Graham Platner’s Plan to Dethrone Susan Collins — and the Establishment

Graham Platner, the leading Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine, was supposed to participate in a debate with his chief rival, Janet Mills, last week. Mills was the party establishment’s favorite — she’s the state’s governor and was the pick of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Platner is the guy who seemingly came out of nowhere — a progressive 41-year-old military vet and oyster farmer pitching a working-class revolution.

The pitch really, really worked, at least with Maine’s Democratic base and with donors in-state and out, and before the debate could even happen, Mills dropped out. That makes Platner, who has never held elected office and has been a source of anxiety and debate among some in the party, the presumptive nominee, now running against the state’s longtime and heretofore unbeatable Republican senator, Susan Collins.

Democrats are now pinning their hopes on “a random guy,” as Platner self-deprecatingly called himself in our interview, to help win back the Senate in November. But Platner’s been dogged by controversy in his short time in the national spotlight, starting with the revelation of a tattoo on his chest that’s widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, and then with media reporting on his past offensive social media posts. So is he ready for prime time? I sat down with him to find out.

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The test right now is if you can run in a general election. There have already been quite a few controversies, and we’re going to talk about that later. But the G.O.P. is going to dig up everything and more that they can. And probably lie at some point.

Is there something new you want to get ahead of? No. I have lived my life. I’ve been there for the whole thing. I know what I’ve been through. I know what my behavior has been. After they dropped the opposition research stuff on us, it was always like, Oh, there’s more coming. And I was like, I don’t know what this “more” is going to be. Oh, they’re going to dig up everything in your life and everything you’ve ever done. I get that, but I’ve been through my life and I’m certainly an imperfect person and I certainly went through my struggles, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. But I also know that I’ve never been close to money, I’ve never been close to power. I don’t think anything I’ve ever done has been outside the realm of what people do when they struggle.

Yours is one of the very few races that could help to flip the Senate into Democratic control. As you know, the Democrats are extremely anxious about wresting some control back in their favor. For good reason.

I’ve had Democrats tell me that the fate of the country is in the hands of you and a few other people now. How do you feel about that? I don’t engage with it emotionally because it’s way too much. This whole experience has been just one intensely surreal thing after another. My wife and I went from one day living a very small, simple life to, literally within days, having this whole thing upend our entire existence.

Because you were recruited? Yep, somebody saw a video of me talking about fighting a Norwegian salmon farm in our area and they were like, That guy seems well spoken, maybe we should go talk to him. And they came to my house and said that we should run for U.S. Senate. My wife and I were like, That’s the most insane thing we’ve ever heard, please get out of our house. Then they came back a few days later with more of a fleshed-out plan, and at that point we’re like, Oh, my god, it’s still insane but there’s something to it.

We’ve spent a long time being very engaged politically at the local level. And I think both of us are deeply committed to building a significantly better future. This was an opportunity to do something about it on a scale that is, frankly, just hard to comprehend. I still live in Sullivan, Maine, in my small house and across the street from the boat launch. My business partner is still in the yard this week getting the boats ready. So it’s a strange disconnect.

You’ve been running as this anti-establishment candidate. But now there’s the Democratic Party’s money and their organizing power to win this campaign. Do you think that hurts your message of being an outsider? No, I think it’s very clear to everyone just how not the establishment candidate I am. Without question, the Democratic Party wants to retake the Senate more than anything else, and almost no map that has a Democratic Senate does not include flipping the state of Maine. So they’re going to come and help us out. The thing that’s important to know is we welcome their support with the money, but we’re not going to take direction or advice on what we’re doing because what we’ve built is ours. A lot of people who were supposed to be really, really good at politics, who were the experts, said that all this was entirely impossible. And we didn’t just prove them wrong, but we did so in a rather spectacular fashion. We’re just going to keep doing that.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had not reached out to you until Janet Mills dropped out. You’ve had a conversation with him recently. Did you say, Hey, bud, stay out of my business? No. The conversation was short, we did not get into details. He said congratulations. I said thank you very much. He said the priority is to beat Collins. I said that’s my priority, too. And however we can work together to do it effectively, that’s what I want.

