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Maine’s Democratic Senate primary has become one of the most closely watched races of the 2026 midterms, and one of the most contentious within the party itself. Graham Platner, a 41-year-old combat veteran and oyster farmer from a town of 1,000, is leading two-term Gov. Janet Mills by more than 30 points in the most recent poll. That’s despite a rocky October that surfaced offensive Reddit posts from Platner’s past, as well as a chest tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol, which he promptly had covered with a new design. He’s outraised Mills. He’s been endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, Martin Heinrich, and, most recently, Ruben Gallego. And still, he says, no one from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has spoken to him.

I’ve been following Platner’s campaign as a former political reporter who grew up in West Virginia, a rural state where Democrats have lost the ability to win over the course of my lifetime. When I heard that Platner was passing through the Bay Area for meetings and fundraising, I sat down with him for an extended interview for Death, Sex & Money. We talked about a lot: his childhood in rural Maine, his combat service, his struggles with PTSD, why he and his wife traveled to Norway for fertility treatment they couldn’t afford in the U.S. But some of his most striking comments were about how the national Democratic Party has treated his candidacy from the very start, and how he thinks about the political choices Democrats face right now.

We offered the DSCC a chance to comment on Platner’s accusations—he raises serious and controversial charges—but the committee did not respond.

Platner spoke to Death, Sex & Money on Feb. 23, before the U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran. An excerpt of our conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anna Sale: When news came out about your tattoo—the skull-and-crossbones design that resembles Nazi imagery—you said it was fed from people researching your background who wanted to discredit you. Do you understand it to have come from national Democrats?

Graham Platner: We have our suspicions. The governor announced the campaign on a Tuesday and all of the negative stories began to drop Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of that week. You don’t have to do a lot of deep thinking to find connections there.

The national Democratic Party—your party—is, you believe, feeding this information about you. And one of the insinuations is: This guy came out of nowhere, he is untested, he is too risky for this moment, and Maine is a state where a Republican seat could flip. When you think of untested as a word people are trying to connect to you, how does that sit with you?

It’s weird, because they see it as untested within their very specific value structure. But I did four tours in the infantry in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve got decorations for combat service. I left that and struggled for years with the standard outcomes of intense combat service mixed with a total disillusionment and cynicism around the wars that I fought in. Then, with help from the Department of Veterans Affairs, I dug myself out of that hole. I got to return to my hometown and build a whole new life, one that I find very fulfilling, one that I find really grounding, and was able to start a small business, built an oyster farm into a successful commercial operation. In that same time, I became a very active member in my community. Met my wife, Amy. Fell in love, got married.

To me, those are all challenges that I think a lot of regular people can see and identify with. To say that I am “untested” because I haven’t run for this level of political office before, I think, is really indicative of this political system that has evolved separately from the real world. Most Americans understand that just because you grew up in the world of the political establishment, that doesn’t actually mean you’re going to be able to represent—in fact, in some ways, we’re beginning to realize it probably means you’re not going to represent working people and regular people nearly as effectively.

Do you believe that the Democratic Party, the National Democrats, targeted you because they didn’t think you were going to be a good general-election candidate? Or is it because of your politics?

I’ll be honest: It’s worse than that. It’s because we didn’t ask permission. That’s why. And we were told this. We received messages from Washington, from the national-level party, the DSCC. Very early on, before we launched the campaign, we received very clear warnings that I had no right to do this, that they were the ones who choose. They had a candidate they had chosen: Gov. Mills. She had not announced yet but was going to be the candidate. And I had essentially not done my time. I was skipping the line. And they essentially said that if we do this, they’re going to come after me. They’re going to rip my life apart.

Yeah, this was explicit. Not to me directly, but to people close to me on the campaign. And I also reached out. I made it clear that I was very willing to talk to anyone in Washington, to have a conversation, just so they could hear me out. To this day, by the way, all these months later, no one has ever taken me up on that.

You’ve never spoken with Chuck Schumer? 

You’ve never spoken with Kirsten Gillibrand, who heads the DSCC? 

Nope. We’ve never spoken to anybody at the DSCC, period. The only folks I’ve spoken to in Washington are other senators who have been very supportive of what I’ve done, both publicly and behind the scenes.

So it’s not because you’re critiquing oligarchs and billionaires. It’s because you didn’t follow instructions. 

They went after us early on. They didn’t even know about the critique. We hadn’t even launched the campaign yet. There was no policy, there was no public criticism, there was nothing. It was merely that I hadn’t waited my turn. Which I find to be rather insulting. I’m a Democrat. I live in the state of Maine. The Democratic Party is supposed to be democratic, small-d democratic. The whole point of primaries is that candidates put together campaigns, launch them, then give the members of their party and their state the ability to choose who they think is best going to represent them. That’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s a fundamentally undemocratic thing to say and do. It also just seems so weird, because it’s all about showing subservience, or showing that you have some loyalty.

