By Nick Gervin,Ross Barkan

Copyright gq

“Susan Collins killed my friends,” Graham Platner tells me with his characteristic bluntness.
We are bobbing on his skiff, the bay waters shimmering around us. It’s brilliantly sunny, nearly cloudless, and summer is dipping into fall. Platner, speaking in his friendly growl, is explaining how the senior United States senator from Maine has blood on her hands for voting for the Iraq War.
“I am very open about my opposition to US military adventurism and the military-industrial complex,” says Platner, who served three tours in Iraq as a Marine, and later deployed to Afghanistan with the Army. “I’ve seen firsthand what the outcomes are. They are horrific and disgusting.
“The American people see no value in these wars. Nobody has been able to explain to me how what I did in Ramadi in 2006 fucking improved the lives of people in Sullivan, Maine,” he continues, referring to his hometown, which sits on the bay where we float on his oyster boat. “We spent an immense amount of money. I watched my friends die. This is not academic to me. I am angry about this. I will remain angry about this.”
If you’re bemoaning the anemic pushback that Donald Trump is getting from Democratic establishment and tracking the subsequent primary challenges springing up across the country, you’ve probably heard of Platner, 41, an oyster farmer who lives with his wife, Amy, in an eastern stretch of Maine off Frenchman Bay. A Democratic candidate for Collins’s Senate seat, he is a rising star of the second Trump era. If in the first Trump term, Democrats lionized suburban women and argued that the swing counties just outside of major cities were the key to dethroning Republicans and turning the tide on MAGA, 2025 has a distinctly different flavor to it. Pink pussy hats are out, as are #MeToo-style vows to confront toxic masculinity. In are the men themselves: Donald Trump performed well enough with male voters, those under 30 in particular, that some Democrats now openly fret they’ve lost a whole gender. It wasn’t just white men, in 2024, flocking to Trump. Black, Latino, and Asian men all drifted rightward, and Joe Rogan’s endorsement of Trump led many on the left to ponder how they could find their own version of Rogan—a muscle-bound, heavily tattooed MMA enthusiast—to combat the GOP.
Platner, who has raised $3.2 million in less than two months and attracted overflow crowds to his campaign events, is not a famous podcaster or stand-up comedian, but he’s got the forearm tattoos and the visible muscle. He’s a firearms instructor and competitive pistol shooter who was a machine gunner in the Marine Corps. (“I do think that when I go to the United States Senate,” he says, “there will be no senator in the history of the United States who has more competency and familiarity with firearms than me.”)
For Democrats, progressives in particular, who dream of turning MAGA men left, Platner is deeply alluring. Democratic elites have, of late, fixated on winning back men, but they’ve often focused on style over substance, hoping the facial hair and the ink and the ability to shoot a gun is enough. Platner is making a slightly different bet: that policy will have to matter most of all. He’s a proud economic populist who bashes the oligarchy, supports single-payer healthcare, and wants to end all military aid to Israel, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians during their invasion of Gaza. In a state that barely numbers a million people, many have already heard of Platner, and he’s won an endorsement from Bernie Sanders. He’s been a candidate, remarkably, only since August.
Any Democratic path to retaking the Senate majority and roadblocking the Republicans runs through Maine. Susan Collins has been in office since 1997, and she’s the last Republican senator in all of New England. If Collins has been a source of deep frustration for Democrats and Republicans alike—she’s not fond of MAGA but also is glad to sit in the GOP majority and vote with her party more often than not—she is the definition of a political survivor, with deep roots in Maine and a genuine record of bipartisanship. Platner has blasted her for avoiding town halls and ducking protesters, and there’s a sense, talking to Mainers, that Collins’s act is beginning to wear thin in an era of rising polarization.
Left-leaning voters, certainly, are hungry to vote against her next year, when she is expected to seek reelection. Independents who are souring on Trump are having second thoughts about Collins because she voted for the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which slashed taxes on the wealthy and gutted the social safety net. Collins is now one of the more vulnerable Republican incumbents in America.