I’ve watched you on the campaign trail, and one of your main messages — not to put too fine a point on it — is F the establishment. Yeah.

Do you think Schumer should be replaced as leader then? My criticisms remain exactly the same as they were [before Mills dropped out]. Leadership in the Democratic Party has failed the moment. I don’t think Senator Schumer has risen to the occasion, and I think we need new leadership in the party, without question.

You’re pitching yourself as a working-class man. You’re a firearms instructor, a gun owner. In your campaign launch video, you’re wearing a dirty hoodie, you’re shucking oysters, you’re swinging a kettlebell, you’re chopping wood. One of the things that I have heard debated quite a bit about you are your working-class roots. Ah, yes.

You grew up in a small town, didn’t graduate college, became a bartender. But also your father was an attorney, your grandfather was a Cornell-educated architect, quite well known. How do you think about class? Is working-class how you grew up or how you live now? I work with my hands. I don’t make a lot of money. My wife and I work incredibly hard and we probably make, like, $60,000 a year combined. We don’t have money left over. We’re not saving for retirement. I was lucky. I got to buy my house in 2017, and I could not afford my house today. My house has gone up almost three times in value.

Do you have family money? My father gave me the mortgage, except, of course, because he’s my dad and he’s an attorney, he gave me a significantly higher interest rate than the bank would have. I could have used a V.A. home loan if I had wanted to, but at that point it was just easier to do it that way. But I could never get that today because I couldn’t afford the monthly mortgage if it was three times what it is. My income hasn’t gone up three times.

My wife and I recognize the life we’ve been able to build has come from a lot of luck. But on top of that is also my V.A. health care and my V.A. pension. That’s the baseline that allows all this to happen. If it wasn’t for the V.A. health care, I wouldn’t have had the freedom to start a business, to move back to my hometown. I moved back to Maine in 2016 from D.C. and I was broke broke. I was living at my mom’s house because I had spent a number of years very depressed after my combat service.

But you know, in this day and age, you are working class if you make your money from work and wages. The world of wealth disparity has become so intense that there are just so many people now who are sitting on so much money who do not work. They make money off their investments. They make money off their wealth. I know it’s an expansive definition of “working class,” but I think you need to have an expansive definition when we have the most expansive margin of wealth inequality in the history of the country. In the state of Maine, almost everybody’s working class. Everybody works, everybody struggles. If the hospital closes and that really impacts you, you’re probably a working-class person.

On the one hand, it makes political sense to say the working class is this very expansive group of anyone who gets a W-2 and has to pay taxes off a salary, which is different than if you’re making it off your investments. But I know people who consider themselves working class who grew up with a lot of struggle. And that definition probably feels to them too expansive. I spend a lot of time around labor unions, around community groups. These days everybody seems to subscribe to the same definition. I get a chuckle out of the fact that a lot of folks in this political system who come from incredible amounts of privilege and wealth are the first ones to be like, Are you really working class? You’re just out there not making a lot of money and working on the ocean, but your dad was a small-town attorney. Does that mean that you can’t actually represent working people? I honestly think it’s a tool. It’s a political weapon that throughout history has been deployed against people whose primary political goal is to improve the lives of working folks around them, to call into question their bona fides.

Well, I’m asking because I’m interested in hearing how you describe yourself. Just to understand how you tell your own story and also how you view what your coalition is. I don’t mean you. But I think that’s why we’re winning by spectacular margins, because in a state like Maine, everybody’s like, That makes perfect sense. We all do feel very much that we’re suffering the same way.

So after high school you joined the Marines, at 19. You went to Iraq in 2005. We were there at the same time. I covered Iraq from 2002, before the invasion, to 2010. Why did you want to serve? Because you were antiwar. You were out protesting the conflict. I just saw this post about you —— I got dragged out of a Bush rally in 2002.

