In the far north, something is stirring. On a mid-April Saturday evening, a low mist and spitting rain emptied the revamped Portland wharf-side bars and restaurants of their flaneurs, and all of the downtown energy belonged to a gathering crowd in the mass function room of a Holiday Inn. Mainers showed up in rain gear and Celtics jackets and laughed off the dismal night.
Although Portland is a city, it feels like a local town. “Every conference I’ve ever attended in Portland was right here,” said a retiree who accompanied his wife to see Graham Platner, the out-of-the-blue Democratic sensation in Maine’s upcoming Senate race. “We promised our children we’d come to hear this,” he shrugged.
Platner (41) entered politics with no experience, propelled by a mix of audacity and urgency and a vow to upend a system he says has been bought by the billionaire class. He’s an oyster fisherman and a marine veteran who shows up in jeans, checked shirts and his regulation crew cut and beard to tell a compelling story in a voice that sounds like a packet of Marlboro Reds. He is the Northeasterner whom mid-career Ben Affleck was born to play – and Platner’s story has a cinematic appeal.
On Thursday, his Democratic primary opponent Janet Mills, who is the sitting governor of Maine, dropped out when faced with plummeting odds. Recent polls had her trailing Platner by 64 to 24. The fisherman is now favourite to topple Susan Collins, the Republican who has held this Senate seat since 1996. He entered politics less than a year ago.
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In Portland, the crowd was entertained by Gus and Peppin, a superb fiddle/guitar duo with a Cajun-Celtic repertoire from Platner’s bailiwick of eastern Maine. He was introduced by several people, including his wife Amy, and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. Although Warren, the Harvard law professor turned politician, can be sharp, she is a formidable live speaker. She told the crowd of when she first noticed Platner, during one of his debut interviews.
“A question was put to this guy who was about to throw his hat in the ring. And the question was: When did you first realise the system was rigged? And without hesitation he turned to the 2008 crash. Some of you may remember – eight million families lost their homes. Millions of people lost their jobs. Platner, without hesitation, said: ‘When none of the bankers went to jail.’ And I said to myself: ‘That’s my kinda man’.”
That allusion to 2008 resonates in this part of the country. Portland is 100 miles north of Boston, but it feels out there. On the drive up, many of the businesses and restaurants in the resort towns were shuttered, waiting for warmer days. The tollbooth operators were friendly and many of retirement age. According to the Maine Jobs Council, foundational jobs – fishing and forestry – have declined alarmingly over the last 15 years, from 44 per cent to 14 per cent of the jobs market.
Since that 2008 implosion, Maine’s economy has recovered more slowly than any other state in the country, and what new jobs have been created are concentrated in the service sectors. The tax base is shrinking, costs are climbing in tandem with the national economy, and Maine’s young are leaving and the state has the highest percentage of over-65s in the country.
During the post-pandemic fixation with loneliness, a series of reports found Maine ranked first as the loneliest state. In summer, its coastline and wooded interior become an outdoors paradise. In winter, parts of Maine begin to darken before four o’clock. Reports of attendant problems related to winter depression and alcohol and drug addictions make for bleak reading.
Geographically, Maine is, of course, remote: a national afterthought except for the fact that Stephen King, through his books and film adaptations, has placed Maine at the epicentre of American storytelling for the past 40 years. As he wrote in Salem’s Lot: “Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially generation by generation.”
Into this void stepped Platner, from Sullivan, a maritime town of 1,200 not far from the entrance to Acadia National Park. A son of the sea turned US marine, he served multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and grew so disenchanted by the political scene during six months of diplomatic service in Washington that he headed home with the intention of tuning out and getting by for the rest of his days.
Then he was approached by a local consortium to run for Senate. As he cheerfully told Jon Stewart in a podcast that aired this week, his first response was to tell his visitors to “f**k off”.
“I’m 41 years old,” he told the crowd at the Holiday Inn. “I was born in 1984 in Bluehill, back when you could do that. When I was born, there were six places to give birth in eastern Maine. There are two today – both owned by the same corporate entity. We lost our last independent labour and delivery unit last summer when MDI [hospital] closed its doors.
“In my short life I have watched the hard work that Mainers have – a lobster boat in the summer, do some carpentry or plough driveways or do reeds in the winter. And that was enough! That was enough to own your home. That was enough to raise your family, put food on the table, enough to send your kid into a public school, it was enough to even save a little bit for retirement.
“I knew guys who put their kids through college as clam diggers when I was a kid. It’s not enough any more, that hard work, that hardscrabble existence that us Mainers are proud of. Everybody in Maine has at least two jobs. Even if they don’t if you ask enough questions, they’ve monetised the hobby. That hard work ceased to be enough. That person that sterns and ploughs? They got to take an extra shift in Home Depot now.”