Platner is not yet assured to face her. He’s in a primary with several candidates, and Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, is expected to enter the race shortly. Democrats in Washington, including Chuck Schumer, have aggressively recruited Mills, who has respectable approval ratings but would be, at age 77, serving in the Senate in her 80s if she finished even one term. Beyond the 84-year-old Sanders, who enjoys a great deal of support from young voters, Democrats have grown more frustrated with elderly politicians. Joe Biden’s implosion is a major reason why. And there are a number of Democrats who have insisted on serving when they are elderly and ill, like Dianne Feinstein, the late senator from California, and Gerry Connolly, a Virginia congressman who died not long after winning a leadership fight over Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to chair a crucial House committee. Voters in both parties, meanwhile, are in an antiestablishment mood, and oyster farmers who never held political office before are a bit more attractive than they used to be.
“Mills is not the answer, because Mills is of the establishment that has brought us to this position,” Platner insists. “There is a deep anger at the political establishment across the state of Maine, and it is in that anger, it is in that angst, that I think we, I can see a very clear path forward in beating Susan Collins. I don’t think that my pitch, which is that we should elect a working-class person to represent working-class people who’s running on very clear policies that are going to materially improve the lives of working families in Maine—that is not the pitch that Janet Mills is going to make, nor can she. She has also been in power for quite some time.”

From the age of two, Platner wanted to become a soldier. “I loved military history. I loved war films. I loved playing in war. I was a Civil War reenactor,” he says. What made him unique was that he was protesting the Iraq War before enlisting in the Marine Corps. “I did my best to stop it. I got thrown out of a George W. Bush rally in Bangor in 2002, for holding up a sign that said ‘No War in Iraq.’
“When the war came,” he continues, “I also felt that it was my duty as an American to go. I also felt some kind of like, you know, just like that weird draw that young people get towards adventure. And this was going to be my generation’s war. I felt like I had to take part. I also believed then—I don’t believe this anymore—that, like, if I went into it with some kind of cynicism, that I would be able to do good things inside of a larger failed policy. And while that is true, that doesn’t change the larger failed policy or failed strategy.”
After several tours in Iraq, Platner enrolled at George Washington University on the GI Bill but found himself, later in the 2010s, working for the notorious military contractor once known as Blackwater. He hated this because of all the waste, and in his view, outright fraud that he encountered: “The fact that the US Embassy in Kabul was constantly under construction…every week, there was a new project because somebody came up with a new security concern that was going to have to be dealt with and so some private company was going to bid it.” He returned to Maine, taking over Waukeag Neck Oyster Company. “My wife and I work incredibly hard, and we also do not make a lot of money. We make enough money to live the little life that we wanted to live in Eastern Maine.”
The overtly working-class, proudly masculine progressive is not wholly new. John Fetterman, hulking and tattooed, rose to fame by winning a Senate seat in Pennsylvania. If Fetterman ultimately disillusioned progressives with his ferocious defense of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, he offered something of a roadmap for left-leaning Democrats who seek to appeal to the rural voters fleeing their coalition. It starts with a willingness to buck party leadership and speak the language of those who have been alienated by the political system. Joe Calvello, a well-regarded progressive operative who helped elect Fetterman, is now working for Platner and staying near him in Maine. Morris Katz, a young admaker who has gained a degree of fame for helping to craft the media approach of New York City’s Democratic Socialist Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, is on Team Platner too.
The oysterman joins a roster of antiestablishment candidates across America: men—yes, they are mostly men—who’ve channeled the growing rage at the status quo. There’s Dan Osborn, a former labor leader at a Kellogg’s plant who is mounting a second Senate bid as an independent in Nebraska, where he hopes to defeat a Republican incumbent. Bob Brooks, running for a House seat in a swing district in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, delivered Domino’s pizzas, drove Budweiser trucks, and washed dishes before becoming a firefighter and union leader. In Kentucky, Logan Forsythe is running for Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat; he lived in a minivan, eventually became a Secret Service agent, and returned to Kentucky to serve as a lawyer for rural clients.
Trump voters, Platner argues, can still return to the Democratic coalition. He has just handed me an oyster straight from the water. The taste is salty, and then sweet. If he does get elected, he’s unlikely to attend many DC soirees or campaign fundraisers in wine caves.
The MAGA men of Maine, Platner says, are “not idiots. They’re not racists. They’re not bad people. And I know that because they’re my neighbors. They voted for Trump because they wanted the system to change.”