Yeah, so it’s a strange thing to sign up. Everybody says that, but it never was for me. I wanted to be a soldier since I was about 2. I was singing “The Marines’ Hymn.” I was 4 or 5 when I first memorized it. I don’t know why that is. But I always had an attraction to service, and also adventure. In our society, we sell militarism and war in this very romantic fashion about adventure and excitement. Then — and you can probably understand this, too — there is this weird attraction when everyone tells you that the only way you could ever experience it is to be there. That it’s so unique that you could never get it unless you had seen it. I grew up reading military history books, and I was into Civil War re-enacting. In high school I became pretty critical of certain elements of American foreign policy. Certainly when the war in Iraq was kicking off, I was like, This seems like a deeply stupid idea.

There’s an image of you in high school holding up a sign saying “Free Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Kyrgyzstan and Tibet.” I got really into Irish politics when I was in high school, which introduced me to national liberation struggles and seeing the world through that lens. At the same time, though, I was still a young man in the United States and I was very patriotic. I met a lot of guys in the Marine Corps that thought the war was dumb. The attraction is more to the camaraderie and the whole infantry combat unit thing. I don’t have many friends in the Marine Corps who, when we were serving, said, “I’m definitely here to fight for George Bush.” You’re there because you were a young, angsty man and you wanted to go have an adventure and you wanted to fight.

You’ve been diagnosed with PTSD; you’ve talked about that. I was also diagnosed with PTSD, and for me, I can remember exactly what happened that caused the cascade. What was it for you? It was 2006, and it wasn’t a specific moment. [Pauses] That’s not actually true. [Expletive.] [Tears up]

I’m sorry. That’s OK. In 2005, my vehicle got hit by an I.E.D. outside a place called Karma, north of Fallujah. It was myself and my best friend that were in the back of the truck. Another Marine was driving. And we drove over an I.E.D. and blew the truck up. We all got knocked unconscious. I come to and the whole front of the truck is ripped off. I thought we had engine trouble. I was all discombobulated. I ran around to the back of the truck, and there’s my friend. He’s alive, but a piece of shrapnel has come up under his helmet and ripped a lot of his head off. I’m 20 and this guy’s my best friend. We went to infantry school together, we came to the fleet together, we were thick as thieves. I was a combat lifesaver, so I got this training. But they never told me what to do when you’re looking at brains. And I remember standing there being like, I don’t know what the [expletive] to do. This is my best friend and I’m supposed to save him, but I have no idea how to even do that. And then luckily this guy, Doc Huey, spectacular Navy corpsman, comes running up and starts immediately going to work and saves his life. And he survives. But I was, of course, distraught because he was my best friend and I’m a kid.

It’s scary. It’s very scary, and then we also came under fire. All this is happening, and there’s also a gunfight going on. So then I’ve got to go get in the gunfight for a while, and we get the vehicle back, we drop him off at the medical station, and then I’m in the back of the truck just cleaning the blood out, mopping it up, and I just remember there was a moment when they were like, Well, we’ve got to go back on patrol in three hours, and you’re just like, Yep. … So there was a hardening at that point for me. You don’t get to engage with this, because if you do, you’re going to be worthless, and you can’t be worthless out here. The whole point of this is to be effective at your job. Frankly, I saw worse things after that. There was much more horrific violence. I saw people in far worse physical shape, far more death, awful stuff. I realize looking back on it now, that was the first time it happened to me.

We got back from that deployment and we all drink a lot, we all party a lot. High-risk behavior is pretty standard for young Marines. But when I got back from my Ramadi deployment in ’06, in between my second and third deployments, that was when I know that I was absolutely self-medicating and drinking heavily, really not wanting to engage with feelings and emotions, becoming very emotionally distant. I had a girlfriend. That relationship totally fell apart because I was just a wreck of a human being. Sadly that remained the case for a while, not being a very emotionally connected human being. It all starts back then.

