Platner is not just running ahead of Gov. Janet Mills for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. He’s possibly the most remarkable political story in the country.

[Republished, with permission]

By JOSH KEEFE | The Maine Monitor

In 2002, my classmate Graham Platner ran for student-body president of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. I remember watching him in our auditorium debate his fellow candidates. He was the radical, wearing a revolutionary proletarian costume: overalls and a red armband. (When I asked him about this recently, he told me he thought he had a history presentation to give that day.) I don’t recall the issues they discussed, but I do remember Platner proposing collective action to overturn some school policy — saying something along the lines of, “They can’t suspend us all.” The history teacher serving as moderator interjected to remind Platner and everyone else that, yes, in fact, they could. 

Students elected the safe candidate, a future chiropractor. But Platner had other outlets for his energy and ideas. Around that time, he skipped school to protest the coming Iraq war when President George W. Bush visited our local airport — and was forcibly removed by the Secret Service. In the high school yearbook, our class voted him “most likely to start a revolution.” 

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Nearly a quarter-century later, Platner, now 41, is not just the probable Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Sen. Susan Collins; he’s arguably the most remarkable political story anywhere in the country. A former U.S. Marine and oyster farmer who, school elections aside, had never previously run for office, Platner’s viral August campaign launch once seemed destined to be a short-lived novelty.

Not long after he announced his candidacy, Janet Mills, Maine’s two-term governor and a savvy politician who has been winning elections since before Platner was born, threw her hat in the ring. And Platner soon faced a succession of controversies. It turned out he’d spent years as a prolific Reddit poster, leaving behind a trail of comments — he called himself a “communist” in 2021; agreed in 2020 that “all cops” were bastards; used a homophobic slur in 2018; and, in 2013, argued women shouldn’t get blackout drunk if they were worried about sexual assault — that didn’t exactly scream “electable.” Shortly after those revelations, Maine voters also learned he had a Nazi-linked tattoo.

The national media, which had previously hailed him as a new kind of rugged, populist Democrat, quickly buried him. But in Maine, Platner kept campaigning, and voters kept listening. Today, he is the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. One recent independent poll found him leading Mills by 27 points.

What in the world is going on here? On the surface, Platner vs. Mills is just the latest chapter in the populist-left vs. establishment-center struggle that has been roiling the Democratic Party since Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders faced off in 2016. And the race certainly is that: Platner has been endorsed by Sanders and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren; Mills is backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

But over the past few months, as I attended events and interviewed more than 50 people — former and current state officials, Democratic voters, local political experts, Platner and Mills themselves and those who know them — I came to suspect that something related, but also more specific, was at play: This race has become perhaps the country’s clearest referendum on how Democrats should be responding to Trumpism.

Since 2016, Democrats have debated whether or not the fundamental problem is President Donald Trump himself or the circumstances that produced him. Mills has become a kind of personification of the first view. Outside of Maine, she may be best known for a viral moment from last year, when, at a White House event for the nation’s governors, Trump called her out directly, saying he would pull all federal funding from Maine if it refused to comply with the administration’s executive order on transgender girls and women in sports. From the audience, Mills responded coolly, “See you in court.”

Now, she has built her campaign around a promise to go toe to toe with the president. In a phone interview in February, I asked her directly whether she believes Trump is the symptom or the disease. “Good grief. I would like to think, I would like to believe, that it’s a fluke,” she said. “But I know one thing: Whatever the origins, whatever the cause, we have to stand up to him. And I’m the person in this campaign who has stood up to Donald Trump, and I’ll do it again in the U.S. Senate.” 

Platner is up to something different. He isn’t running a campaign so much as seeking to build a mass movement against the status quo. He’s not trying to woo the working class to the Democratic Party; he’s trying to mobilize the working class to take over the Democratic Party and use it to fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizens. To him, Trump is a symptom of a larger rot, a fundamentally broken system, and the old rules of American politics are already beside the point. The Democratic establishment is “still existing in this world where they think that if you know the rules the best, you’re going to win,” he told me. “When the other side is just beating you over the head with the rule book, it doesn’t matter.”

In keeping with these themes, he’s running a far grander campaign than Mills in terms of ambition and drive. (It does help that he isn’t limited by the need to simultaneously govern.) He seems to be everywhere, all the time, both on TV, thanks to his nearly three-to-one fundraising edge, and in person. His call for building working-class power aligns not only with his working-man presentation but with his workman-like approach to campaigning: He has held more than 50 town halls — so well attended that people are often turned away — and shows up in every corner of the state. Unlike Mills, he’s not trying to convince voters he will stand up to Trump; he’s trying to start a movement to build a world without the despair and resentment that he believes allows Trump’s brand of politics to flourish. 

