In a hoarse baritone loud enough to be heard over a squall, oysterman Graham Platner said it. Poverty. The unsayable word.
Naming poverty is unusual for modern American politicians. But naming poverty in Maine, tied with West Virginia for the title of the whitest state in the country (90.1 percent), is downright radical. So it may be the shrewdest part of Platner’s bid to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins that he isn’t beating around that wild blueberry bush. Maine, he said as he announced his candidacy, is now “unlivable for working-class people,” which is “driving our families into poverty.”
Was that so hard?
Evidently, yes.
To understand just what a taboo Platner is breaking it’s crucial to understand that, for at least two decades, both right and left have converged on a dangerous policy of folding all low-income white Americans into a raceless “working class.”
Year after year, our collective inability to see poor people as anything but Black—citing what liberals call white advantages and MAGA calls white superiority—pits the poor (always coded Black) against the working class (coded white).
For Democrats, this rhetorical move may have started as a well-intended effort to focus on racial inequities. For Republicans, it’s stock Southern Strategy. But it amounts to the same thing.
And it has all but broken us. “In America, white people aren’t supposed to be poor. Period,” the Mississippi academic LaToya R. Jefferson-James wrote in 2021. The willful blindness to 66 million poor white Americans has undermined solidarity among the poor of all races by pushing low-income whites to identify more with their race than their economic status. Thus Republicans have been able to starve the poor to feed the rich, all while jacking up white racial grievances. Meanwhile, the left wrings its hands for one more decade over the refusal of the raceless “working class” to vote its interests.
In 2024, a slight majority of white voters in households making under $50,000 a year went for Trump over Kamala Harris by 50 to 48 percent—the first time this indigent population has voted Republican in a presidential election since the 1960s. To spell this out: Poor white voters had chosen Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden but suddenly decided that Harris uniquely didn’t understand them?
I’m increasingly skeptical that racism or sexism explains this. As political scientist Kristoffer Ealy points out, Harris studiously avoided talking about race, stood with unions, and used the phrase “working class” so often that Ealy “started checking her podium for a swear jar.” But that phrase doesn’t capture the plight of poor white people who face hunger and live almost as far from unions as they do from the Ivy League. Though he had nothing materially to offer them, Trump could appeal to the whiteness of the white poor, because the Democratic Party was blind to poor whites and turned instead to their richer relatives—union hardhats.
But there’s another reason, besides winning low-income votes, that Platner is spot on to bring up poverty in Maine. In short, the numbers give no argument. White poverty pervades the state. More than 1,225,220 Mainers live at or below the poverty line. And Maine has the third-highest percentage of poor whites in the nation, after only West Virginia and Kentucky.
When you factor in Maine’s cost of living, the situation becomes even more dire. Some 96,000 full-time Maine workers earn the minimum wage of $14.65 per hour, but a living wage in the state is $23 per hour, and the median cost of a house is a larcenous $419,000 (the national average is $368,000). More than 172,200 Mainers needs SNAP benefits to afford food, and 100,000 Mainers can’t cover energy costs during the state’s frigid winters. Add to this that many Mainers simply don’t have enough to eat. One in five Maine children faces hunger, the highest rate in New England.
These Mainers simply are not over Kamala Harris by 50 to 48 percent working class. After all, that crusty conceit from Marx or Bruce Springsteen points to a livelihood in manual or low-skilled work. But these folks have no meaningful livelihood at all. They’re freelancers and gigworkers, picking up shifts, shampooing hair, running auto-parts deliveries, bathing the elderly, getting paid on Venmo. Many are also without a place to live, at least intermittently, as evictions affect renters in four out of every 100 housing units in Maine.
But, as Platner surely knows, the white poor are also an extremely powerful voting bloc. In fact, William J. Barber II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, the authors of White Poverty (2024), argued last month in Time magazine that they’re now the largest swing vote in the country.
And contrary to the widespread liberal complaint, these voters do know, in increasing numbers, that the Trump administration is strafing their Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and rural hospitals. In 2022, scholars Kristin Lunz Trujillo and Zack Crowley discovered that, while some rural voters had symbolic concerns about their “way of life” or threats from elites, others had material concerns—namely, that their communities needed more resources—and that group voted for Democrats. This may explain why, as Ealy explains, Kamala Harris in 2024 made headway among poor whites in Eastern Kentucky, where voters had gotten sick of the Republican con.
But poor white voters must be engaged. This begins by using unminced words: low-income, unlivable, poverty, homeless. We also need more models of Americans who are neither spoiled heirs nor self-made libertarians, but taxpayers who work hard and also need a hand up to cover food, health, and housing costs. Politicians shouldn’t have to look far. That’s fully 53 percent of us. As a freelancer, I’m in that number, and I’m extremely grateful for Medicaid.
Graham Platner knows this territory, too, as Ana Marie Cox reported for TNR last month. Though he has a small oyster-farming business and pays his wife and his business partner for their labor, he himself doesn’t take a salary from it. As a disabled veteran, he makes ends meet with benefits from the Veterans Administration.
But I don’t think Platner is connecting just because he’s a regular guy and sounds a bit like Bernie. He’s much more imaginative. And, at 40, he’s less than half Bernie’s age. He’s the ideal candidate to introduce the left to Americans in 2025. We’re not union hardhats or neo-Bolsheviks, but stretched gig workers who need help covering costs.
“Piecing it together has always been a part of life, working multiple jobs, seasonal jobs, this is not a new thing for us,” Platner said of Mainers last week. “But in the past few years, it’s really beginning to feel like hard work is not enough.”
It does, indeed, feel like that. Platner may have a long way to go. But for now it’s just good to hear someone say it.
The post Maine’s Graham Platner Has Discovered a Secret: Poor Whites Exist! appeared first on New Republic.