You end up serving quite a few more tours, and then in 2018 you go as a military contractor to Afghanistan. How had your views at that point evolved? When I went back in 2018, I didn’t believe in any of it. I went in 2018 because I was broke and lost and I had no idea what to do with myself and my skills. All I’d ever really done was carry guns for a living. A friend of mine was just like: Hey, man, I’m on a contract in Kabul. We don’t do anything, all we do is lift weights. So I went over for six months, and at that point, whatever disillusionment there was became something much deeper. We’re out there dropping bombs on people’s houses. There are special operations units kicking in people’s doors in the middle of the night. All the violence is still happening and nobody has an inkling of what to do or what we’re even attempting to do. And so I quit, moved back to Sullivan, bought a 19-foot Seaway skiff, started farming oysters. I wanted to get as far away from all of it as humanly possible.

When you look back, do you feel angry that you were part of that violence? Regret? I have a complicated relationship with it, because I am still proud of being a Marine. I am very proud of my service and the service of the guys that fought next to me. We tried our best, we truly did. But it doesn’t matter if you try your best inside of a flawed policy and a flawed system. It’s flawed from the top down. It’s bound to fail, it’s bound to bring an immense amount of violence upon people who in no way, shape or form are deserving of it. We destroyed Iraq and we destroyed Afghanistan, and all the suffering, all the killing, all the dying, all the displacement — we, the United States, did that. And that I’m ashamed of.

The anger that I feel is for the people that sent me, who are frankly still the same people who are sending people off right now to be in harm’s way so we can have this stupid war with Iran. Susan Collins voted to send me to Iraq, and she’s also there to help Donald Trump continue this absolutely insane conflict in the Strait of Hormuz. If I have any anger, it is reserved for the political system itself and the people in it who view war not as a thing that has a human toll but as a political game.

I want to come back to something else that happened during your time in the Middle East: You got a tattoo in Croatia when you were serving, and it resembles Nazi insignia. It’s a skull and crossbones. I got a skull and crossbones with a bunch of other Marines in a tattoo parlor in Croatia because skull and crossbones are things that Marines get. I had it for 17 years. I took my shirt off. I was out in public. I took pictures with it. I went through two security clearances where I got screened for gang and hate tattoos and it never once came up on a screening. Until after the campaign started, and then the establishment candidate got in the race, and suddenly they drop all this opposition research, and part of it is that Graham Platner has this tattoo with white-supremacist ties or Nazi ties. At that point I took a look at the thing and I’m like, Well, I don’t want something that has that kind of connotation on my body, so I promptly got it covered up.

Did other people get the same tattoo? Yeah. Other guys in my unit.

You say it’s opposition research, and that may well be true, but ultimately it is hard for voters to know why you got it. That doesn’t seem to be the case for people in Maine. I’ve talked about this ad nauseam.

Have you made outreach to Jewish voters, and how have they responded? Half of my family is Jewish. In fact, the video in which the tattoo is displayed, which was the video that was shared, was at my brother’s wedding to my Jewish sister-in-law with her whole extended Jewish family where I was taking my shirt off and dancing. If I had thought I had something that was this obvious antisemitic thing, I would not have done that, because that would be utterly insane. We have a lot of close supporters who are in the Jewish community in Maine, primarily because I’ve been close with people in the Jewish community in Maine my entire life.

There are controversial statements also on social media. You posted over 1,800 comments under the username P-Hustle from 2009 to November 2021. And some of them are objectively concerning. You said that rural Mainers are racist and stupid. You said that sexual assault victims should take responsibility for themselves. This all came out in the national press. Why didn’t you disclose this stuff first? Oh, we did. We released all of the comments. When people came to us, they’re like, We’ve got a couple little ones. And we were like, There’s a lot more than a couple. So we just put everything out there.

You did delete them, though, before the campaign launched. I deleted them a while ago. I haven’t used Reddit, I think, since 2021. I’ll be honest, I don’t actually know when I did delete everything.

It wasn’t because you were going to run? No, no, no. I stopped using the internet because I got happy. I sat on the internet for a number of years getting in fights, in the parlance of the times, shit-posting, trying to get a rise out of people, trying to get in arguments because it brought me some form of serotonin boost. Truthfully I was really, really isolated and alone. Very angry. A lot of the worst comments come from the years where I was at my absolute worst, which really is between 2012 and 2017, 2018. I was in a pretty dark place.

