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I’m a Maine Reporter Who Went to High School With Graham Platner

Here’s what explains his success.

In 2002, my classmate Graham Platner ran for student-body president of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. I remember watching him in our auditorium debate his fellow candidates. He was the radical, wearing a revolutionary proletarian costume: overalls and a red armband. (When I asked him about this recently, he told me he thought he had a history presentation to give that day.) I don’t recall the issues they discussed, but I do remember Platner proposing collective action to overturn some school policy—saying something along the lines of “They can’t suspend us all.” The history teacher serving as moderator interjected to remind Platner and everyone else that, yes, in fact, they could.

Students elected the safe candidate, a future chiropractor. But Platner had other outlets for his energy and ideas. Around that time, he skipped school to protest the coming Iraq war when President George W. Bush visited our local airport—and was forcibly removed by the Secret Service. In the high school yearbook, our class voted him “most likely to start a revolution.”

Nearly a quarter century later, Platner, now 41, is not just the probable Democratic nominee for the US Senate seat held by Republican Susan Collins; he’s arguably the most remarkable political story anywhere in the country: a former US Marine and oyster farmer who, school elections aside, had never previously run for office. Platner’s viral August campaign launch once seemed destined to be a short-lived novelty. Not long after he announced his candidacy, Janet Mills, Maine’s two-term governor and a savvy politician who has been winning elections since before Platner was born, threw her hat in the ring. And Platner soon faced a succession of controversies. It turned out he’d spent years as a prolific Reddit poster, leaving behind a trail of comments—he called himself a “communist“ in 2021; agreed in 2020 that “all cops” were bastards; used a homophobic slur in 2018; and, in 2013, argued that women shouldn’t get blackout drunk if they were worried about sexual assault—that didn’t exactly scream “electable.” Shortly after those revelations, Maine voters also learned he had a Nazi-linked tattoo.

The national media, which had previously hailed him as a new kind of rugged, populist Democrat, quickly buried him. But in Maine, Platner kept campaigning, and voters kept listening. Today, he is the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination. One recent independent poll found him leading Mills by 27 points.

What in the world is going on here? On the surface, Platner vs. Mills is just the latest chapter in the populist-left vs. establishment-center struggle that has been roiling the Democratic Party since Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders faced off in 2016. And the race certainly is that: Platner has been endorsed by Sanders and US Senator Elizabeth Warren; Mills is backed by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

But over the past few months, as I attended events and interviewed more than 50 people—former and current state officials, Democratic voters, local political experts, Platner and Mills themselves and those who know them—I came to suspect that something related, but also more specific, was at play: This race has become perhaps the country’s clearest referendum on how Democrats should be responding to Trumpism.

Since 2016, Democrats have debated whether the fundamental problem is President Donald Trump himself or the circumstances that produced him. Mills has become a kind of personification of the first view. Outside of Maine, she may be best known for a viral moment from last year, when, at a White House event for the nation’s governors, Trump called her out directly, saying he would pull all federal funding from Maine if it refused to comply with the administration’s executive order on transgender girls and women in sports. From the audience, Mills responded coolly, “See you in court.”

Now she has built her campaign around a promise to go toe to toe with the president. In a phone interview in February, I asked her directly whether she believes Trump is the symptom or the disease. “Good grief. I would like to think, I would like to believe, that it’s a fluke,” she said. “But I know one thing: Whatever the origins, whatever the cause, we have to stand up to him. And I’m the person in this campaign who has stood up to Donald Trump, and I’ll do it again in the US Senate.”

Platner is up to something different. He isn’t running a campaign so much as seeking to build a mass movement against the status quo. He’s not trying to woo the working class to the Democratic Party; he’s trying to mobilize the working class to take over the Democratic Party and use it to fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizens. To him, Trump is a symptom of a larger rot, a fundamentally broken system, and the old rules of American politics are already beside the point. The Democratic establishment is “still existing in this world where they think that if you know the rules the best, you’re going to win,” he told me. “When the other side is just beating you over the head with the rule book, it doesn’t matter.”

In keeping with these themes, he’s running a far grander campaign than Mills in terms of ambition and drive. (It does help that he isn’t limited by the need to simultaneously govern.) He seems to be everywhere, all the time, both on TV, thanks to his nearly three-to-one fundraising edge, and in person. His call for building working-class power aligns not only with his working-man presentation but also with his workman-like approach to campaigning: He has held more than 50 town halls—so well attended that people are often turned away—and shows up in every corner of the state. Unlike Mills, he’s not trying to convince voters that he will stand up to Trump; he’s trying to start a movement to build a world without the despair and resentment that he believes allows Trump’s brand of politics to flourish.

Maine is certainly not the first place where these contrasting prescriptions for how to end Trumpism have been present in a Democratic primary. But rarely have they been so perfectly embodied by two such different candidates. And if the polls are even close to right, Democratic voters are about to deliver a bracing message about which of these visions they currently prefer.

On a Friday evening in early April, the Oxford County Democrats held a candidate forum in Fryeburg, a town of about 3,500 on the New Hampshire border and part of Maine’s rural Second Congressional District. To the surprise of organizers, the middle school gymnasium was filled with roughly 300 people.

The forum featured several candidates running for local offices—school board, selectman, state Legislature, and sheriff—plus Platner. He wore a hoodie with “Neat” (as in, no ICE) across his chest and a baseball cap with the logo of a local guitar manufacturer.

When it was his turn to speak, Platner talked, as he often does, about power. He discussed how New Dealers once wielded power on behalf of working people and how, starting in the 1970s, corporate interests began taking that power back, pouring money into politics to influence policy, which produced more money to pour into politics. It has all led to this moment, he explained, when a supposedly democratic country starts a war in Iran that is overwhelmingly unpopular with its citizens but is good for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Saudi government, and Raytheon executives. “Every time a Tomahawk missile hits a kid’s school, somebody makes a profit,” he said.

“We are the richest society in the history of humanity,” Platner argued. “We can have universal healthcare. We can have universal child care. We can have universal education, going from kindergarten........

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