Maine is certainly not the first place where these contrasting prescriptions for how to end Trumpism have been present in a Democratic primary. But rarely have they been so perfectly embodied by two such different candidates. And if the polls are even close to right, Democratic voters are about to deliver a bracing message about which of these visions they currently prefer. 

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ON A FRIDAY EVENING in early April, the Oxford County Democrats held a candidate forum in Fryeburg, a town of about 3,500 on the New Hampshire border and part of Maine’s rural 2nd Congressional District. To the surprise of organizers, the middle school gymnasium was filled with roughly 300 people. 

The forum featured several candidates running for local offices — school board, selectman, state Legislature and sheriff — plus Platner. He wore a hoodie with “Neat” (as in, no ICE) across his chest and a baseball cap with the logo of a local guitar manufacturer.

When it was his turn to speak, Platner talked, as he often does, about power. He discussed how New Dealers once wielded power on behalf of working people and how, starting in the 1970s, corporate interests began taking that power back, pouring money into politics to influence policy, which produced more money to pour into politics. It has all led to this moment, he explained, when a supposedly democratic country starts a war in Iran that is overwhelmingly unpopular with its citizens but is good for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Saudi government and Raytheon executives. “Every time a Tomahawk missile hits a kid’s school, somebody makes a profit,” he said.

“We are the richest society in the history of humanity,” Platner argued. “We can have universal health care. We can have universal childcare. We can have universal education, going from kindergarten all the way through higher education. We can have a tax code that pulls back all the wealth that was stolen from the working class of this country for the past 50 years.” He broke for a loud round of applause before continuing. “What we need to do is, from the ground up, build power the old-fashioned way,” he said. “This comes from organizing.”

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The contrast with the Mills campaign is striking. Her pitch to voters has focused on how she is the only person who can beat Collins and stand up to Trump. “I’m running because I couldn’t sit back and do nothing in times like these,” Mills told me in late January. Amid the tumult of Trump’s second term, she grew exasperated watching Collins “be concerned, concerned, concerned but never courageous.”

We were at a home near Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where Mills had just finished answering questions from roughly 20 women. The night before the event, Mills delivered a defiant State of the State address, in which she sparred with a Republican lawmaker over federal universal health care and repeatedly said “you’re welcome” to the GOP side of the aisle after listing her accomplishments. Some Republicans walked out and later said it was a campaign speech aimed at Democratic primary voters. 

At the Brunswick event, some of the women thanked her for the speech and for using it to stand up for reproductive health. Others prefaced their questions with gratitude for the governor’s record. “You’re a doer,” one told Mills. “You get things done.”

She has notched a number of liberal wins — signing into law paid family and medical leave, free community college, the country’s most generous student-loan tax credit and record investments in housing and clean energy. She also fully funded the state’s portion of education costs for the first time and provided free school lunches. Yet she has alienated progressives with repeated tacks to the center — vetoing an effort to add a new top tax bracket (before coming out in early April in support of a similar measure) and killing a bill to expand sovereignty for Maine’s Indian tribes. Her relationship with Maine labor, meanwhile, has been so contentious that union leaders publicly tried to draft a candidate to primary her in 2022. “She’s just too conservative for where the Democratic Party is and where a lot of Mainers are,” said Ethan Strimling, a former mayor of Portland.

It isn’t just a matter of ideology, though. It’s also about a lawyerly, careful, rules-based vision of politics. Mills was a prosecutor and the state’s attorney general before she was governor; to her allies, she’s a master of legal fine print and policy who identifies flaws in well-meaning legislation and is willing to buck her own party to do what she feels is right. “Janet is not afraid to irritate or frustrate her party or anybody because she wants to get to the right answer whenever possible,” Emily Cain, the former executive director of Emily’s List, which has endorsed Mills, told me. “She cares about the long-term implications of changes to the law and policy on the people of Maine.” Cain added, “It’s not always sexy to be so deliberative.”

And “deliberative” is one way to describe her campaign. Mills did not release a policy platform until early April, nearly six months after entering the race. Before then, the one policy she touted was universal health care, but, even there, she struggled to provide details. When I asked her in Brunswick how she proposed to provide health care for all Americans, she said she didn’t yet have a federal plan in mind but argued that the U.S. “needs to look more broadly at how other countries are achieving universal health care in the most efficient and humane way.” Her recent policy plan didn’t offer additional specifics.

The upshot of all this has been that her campaign — in contrast with Platner’s, which had a detailed policy plan at his campaign launch in August — is mostly about her experience as a fighter and her determination to stand up to Trump. “That’s the most important thing we can do right now — stand up to this administration,” she told me by phone in early February. “Fight for universal health care. Fight to save our democracy and our Constitution.”