I just want to clarify. Can you walk me through the timeline again? You decided you were going to run. Did you worry about those old comments immediately? When exactly did you delete them? When did you decide to release the others? Well, we just put everything out right after we got contacted by CNN, which I think was the first outlet that reached out to us. They’d found some, and we were like, There are more. I’m an elder millennial. I grew up on the internet. I am well aware that everything you post on the internet is there forever. It’s not a thing I don’t know.

So you deleted them like in 2021, 2022? I’ll be honest, I don’t know.

But well before you were considering running for office? Yeah, I’m trying to think. I deleted my Reddit profile because I just stopped using Reddit. But I don’t know, actually, when I did that, because I hadn’t used Reddit since I think ’21. So somewhere in those five years between 2021 and 2026.

You wrote in 2018 about armed resistance to fascism. You said, “An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.” How do you think about that now? As a student of history, it is difficult for me to not see elements of that as being a reality, especially in resistance to fascism. We didn’t beat the Nazis with smiles. We beat them with war. I don’t think it’s a very controversial statement.

In the context of political violence, some might see it as worrying. Well, to be fair, I was talking about it as a private citizen with no visibility, and mostly just talking about what I thought was a very clear historical reality. Again, historically, fascism has been beaten with armed resistance and conflict.

Do you think there needs to be armed resistance in this country? Good lord, no. Violence has absolutely no place. And I don’t think it moves us any closer to a better or freer society. That’s what the organizing is for. I think one of the reasons we actually see an explosion of political violence today is because we do not have more effective outlets. There are people who want to see change. Especially for folks who are either ideologically or just mentally more attracted to using violence, when there is no other outlet, when there is no healthy place to put that energy, I do think you see an explosion of violence, which is what we’re seeing right now.

In 2017, my mom and I went down to the Women’s March in D.C. I remember going there and being like, Oh, my god, look at all these people. We’re clearly going to resist. We’re going to fight back.

The pussy hats. Nothing happened! Because it was just mobilization. Mobilization’s a tactic. Turning people out into the streets, protests, that’s part of it. But it needs to be deeper. I think one of the problems is that we haven’t had that in quite some time, outside of the labor movement and the civil rights groups — they’ve kept the flame alive. But right now, that’s the work we need to be doing, tying into those skills and those legacies of organizing, expanding them to everybody else, to give a lot of people who are feeling hopeless and angry a place to come in and a place to put that frustration, that anger, to positive use, working with their neighbors, building trust, building relationships at the community level. That is the only way we’re going to effectively resist the Trump administration, but also the only way we’re going to effectively build power, rebuild the American political system to be more representative of the average American.

The way you’ve discussed this is “revolutionary.” You have talked about wanting to completely break the system as it works now. We need a political revolution in this country. Bernie said it in 2016. It was right then, it remains right today. Whether it’s money, whether it is the way our democratic systems have been subsumed by corporate power, we need to change the structures of how this thing works.

I want to talk about your plans if you are elected. It is very hard to get things done in the Senate. You’ve talked about Bernie Sanders a lot. He’s someone who has moved the party on ideology but not necessarily on legislation. You’ve exhorted voters in the past to elect people who want to wield power. I just wonder what that means. What is the philosophy of Graham Platner? The philosophy is that we don’t have things that most of the American people want, like universal health care, like a foreign policy that isn’t just based around militarism. We don’t have them not because we don’t know what they are and not because we haven’t been able to define or even write policy around them. In the Senate, what we need is more numbers. We need more people who are willing to vote for things like universal health care.

There’s been a frustrating relationship with a lot of the pundit class over the course of this campaign, which is always like, We haven’t been able to get Medicare for All, so why do you think we can get it now? Well, we’re definitely never going to get it if we elect people who don’t want to get it! That seems fairly obvious to me. I think we need to look at the United States Senate as a place where we have to engage in a power-building process, which is going to be electing more people who want to advocate, vote for and elevate the conversation around these things. I kind of agree with you on Bernie. Bernie has been able to change the narrative and change ideology, but hasn’t been able to move votes. That’s because he’s one vote. We need to add to that. We need more.

