Veteran, oysterman, and first-time political candidate Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate campaign against Maine Republican Susan Collins kicked off last week to an impressively strong reception. His launch video has racked up millions of views across social media platforms. He has embarked on a media blitz that has run the gamut from independent progressive media outlets to bookings on CNN, and his campaign has boasted recruiting over 300 new volunteers a day since his announcement. He plans to further capitalize on that momentum with a Labor Day rally with Bernie Sanders in Portland.
In an interview with the Prospect, Platner argued that the energy around his candidacy is the latest indicator of a growing hunger for new approaches from a Democratic coalition that is stuck in the wilderness after being routed by Trump last November. “Working-class people in this country feel like they’re not being represented … both by policy and by the structure of our system,” he said. “The only way we’re going to get that is by sending up fighters from the working class who are willing to fight for the working class. And I’m getting the feeling from the response to our announcement that I was not the only one who felt that way.”
Platner joins a growing wave of populist Senate candidates who are challenging modern understandings of political labels by forefronting anti-establishment, anti-corporate, and distinctly localist politics and policies. Fellow travelers include Dan Osborn, running for Senate against Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, whose insurgent independent bid against Ricketts’s Republican colleague Deb Fischer last year saw him overperform Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by 14 points overall and by more in ultra-red rural areas across the state, and Nathan Sage, who is mounting a Senate bid for the Democratic nomination in Iowa on a similar platform.
Each candidate has taken a slightly different approach to threading the needle in their appeals to liberals, conservatives, and disaffected nonideological voters who loathe the establishment class of both parties. But all have emphasized the need to revitalize small local businesses and labor unions, rein in the power of big corporations through strong antitrust enforcement, and implement aggressive new taxes on the wealthy to fund stronger social benefits. Their strategy echoes the approach of the Greenback, Granger, and Progressive movements that rose to prominence and remade the politics of both parties during the first Gilded Age, in response to the extreme concentration of resources and power that defined the late 19th century.
According to Platner, America has entered a new gilded age and needs a politics that can meet the moment. “I think the comparisons between the late 19th century and now are apt: vast amounts of wealth and regulatory structures that in no way, shape, or form keep that wealth in check,” he told the Prospect, pointing to the power people like Elon Musk and other prominent Silicon Valley leaders have over the current administration and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party establishment. “Part of what this candidacy is is a reaction to that.”
Platner’s performance in the primary and, if he gets there, the general election are bellwethers for the ongoing debate over the Democratic coalition’s future.
Such a fundamental reshaping of politics is no small feat. While Osborn has the benefit of running a nonpartisan campaign in Nebraska, Platner, like Sage, has to contend with an organized and entrenched state and national Democratic Party that is unlikely to stand down for a populist independent candidate and is likely wary of rolling the dice on an unorthodox candidate against a vulnerable incumbent, when more traditional options are on the table.
National Democrats led by Chuck Schumer have a wish list of experienced former elected officials to flip Senate seats, from two-term governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina to populist former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. These may make sense in individual races, but in aggregate look like a recapitulation of the gerontocracy.
Elsewhere, Schumer has played kingmaker, including by forcing out populist J.D. Scholten in Iowa in favor of a more conventional Democrat, state Rep. and Paralympian Josh Turek; and backing Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan over two more progressive options.
In Maine, the only state being contested in the Senate won by Kamala Harris last year, Collins has seen her approval rating fall to new lows after casting the deciding vote to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut taxes on the wealthy and funded it in part with cuts to Medicaid and food assistance.
Former California Rep. Katie Porter’s chief of staff Jordan Wood has already launched a more conventionally progressive campaign for Senate in the state, raising over $1 million since launching in April. And two potentially formidable establishment candidates—Maine state House Speaker Ryan Fecteau and sitting governor Janet Mills—appear to be seriously considering jumping into the race. Schumer has been particularly active in attempting to recruit the 77-year-old Mills, who has not yet made a decision and who would be 85 by the end of her first Senate term.
Platner’s performance in the primary and, if he gets there, the general election are bellwethers for the ongoing debate over the Democratic coalition’s future. He seems acutely aware of the careful balance he needs to strike to position himself as a cross-ideological outsider. His campaign staff, which includes veterans of Zohran Mamdani’s insurgent primary victory in New York City like Morris Katz and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman alums like Joe Calvello, reflects that awareness.
They have focused much of his early messaging on what they believe is Platner’s unique ability to reach the young men the Democratic Party has been hemorrhaging in recent cycles. In our discussion, Platner recounted his own experience as a “young contrarian man” with “conservative leanings” who rebelled against his parents’ liberal politics. According to Platner, his time in Iraq and Afghanistan fundamentally changed his outlook, and he began seeing wealthy elites like defense contractors as the true enemy. That shift was completed when he returned to Sullivan, Maine, and began working in local industry. He believes that political trajectory will resonate with other young men.
He has also studiously avoided labeling himself as a progressive, despite embracing popular progressive positions like Medicare for All and an end to support for the genocide in Gaza, which he considers the type of endless war Americans should avoid becoming embroiled in so they can focus on investing back home.
But there are limits to that approach. When asked about the other long-simmering foreign war that the U.S. is funding in Ukraine, he took a different tone. “I support the Ukrainians in their fight. They were invaded. They’re resisting with all the means that they can. And I personally think that we should provide them with support,” he explained. Similarly, he opposes the dismantling of USAID and the withdrawal of American humanitarian and development support around the world. In Platner’s view, those kinds of interventions are made more difficult when Republicans and Democrats alike “have wasted so much money, so much political capital, frankly, so much decency in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global war on terror, and in our support of the Israelis’ continued atrocities in Gaza.” (Disclosure: My spouse was an employee at USAID whose portfolio included managing humanitarian aid to Ukraine.)
He has similarly tried to split the difference on immigration, while pointing to the Trump tactics that have angered ordinary Americans. In a callback to Dan Osborn’s approach in Nebraska, Platner’s platform calls for “strong border security” while sharply opposing mass deportations—“Our government is kidnapping people off the streets and imprisoning them in hellish conditions. This is unconscionable”—and supporting a pathway to citizenship. The combination, Platner claims, is a check on the “multinational corporations” that want “illegal workers with no rights who they can pay slave wages and abuse at will.”
It is unclear whether Platner can continue striking that sort of delicate balance without taking on the baggage that comes with being typecast as a standard liberal or progressive Democrat. But what is clear is that Platner’s theory of politics is fundamentally at odds with an emerging liberal orthodoxy that says Democrats need to focus on building quickly by overriding local controls over development and redistributing wealth on the back end to workers and communities that are left behind.
He pointed to his state’s famed and tightly regulated lobster industry as an example. “The state of Maine has passed laws over the years that have regulated the lobster industry in a very specific way, and it means there’s one boat, one captain, one license. Fishing can only be conducted while the captain is aboard. This has entirely disincentivized consolidation,” he explained. “The result is a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry for the state of Maine that has almost no corporate ownership.”
When presented with the alternative theory—that Maine should instead allow consolidation in its prize industry and redistribute wealth back to workers and their communities through other means—he bluntly dismissed its proponents. “Those people are full of shit,” Platner told the Prospect. “The distribution of resources needs to happen at the level where things are being produced.”