Graham Platner Is the Real Deal

The Maine oyster farmer embodies the populist energy that Americans have been looking for. He’s the best candidate to defeat Republican Senator Susan Collins.

Aaron Regunberg
August 26, 2025

"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, and the politicians who sell us out.”

Graham Platner delivers these lines in the video announcing his out-of-nowhere campaign against Maine’s Republican senator, Susan Collins. In the viral clip, Platner is leaning casually against the wheel of a small boat. He’s wearing a stained sweatshirt, but without any of the Fetterman affect—this is a working oysterman in his normal attire. He’s got a gravelly voice, a bristly beard, and ruggedly casual charisma. But beyond the working-class aesthetic, it’s this line in particular—“I’m not afraid to name an enemy”—that I think explains his magnetic draw. Americans understand that the system is rigged, and we’re hungry for candidates with the guts and honesty to call out the villains causing our pain.

In his launch video—which has already racked up 4 million views on X—as well as every other statement he’s made over the last week, there is no trace of the anodyne consultant-speak that has become so synonymous with Democratic politicians. Platner does not blandly talk about an “opportunity economy”—he growls that “the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians.” He doesn’t try to rise above the fray—he says outright that watching his state “become essentially unlivable for working people” makes him “deeply angry.”

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This approach would be a different challenge for Collins than the Democratic campaigns she has bested in the past. In 2020, the DC establishment coronated former House speaker Sara Gideon as Maine’s Democratic nominee for the US Senate. Gideon—a transplant who hailed from southern Maine, the wealthier part of the state—did not associate herself with any memorable policy commitments or plans. She ran as a moderate who could get things (unclear what things) done by working across the aisle. She raised a jaw-dropping $69 million. And she lost by nearly nine points.
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