Mainers have noticed the difference. “We have heard detailed policy from Platner or detailed wishes for policy,” Democratic state Rep. Amy Roeder of Bangor told me. As for Mills: “I’m seeing a lot from her record, which is great, but we’ve got to look forward, too.”

Her campaign has been defined not just by a comparative lack of ideas, but has also seemed more limited in reach. True, Platner, having turned most of the responsibility of his oyster farm over to his business partner, is effectively a full-time candidate and makes three to six campaign appearances a day, while Mills has a job governing Maine — a duty that for the last year has included defending the state from numerous attacks and threats from the Trump administration.

Whatever the explanation, though, Platner is filling theaters, veterans halls and school gymnasiums — reinforcing the impression of someone who is building a mass movement — and Mills is not. She has chosen to campaign by meeting small groups, as she did in Brunswick. These discussions, which her campaign calls a “Candid Conversations” tour, didn’t launch until January, after Platner had been holding town halls for months. She’s aggressively visiting businesses and events throughout Maine, her campaign told me, including attending 11 Democratic caucuses (local party meetings for choosing leadership and delegates to the state convention) across eight counties in early March. But it’s hard not to notice how the pictures from many of her events, featuring Mills talking with a handful of people, differ from the images and videos of Platner speaking to large crowds.

It’s a controlled approach to campaigning that has also marked her tenure as governor. “It’s very rare that she’ll sit down for an interview,” said longtime Maine journalist and author Douglas Rooks. “Janet Mills has had a very closed Blaine House and governor’s office.” By contrast, “Graham will go anywhere. He’ll talk to any group. It’s sort of, ‘Bring it on.’”

•••

Throughout my reporting, as I asked people for their thoughts on the race, I repeatedly heard a version of the same thing: I like Mills; I appreciate what she’s done as governor; but it’s time for someone younger.

Platner, not surprisingly, is winning among younger voters by a considerable margin, and some of them expressed exasperation with what they called the “gerontocracy” running the party. More surprisingly, older voters I spoke to almost always raised the issue of age. Rachel Phipps, 64, of Kennebunk, whom I met during a late-November roundtable discussion with Mills and U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree on rising health-care costs, said she “greatly admired” Mills but thought running at her age was “irresponsible.” David Mokler, whom I met at a meeting of Biddeford Democrats, said he was undecided, “but I like Graham because he’s young.” He added, “I’ll be 75 this year. I want the younger people to get involved.” Lalla Carothers, 62, of Cumberland, whom I met at a Portland anti-ICE protest in January organized by Platner, also said she was undecided and noted that Mills “has done an amazing job.” “But,” she said, “it might be time to bring in some new, young voices.” 

Polling suggests that Platner has won over older voters who were initially in the Mills camp. A Pan Atlantic Research poll released in December had Mills crushing Platner by 48 percentage points among voters 55 and older. But the version of the poll published in March found he had narrowed her lead in that age group to just 3 points.

The more I heard these sentiments from voters of all ages, the more I began to suspect their feelings about Mills’ age were linked to the larger contrasts in the race. Mills isn’t former President Joe Biden — she’s a spry 78, and, as Roeder put it, “she will outlive us all” — so the concerns were not about her physical or mental capacities. Rather, it seems that her age has become a proxy in voters’ minds for her lack of new ideas, her languid campaigning, her politician biography. Platner wants to overturn the system that preceded and led to Trump. Mills is, in effect, campaigning as its defender.

“The plan for him wasn’t to go into politics,” Anna Makoujy, 37, said at a town hall in Biddeford as she explained why she supported Platner. “He didn’t do the ‘I’m a lawyer’ thing, then the ‘I’m gonna make policy’ thing and then ‘now that I’m a professional in policy, therefore I can go to D.C. and create policy.’” Instead, she said, “he responded to a need.”

•••

With her poll numbers low, Mills recently decided to go negative on Platner. Last month, she released a series of ads highlighting his deleted Reddit comments from 2013 about rape. In those comments — about women being sexually assaulted after blacking out from drinking — he’d written: “Holy fuck, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?” The Mills ad showed women reading parts of Platner’s comment and expressing their disgust. It ended with the tagline: “Graham Platner, the more you look, the worse it gets.” (Platner has apologized for the comments, explaining that he was suffering from combat-related post-traumatic stress when he wrote them and no longer shares those views. He has run ads directly addressing the situation.)