“The system is not going to change. In fact, it’s going to be getting worse under Trump. We need to be there with open arms to welcome them back and give them the answers for what they’re looking for, which are the material daily needs of their lives around health care, around housing, around child care, around education. These are the things that matter.”

Platner, unlike Fetterman, appears much less likely to let down liberal and progressive Democrats because he is, in every sense, a true believer. He was protesting the Iraq War and speaking up for Palestinian rights when he was still in high school. Those who know him say he is, like Sanders, ideologically consistent. And while some in the Democratic Party have called on politicians to moderate on cultural concerns, Platner is unapologetically a man of the left. He wants to defund and abolish ICE entirely. He will not, unlike fellow Democrats Gavin Newsom and Seth Moulton, the Massachusetts congressman, declare that he’s uncomfortable with transgender girls playing girls’ high school sports.
Republicans are preparing to pounce: They hope to portray him as too much of a leftist for a state that has, on the balance, rarely swerved too far toward one political pole. “If socialist Graham Platner and his Mamdani inner circle of staff survive the crowded Democratic Primary in Maine, he will be the most radical and angry candidate to lead a major party ticket here in modern memory,” says Jason Savage, the executive director of the Maine Republican Party.
But politically, Maine is not like most American states. Voters here pride themselves on their independence, and the rural culture itself can be as much Canadian as it is American. The left-right political divide has always meant less. A libertarian streak—or at least one that prizes self-reliance—is found in many Mainers. “Maine is less polarized than the nation as a whole,” said Mark Brewer, the chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine. “Mainers do view themselves as a different type, a different breed.”
In many respects, Platner fits this mold. If his policy platform is unabashedly left-wing, he speaks in the language of populist Maine. He is the blunt outsider harnessing discontent at a political system that can feel, with each passing year, more remote to the average person. The cost of housing and groceries have surged since the pandemic, and Trump’s tariff regime has only strained household finances further. Platner is, at a minimum, a vessel of this discontent.
What makes Maine particularly intriguing is that its lawmakers have not, as the writer Nick Rafter recently pointed out, historically presented as hardscrabble or even blue-collar. Erudite, bookish senators like Ralph Owen Brewster, Margaret Chase Smith, George Mitchell, Bill Cohen, and Olympia Snowe were all popular in the state, and the percentage of voters with bachelor’s degrees is not especially low.
Platner, if he so chooses, has the ability to appeal to that tradition. He does not hail from a line of oyster farmers: his father, Bronson Platner, is a prominent local attorney who ran an unsuccessful campaign for city council in Ellsworth, and his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a popular restaurateur. Platner’s grandfather Warren—Bronson’s father—was a leading modernist architect who designed interiors for the Ford Foundation and, most famously, Windows on the World, the restaurant that sat atop the old World Trade Center. At the time of his death in 2006, according to The New York Times, he was working on a new shopping center in Greece.
For now, this won’t be a part of many campaign biographies. Oyster shucking comes first. “Platner fits into Maine because Maine does like working-class candidates, even if they’re not totally working class but came from these relatable backgrounds like being an oysterman from Sullivan. He’s not from a big city,” says Billy Kobin, a political reporter at The Bangor Daily News. “He works on the water.”
Whether Platner, gaining great heaps of momentum, can ultimately defeat Mills and then Collins is an open question. What is inarguable, though, is that the first-time candidate has struck a nerve in his home state. The crowds at his campaign stops are real, and growing. Social media is ablaze. It’s not clear what will happen because statewide Democratic primaries in Maine aren’t very common. If Platner survives to face down Collins, he will need to convince Mainers that the Republican senator’s blander, mostly Trump-appeasing brand of politics is out of date, and that they effectively live in a blue state and need a fighter to furiously stand up to the president. He’ll need to dig many votes out of Trump-friendly counties while electrifying every last Democratic stronghold.
Above all, he will have to—unlike almost all his predecessors—chart a fresh path for populism in his home state. This is his greatest hope. “When working people get abandoned, they look for people to blame. They should be blaming the ultra-wealthy, they should be blaming the billionaire class and the corporate class,” Platner says. “The system is screwing them.”