People had started applauding in recognition of all this before he had even finished. Platner’s argument is that the prevailing US political system – and its representatives – is a cod, a hoax: “a politics that is a theatre – a performance that elites put on that we get to watch happen but the only people who tend to have access to it are those who tend to have a vast amount of money”.
Over 30 minutes that held the crowd riveted, he preached the success of collective movements in the US, from the suffragette movement to civil rights as proof that a popular movement can smash the influence of the billionaire class and reorient national politics in a way that makes it work for people.
“Women did not get the right to vote in this country because men gave it to them. We didn’t get an eight-hour work day because somebody wrote another postcard to a congressman. The Civil Rights Act didn’t happen because LBJ thought it was a good idea.”
You don’t have to spend long in a room with Platner to get a sense of the authenticity and understated urgency of his message. While he is emerging as an unexpected threat to what had been a safe Republican Senate seat, he is also becoming emblematic of the struggle for rebirth within the Democrats among a grassroots that believes the party has lost its identity.
He announced his candidacy last August with a video campaign that quickly generated attention. Already, a political action group operating for Susan Collins, the Republican senator whom Platner believes he can unseat, have begun pouring millions into campaign adverts against him.
His previous foibles include a tattoo linked to nazism – he has pleaded ignorance and had the ink removed – and old social media posts in which he made light of sexual assault victims. He survived those crises by candidly accepting them and apologising for their stupidity and sought to align ordinary Americans caught up in a struggle against a system designed to keep them divided.
“At the end of the day it doesn’t matter who you voted for: if the hospital closed, the hospital closed,” he continued.
“Or if your community is dying because young people can’t afford a home any more and are leaving. It doesn’t matter. We have a whole political apparatus and a media apparatus that wants us all pointing fingers at each other, left and right, because that keeps us from pointing fingers in the only direction that matters and that is up. We need to understand that we are all being exploited by the exact same people. And it’s not immigrants. It’s not trans kids. It’s billionaires.”
In a curious way, Platner is tapping into the disillusionment and helplessness that Donald Trump sensed and harnessed in his rapid ascension from Republican joke-candidate to two-term president.
But while Trump energised real fears and latent prejudices into a mass movement, Platner’s message revolves around the idea of a popular movement forcing government to work on their behalf. While Trump has succeeded in establishing himself as a magi who can, through force of personality, resurrect the decaying Rust Belt towns and revive a lost age of US prosperity, Platner is wedded to the idea of the collective.
“I think he has recognised something that people have been yearning for a long time – something that Trump identified years ago with his drain the swamp messaging, which is this idea that the government doesn’t represent the people any more,” Raymond O’Connor tells me after the event has ended.
“In my opinion Trump harnessed that energy but has done nothing productive with it. And we are hopeful Graham will do something productive with it.”
O’Connor was there with his wife, Melissa. Their baby Jayden got a shout-out from Elizabeth Warren during her introduction. The couple live near Scarborough, about 15 minutes from Portland. They met at Northeastern University in Boston.
“We feel we did everything we were supposed to do,” he says. “We went to college – I’m a software engineer – the most practical degree you could have gone to school for ten years ago.”
Melissa works as a behavioural analyst, specialising in the needs of autistic children. “We have some different top concerns between the two of us, but the shared one is affordability to raise a family,” she says.
“We went to college at an amazing university and both have really good jobs. And we never thought that we would be in a position where money would limit us from having as many kids as we wanted. And it’s been sad but that is now our reality. Just with the cost of childcare, groceries, gas, housing ... I think that is our top concern. It is no longer affordable to raise a family and that was our biggest dream to have as many kids as ...”
They are at pains to acknowledge that they are, through their professions, comparatively privileged. But the economic squeeze and uncertainty they feel runs deep. The number of young people in the room was striking.
Even before Janet Mills officially conceded on Thursday, new adverts paid for by a political action committee aligned with Susan Collins began to air. Now, they will intensify. Mills’s concession marked the beginning of a new campaign, and battle, and also a tacit acknowledgment of the phenomenal impact Platner has made across Maine.
In his conversation with Platner this week, Jon Stewart noted that there was a cinematic archetype to all of this, referencing the Frank Capra classic Mr. Smith Goes To Washington in which Jimmy Stewart plays a naive everyman who ends up in the Senate and takes on the system. It’s clear from listening that Stewart was smitten, and convinced, by what he heard over the hour. There’s a guilelessness to Platner that is rare in politics.
Earlier this week, he and his wife Amy revealed they had recently gone through a miscarriage: the couple had spoken of their infertility struggles and their decision to pursue an IVF programme in Norway. It cost $5,000, rather than $25,000 in New England. They asked for a period of “grace while we grieve”.
But on Thursday, shortly after Janet Mills bowed out, Graham Platner issued a short tribute to his former opponent and vowed to win the Senate seat.
“They [billionaires] took so much they began to think we didn’t even exist at all,” he said. “They don’t know Maine. They don’t know the power we have here. We’re taking back what’s ours.”