Under the pre-Trump rules of American politics, those posts might have doomed Platner. The same goes for his Nazi-linked tattoo. In 2006, after participating in brutal fighting during his time as a Marine in Iraq, Platner and fellow machine gunners got drunk and wandered into a Croatian tattoo parlor, intent on getting something to memorialize their experience and the U.S. fighters who didn’t survive. They saw a skull and crossbones option and decided to get it — because, as one of the gunners, Phil Proschko, told me, “We weren’t gonna get matching fucking unicorns.”

Proschko and Platner both said they were unaware that the skull and crossbones was a Totenkopf, a symbol adopted and worn by the Nazi SS. And Platner said he didn’t know what it was until it became an issue during this campaign. Even when someone working with his campaign told him there was a rumor going around that he had a white supremacist tattoo, he said he didn’t connect it to the skull and crossbones on his chest. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s the fucking most retarded shit I’ve ever heard in my life,’” he told me. “‘No, I don’t have a white supremacist tattoo,’ and I never thought about it again. And then it came up later on, and I was like, ‘God fucking damn it.’” (He had the tattoo covered in late October.) 

But far from dooming his campaign, all these controversies seem to have played into Platner’s brand as a regular person — someone outside the usual political system. Back in November, Platner supporter Jacob Makoujy, then 27 — whom I spoke to before Platner’s campaign event in Biddeford — told me he appreciated the way the candidate had not dodged questions about the revelations but took accountability. “It feels like I can see my own growth, myself, in him,” Makoujy said. “I’ve gotten older and been like, ‘Wow, that was kind of stupid of me.’”

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic member of the Maine Legislature and the current communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, heard similar sentiments while canvassing door to door for Platner in his personal capacity. “People brought up the tattoo,” he told me. “But only to say, ‘Oh yeah, he got this tattoo. I’ve got stupid tattoos, too.’” 

In Fryeburg, high school senior Quintan Flint, 18, of Stow, noted that Platner got the tattoo covered and took ownership of it after he learned about its associations. “This wasn’t like the Trump administration where it’s like, ‘Oh, that never happened,’” he said. As for the Reddit comments, he noted that “everyone says shitty things on Reddit. I say shitty things on Reddit. I mean, it’s Reddit.”

On a recent Zoom call that Mills held with Democratic voters from Hancock County, where Platner grew up and lives, many participants seemed outraged not by Platner’s transgressions but rather by Mills’ attempt to draw attention to them. “I think your ads are divisive and odious, and you are doing Susan Collins’ work for her,” former Democratic state Rep. J. Mark Worth told Mills. 

Mills seemed surprised by the pushback. “I think the voters of Maine have a right to know,” she said. But after a decade of watching Trump’s conduct, some Democratic voters don’t seem to be in the mood to judge Platner’s past. “I constantly have to tell myself that just because something used to be true doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true going forward,” University of Maine political science professor Mark Brewer told me. “I think Platner is a good example, especially within the Democratic Party.”

Trump, according to this line of thinking, changed the rules, and they simply aren’t going to revert. It’s the polar opposite of the message Mills seems to represent: that a return to pre-Trump politics is still possible. “You might argue that a two-term governor and former state lawmaker and former attorney general has the skillset and experience necessary to rebuild the safeguards that have held for our entire history until 2016,” David Farmer, a Democratic political consultant, told me. “I personally would love to have Janet Mills as a juror on a Trump impeachment.”

Juxtapose that with the analysis of Trumpism — its root causes and how to address them — that Platner offered to the crowd in Fryeburg. “People, when their lives begin to deteriorate, are going to look for folks to blame, and if we don’t have the actual answer, then hatred and xenophobia and racism and homophobia and transphobia, all of them will fill the vacuum,” he said. “This means we have to go out in our community, and we have to wear our hearts on our sleeves.”

Like the high school version of himself vowing that administrators couldn’t suspend everyone, Graham Platner — veteran, oyster farmer, a nonpolitician with the Reddit posts and questionable tattoo decisions to prove it — is telling today’s Democrats that the way out of the current era isn’t to simply keep fighting Trump; it’s for a mass movement of regular people to organize and challenge the entire system. If he flips a Senate seat, it just might mean that the post-Trump Democratic Party has finally begun.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Josh Keefe is a government accountability reporter for The Maine Monitor with a focus on Maine’s child welfare system and indigent defense system. Previously, he worked as an investigative reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville and Bangor Daily News. Originally from Veazie, he now lives in Portland.

His accountability reporting on Tennessee’s child welfare system, Maine county law enforcement, and the Maine Army National Guard has been recognized by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, New England First Amendment Coalition, Maine Press Association and Tennessee Press Association. Contact Josh with questions, concerns or story ideas: josh@themainemonitor.org

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