Mother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty; Courtesy of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign
Graham Platner, a 40-year-old oyster farmer from Sullivan, Maine (pop. 1,219), announced a bid for the seat of incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins on Tuesday.
A Marine and Army veteran who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Platner says he’s running his Democratic campaign on a message of economic populism. His goal, he says, is to “claw back wealth that was created by the labor and the consumption of working class Americans who have not shared in the riches they helped build.”
“The working class abandoned the Democratic Party, primarily because the Democratic Party abandoned the working class.”
To accomplish his mission, he will first have to win the party’s primary against at least two candidates: Democrats who have already announced their campaigns include Jordan Wood, the former chief of staff to then-Rep. Katie Porter, and David Costello, a former USAID worker who ran against Maine Independent Sen. Angus King in 2024. Maine Governor Janet Mills, who is term-limited in her current role, has also been floated as a strong possible Democratic contender should she decide to run.
If he wins the Democratic primary, Platner would likely face an even greater challenge: Collins, the only GOP senator up for reelection from a state won by Kamala Harris in 2024. In a markedly polarized Congress, Collins is one of just a handful of senators on either side who have dared to (on occasion) buck her party. She’s one of just three Republican senators, for example, who rejected Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
But her nay vote didn’t the stop the legislation, which 58 percent of Maine residents opposed; it merely required Vice President JD Vance make a quick trip to the Capitol to break the tie. In a state Trump lost by nearly 7 points in 2024, Democrats see an opportunity in Collins’ declining approval rating to oust a GOP senator making only the faintest show of resistance against Trump’s controversial agenda. By contrast, ousting Collins could tip the Senate majority towards Democrats, which would help the party neutralize Trump moving forward.
In announcing his upstart bid, Platner is betting his broad embrace of the working class—and how he defines that group—could be the key to replacing her.
“When I talk about the American working class, I talk about the people who work, who labor and struggle, and have and build families, and cannot access the wealth that this country has,” Platner says in an interview. “Someone who’s making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year is far, far, closer to someone who makes below the poverty line than they are to the rich.”
In other words, reader, he most likely means you. He also means himself.
Platner has never run for office and seldom wears a suit. His closest connection to Congress before his campaign was serving glasses of Jameson to the late-Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) while working a brief stint at the beloved DC dive bar, Tune Inn. More recently, he spends the vast majority of his days on—or in—the Atlantic Ocean, running Waukeag Neck Oyster Company from the town he grew up in.
By his telling, his oyster farm is not making bank: “I don’t make a lot of money,” he says. But he still counts himself lucky. After his military career ended, he said he found it difficult to make ends meet. It wasn’t until several years later that disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs afforded him the financial breathing room to seek out a living he’d actually enjoy. “I didn’t have to go get a job just to get health insurance. I could find something that I might really love, and I could take a risk of starting a business,” he tells me.
Many Americans don’t have that luxury. Instead, they are often stuck working multiple jobs, or at least unfulfilling ones, that still don’t earn them enough to buy a house or comfortably afford basics like health care and groceries. Republicans, he says, obliterated Democrats in 2024 because they acknowledged these common adversities.
“Everybody down here knows that the system is screwing them,” he says. “The one thing the Republicans and, more importantly, I would say, Donald Trump, did, is they told people that they were right. They told people that they were getting screwed, that the system wasn’t helping them.”
Where Trump and other Republicans erred, Platner says, is by not pinning the blame on the billionaires and massive corporations with immense political pull that reap the largest rewards from the government.
Instead, Republicans “blamed minorities, immigrants, groups of people who live lives that are frankly, just as, if not more, full of suffering and pain than the rest of the American working class,” Platner says. “But at least they blamed somebody.”
He argues that addressing the woes of average Americans doesn’t mean abandoning the most marginalized groups; it just means listening to the concerns of all the other working-class Americans who are suffering too.
“The working class abandoned the Democratic Party, primarily because the Democratic Party abandoned the working class,” says Platner. “And if we are going to move things forward, we need to fix that.”