And presuming you know better in Washington. 

Exactly. Don’t get me started. The fact that a bunch of national campaign people in Washington are utterly convinced that they know more about Maine and the Maine electorate than people in Maine, despite the fact that in 2020, they somehow managed to lose the state by 8 points in the Senate race while Joe Biden won it by 8 or 9 points in the presidential race. That kind of goes to show that maybe they don’t know Maine and what they’re up to when it comes to campaigning up there.

Later in our conversation, I asked Platner about how he talks to voters about the cultural issues that have become central to the Democratic Party’s political difficulties, and why he resists the “progressive” label many pundits try to put on him.

Do you think of yourself as a progressive? 

What about being branded as a progressive doesn’t sit right with you as somebody running in a Democratic primary in Maine? 

The things that I’m pushing for—I have friends who are Trump voters who agree with this stuff: breaking up corporate power. Going after tech companies who are using algorithms to fleece us. Ending foreign wars. Ending America’s financial and, frankly, commitment of blood and treasure into these foreign wars. I have multiple friends who are three-time Trump voters who agree with all of this stuff.

And what’s the baggage you don’t want to have?

Honestly, it’s not baggage. We’ve got all these definitions in the media narrative, which frankly do not fit with actual people. I would love it if somebody told friends of mine who voted for Donald Trump three times that they are progressives because they think corporations shouldn’t own the food system. Maybe it’s progressive in the technical sense. In the narrative sense, in the way we use these words, I don’t think there’s any value in it because it doesn’t really reflect actual people’s positions. I think that we have a media narrative and a political narrative that has been built specifically to keep us divided. The more we play into it, the more division we incur.

Something that’s being debated in Maine right now: The Trump administration has said: If you let trans athletes participate in sports, we’re coming after you. Mills, the governor, has said, I will sue you. There’s some Maine press that says that’s hurting her approval rating. How do you talk about that issue—trans athletes—with a Maine voter who’s like, “I don’t get this”?

This whole campaign is funded by a billionaire not from Maine.

The anti-trans campaign in Maine. It’s funded by an out-of-state billionaire to make sure that we have this discussion and we don’t talk about raising his taxes. That’s why it exists. I think there are, like, two trans kids that compete in high school sports in Maine. There are 40,000 Mainers who are going to lose health care because of the lack of the Affordable Care Act extension. One of those things seems very important and real to me. One of them seems like an invented culture-war scare to keep people divided.

So how do you talk to a voter who asks where you stand? 

I was a captain of my high school wrestling team in 2003. I wrestled girls. Nobody cared. There was no uproar. We had girls wrestling in boys wrestling, or vice versa, 20-plus years ago. There was a girl on our high school football team. Nobody cared. I’m sorry—I cannot take it seriously.

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Your response is: You are being manipulated by billionaires by asking me about this instead of asking me about access to rural health care.

Quite literally. The hospitals in rural Maine are closing, actually closing. It’s happening right now. In eastern Maine, we are down to two places where you can give birth. When I was born, there were six. And they’re both owned by the same corporate entity now.

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I’m very clear about my support for the LGBTQ+ community. I’m never going to walk that back. I think we have to find common ground with people. I don’t think that is the same as giving ground. The wins we’ve had toward equality in this country’s history are things that I think we need to maintain and protect. We take no steps back. But that doesn’t mean that for people who don’t agree with us on that, we write them off. We say: This is where I stand, and also, we’re getting robbed by billionaires. And most people are like, Yeah, that actually seems pretty reasonable. One of the reasons I think that the Democratic Party fails so much is that they’ll often say the first part but don’t really want to get into the actual systemic changes necessary to keep working people from getting screwed. So they wind up constantly just engaging in the culture-war fight. The further we get dragged into this stuff, it only serves the people who don’t want us to talk about raising taxes on the rich. It only serves the people who don’t want to talk about a universal health care system. It only serves the people who don’t want us to stop fighting these stupid foreign wars that we get engaged in. They’re the ones that invent this stuff in the first place. I think engaging in it is just playing into their hands.

And when you say finding common ground without giving ground …

You’ve got to meet people where they’re at. If we just immediately start a conversation with telling someone that they’re a bigot and we hate them, like, where do you expect that conversation to go, knowing full well that their material reality is the same as ours? And you have more in common with your neighbor who has the same material reality, even if you disagree on some of these other culture-war issues. We all need the same things, and we are being robbed by the same people in the same system, which is the oligarchy or the billionaire class or the Epstein class or however you want to call it these days. Epstein class, I think, is working pretty good.

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