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Veteran, oysterman, and first-time political candidate Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate campaign against Maine Republican Susan Collins kicked off last week to an impressively strong reception. His launch video has racked up millions of views across social media platforms. He has embarked on a media blitz that has run the gamut from independent progressive media outlets to bookings on CNN, and his campaign has boasted recruiting over 300 new volunteers a day since his announcement. He plans to further capitalize on that momentum with a Labor Day rally with Bernie Sanders in Portland.
In an interview with the Prospect, Platner argued that the energy around his candidacy is the latest indicator of a growing hunger for new approaches from a Democratic coalition that is stuck in the wilderness after being routed by Trump last November. “Working-class people in this country feel like they’re not being represented … both by policy and by the structure of our system,” he said. “The only way we’re going to get that is by sending up fighters from the working class who are willing to fight for the working class. And I’m getting the feeling from the response to our announcement that I was not the only one who felt that way.”
Platner joins a growing wave of populist Senate candidates who are challenging modern understandings of political labels by forefronting anti-establishment, anti-corporate, and distinctly localist politics and policies. Fellow travelers include Dan Osborn, running for Senate against Pete Ricketts in Nebraska, whose insurgent independent bid against Ricketts’s Republican colleague Deb Fischer last year saw him overperform Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by 14 points overall and by more in ultra-red rural areas across the state, and Nathan Sage, who is mounting a Senate bid for the Democratic nomination in Iowa on a similar platform.
Each candidate has taken a slightly different approach to threading the needle in their appeals to liberals, conservatives, and disaffected nonideological voters who loathe the establishment class of both parties. But all have emphasized the need to revitalize small local businesses and labor unions, rein in the power of big corporations through strong antitrust enforcement, and implement aggressive new taxes on the wealthy to fund stronger social benefits. Their strategy echoes the approach of the Greenback, Granger, and Progressive movements that rose to prominence and remade the politics of both parties during the first Gilded Age, in response to the extreme concentration of resources and power that defined the late 19th century.
According to Platner, America has entered a new gilded age and needs a politics that can meet the moment. “I think the comparisons between the late 19th century and now are apt: vast amounts of wealth and regulatory structures that in no way, shape, or form keep that wealth in check,” he told the Prospect, pointing to the power people like Elon Musk and other prominent Silicon Valley leaders have over the current administration and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party establishment. “Part of what this candidacy is is a reaction to that.”
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