, which allowed me to build a really spectacular, fulfilling life that I’ve lived now for almost a decade. It was that kind of support that allowed me the freedom to start a small business, allowed me the freedom to buy a home. All these things that allowed me to move back to Maine and get engaged in my community and fall back in love with this place, that came from the support I got from the VA. And I’ve just gotten to a point where I think that that freedom, that support, should be accessible to all Americans. You shouldn’t have to go fight in foreign wars and watch your friends die just to get the basic foundation of living a good life in this country. I find that frankly abhorrent.

**My husband was a Marine, and he’s told me the transition period can be very difficult. Even if you haven’t been in combat, you’ve had so much structure, and you have a purpose, and then all of a sudden —**It goes away.

**It goes away. And the VA has been very important to him in helping him navigate that. Did your experiences with the VA inform your current support for Medicare for all?**One thousand and ten percent, yeah. The VA saved my life. My body was a wreck. I have herniated discs in my back, my knees were banged up. I mean, I was in the grunts for a while, and it’s hard on your body. And my mind was not doing well. I had PTSD. I was blown up a lot. I was hit by multiple IED strikes and RPGs impacting my position. So there were all these elements of being that close to blasts a lot. There were symptoms that I for a long time did not recognize were symptoms. I also came out of the infantry, so I had this masculine bravado thing, like, Oh, it’s fine, I’ll deal with it. And by dealing with it, I meant ignoring it and drinking a bit too much, which is not actually, it turns out, a successful strategy for overcoming trauma. Who knew?

So in 2016, I came back to Maine. The Maine VA is spectacular. They reached out to me, they got me the care I needed. I started going to regular therapy, all these things that for a long time I knew that maybe would be helpful, but I just shoved it away. And my life entirely turns around. It all comes from that direct support. As a small-business owner, I often get asked to talk at these small business-oriented Zoom meetings or meetings of people who are curious about how a small business in the coast of Maine can succeed. They’re always like, “How did you do it?” “Oh, easy. The VA gives me free health care and helps me pay my mortgage.”

That’s how I got to start a small business. If everybody else could do that too, they too could start a small business. So that, for me, has laid the foundation. I got material support and that allowed me to live a better life. And I am convinced that if we gave that kind of support to all Americans, we would have a much more vibrant economy, a much more vibrant society. I don’t think there is anything valuable, frankly, except to maybe a few people who own the apps, in convincing people that hustle culture is the only way to live. People working all day every day at things that they do not love is not how you build a successful society. It just isn’t. And we need to give people the freedom to do that.

You’ve spoken of oligarchy in your early campaign materials. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan has suggested **that oligarchy is not a word that resonates with working-class Americans. Why did you decide that it was important to use that word, and what do you think it means to the people you’re talking to in Maine?**I use it because I think it’s literally the accurate term. When I go on Wikipedia and look at the definition and then I see the world we live in, I see a lot of similarities. Also, I’ve read a number of academic papers in which it has been argued quite forcefully that the system we currently live in is in fact an oligarchy. So that’s why. And no disrespect to anyone else, but I actually think the American electorate is much more intelligent than a lot of people give it credit for. I think that people can understand concepts that may seem academic. And I know this because I live in a small town. I use that word in conversation, and people do not look at me like I’m confusing. They understand. So I guess, for me, that’s why I use it. It’s the right term, and I think it is not inaccessible in any way.

**This is sort of related, but how are you tapping into what seems to be an anti-Establishment feeling within the American electorate right now?**I think you focus specifically on the things that unite pretty much all working people in the United States. Health care, housing, child care, a feeling that they have watched immense amounts of money get spent on horrific foreign wars while they’ve gotten none of the things they need. Talk about those things. People respond to the material conditions that are their lives. I believe that. I believe it because I see it every day. I don’t have to read some focus-group paper on how we should talk to working-class people. I make $50,000 a year, and I live in a town of a thousand. I’m a working-class person who lives in a working-class town. I don’t believe in magic words. There’s this thing right now where everyone’s like, “Well, what if we change the words?” Then we’ll message differently. And that’s insane. Again, I don’t think people are idiots. It’s not a messaging problem.

People know that when you’re trying to tailor the message, it’s because you’re not trying to change the content or the actual context of what you are saying. The discussion about how we need to use different words, I find it so absurd because by openly having that conversation, you are stating that you don’t want to change anything. You just want to change how you talk about it. I think people see this stuff as just a bunch of weird focus groups politicking, and that’s what they hate. It’s what I hate. It’s why I’m here. It’s why I’m doing this. I can’t stand that stuff. I think it’s ineffective. I think it alienates people. I also think that it’s the reason a lot of people have given up.

So you don’t get dragged into that stuff. You don’t have to run away from your ideals. You don’t have to sell anybody out. You don’t have to say that you believe something you don’t or that you don’t believe something that you do. What you have to do is engage people with the reality they know to be true, which is that they live in a society that is not built for them at all. They live in a society that is built to enrich very, very few people, and it is meant to extract as much wealth and time and energy out of them for that group’s benefit as possible. Everybody knows this. Republicans know it, Democrats know it. Progressives know it. Trump voters know it. Go across the working class of this country, and ask people if they think they live in a society that is designed for their benefit. Not a single one of them is going to say “yes.” And the way that you tap into that is you tell them the truth that they already know. You say that is correct. The people who are screwing you are way up there, and they have accrued all the money and all the power, and they’re going to continue doing it until we start building power of our own.

**How do you plan to sustain your current momentum and build relationships with voters across such a rural state?**Well, that part is in some ways easy. I’m 40. I have an immense amount of energy. I’m a former bartender, and I love talking to people. And I’ve got a Toyota Tundra with at least 400,000 miles left on it as long as I do the oil change. So that’s how. I think we’ve got 22 town halls lined up over the next two months. The plan is me and my wife are going to get in the truck and we’re going to drive all over the great state of Maine, and we’re going to talk to quite literally everybody. And I want to hear from everybody.

The other thing is that I’m not going out there to go talk to Democrats or talk to Republicans. I want to talk to everybody. They’re open town halls. I want everyone to come. I very much think that we are in the situation that we are in because we have a political Establishment that stopped talking to working people, stopped hearing about the material realities that people live in and that are the outcomes of policy. We need to reengage with reality. We need to reengage with what happens when you do policy a certain way. And the only way to do that is to go out there and talk to them. So that’s what we’re going to do. That’s the plan.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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