One of the critiques of Democrats has always been that they’re weak. And that’s from Democrats! Democrats are always complaining that Democrats lose their way, that they get power, they don’t exercise it in the way that they should, etc. I saw that you want to impeach members of the Supreme Court. Is that what you mean by wielding power? Taking action that’s concrete, aggressive? Absolutely. And by the way, this is not just my opinion. Any accurate reading of American history shows that this is the case. I’m going to use the example of F.D.R. F.D.R. implements a bunch of New Deal programs. The Supreme Court says a lot of these might be unconstitutional. We’re going to rule that they’re unconstitutional, and we’re going to shut down the New Deal programs and progress. Then F.D.R. — much to the chagrin of his own party, I may add — threatens to pack the court. Suddenly, overnight, no change to the words in the policies, everything became constitutional.

Power is more than just the words on the page. Power is something that needs to be used when you have it. When you look at American history, when you look at moments in which the nation was in crisis and when large programs were necessary, when things needed to be protected or when new things needed to be built, it wasn’t enough to simply stay within the norms of the institutions as they had been built recently. You had to create new forms of power. You had to use them. I would say in the recent past, the Democratic Party has not had a theory of power.

The Republicans certainly have. Which is why we have lost. While Republicans, and I would say corporate conservatism, has very much developed a theory of power over the past 40-odd years, the Democratic Party developed a theory of management, and that is not sufficient.

Last few questions. I was thinking about your PTSD, and about your time in D.C., and how you discussed it being difficult and you being unhappy. I’ve also thought a lot about John Fetterman. When I interviewed him, he talked about his mental health struggles that were brought on by the stroke. He talked about how lonely he was in D.C. You are an oyster farmer. You partly healed by being out on the sea in Maine. Do you think this time will be different? Of course. I’d done no healing back then. I hadn’t gone through any of the process. I came back and went straight to college in Washington and had done no therapy. I was on my own in many ways and isolated. Hence why I was deeply unhappy then. Now I’m going back down there with not just an array of tools because of years of therapy and years of dealing with stuff, but also a community of people who love me deeply and who I love deeply.

I’ve also spent a lot of time recently developing relationships with sitting senators, relationships that I hope will go far beyond just the professional. I want to be a functioning part of the Senate. I’m not going just to be a pain in everyone’s ass — which, no offense to the senator from Pennsylvania, but that does seem to be his primary goal these days. I want to go and create relationships and create a better future for Americans and for the people of Maine. And, yeah, I’m a different person now because of the time that I’ve spent, the work that I’ve done, the tools that I have. I think it’s going to be incredibly different.

I saw this thing in The Bulwark that argued you have a chance to be the Democratic nominee for president in 2028. I think it’s indicative of people looking for a savior and radical change. I’m definitely not a savior.

Who do you want to lead the party? Or who don’t you want to lead the party? Who I don’t want are many of the people that have been doing it for years. People close with corporate power, people who waffle on positions often. People are sick and tired of that. I think people are happy to disagree with you as long as they know that you’re being straight with them.

So who is that? Is that Gov. Gavin Newsom? I very much like Ro Khanna. I think he’s done an excellent job, and I’ve heard his name bandied around a bunch on this topic. Much like myself, I think he has a connection to the past and understanding that New Deal-era programs are going to be necessary to meet the challenges of the moment and the future. He is interested in long-term industrial policy, which I am as well. It’s something this nation really needs to get back to doing.

But I also wouldn’t be surprised if the person we see in 2028 we haven’t even started talking about yet. People are looking for radical change, and I don’t know where exactly that’s going to come from. I’m relatively convinced that we’re going to be talking about names next year and the year after in relation to the 2028 presidential race that just aren’t even on the radar. I think we’re in for a generational shift in American politics, and it’s coming quickly.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.