Bernie Sanders Is Backing Maine's Oysterman Senate Candidate to 'Send a Message'

The progressive senator says he’s backing Graham Platner to show ordinary Americans they can take on the political establishment and win

PORTLAND, Maine — Bernie Sanders drew 6,500 people to southern Maine on Labor Day Monday to discuss building a grassroots movement to fight the oligarchy, and to introduce them to Graham Platner, the oyster farmer and Marine veteran running for Senate with the Vermont independent’s early support.

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“We need to build a movement that clearly represents the material needs of working people in this country,” Platner says. “Until we do that, we’re going to remain divided and split up, and right-wing populism is going to continue to give people easy targets, to give people easy scapegoats. That only works when there is not a positive vision that addresses real, material problems. And so for me, that’s what we need to build. We need to build that positive vision. We can’t just run around telling everybody that we’re against Donald Trump or that we’re against the Republicans. We need to tell people what we are doing, what is the positive vision of the future we are fighting for. And I think if we do that, we can represent most working people in the United States, who I think all have pretty much the exact same material needs.”

Speaking with Rolling Stone, Sanders outlined his efforts to support more candidates across the country, noting he’s supporting Zohran Mamdani for mayor in New York City, Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race, and Troy Jackson for governor in Maine. (Jackson also spoke at the rally.)

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During his speech, Sanders pointed out that the RAND Corporation — “not exactly any socialist organization,” as he put it — this year published a study that found, thanks to rising inequality, there was a $79 trillion transfer of wealth upward from the bottom 90 percent of workers between 1975 and 2023.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bernie-sanders-platner-maine-senate-oyster-oligarchs-1235419765/