Maybe, after several years of covering American politics, I’m just jaded. It takes a lot for a candidate to pique my interest or make me sit up in my chair. I feel like I’ve seen it all: the kinder, gentler conservative, the gun-toting progressive, the Republican willing to call out their own side for being too right-wing—or maybe not right-wing enough, the Democrat who promises to move their party to the left, or to the center, or (somehow) both.
So color me unimpressed when a candidate like Graham Platner pops up and takes the political media by storm. An oysterman and Marine Corps veteran, Platner is running for the Democratic nomination for Maine’s Senate seat, and he’s getting lots of attention for all the ways he doesn’t look like the modern Democratic Party even as he espouses its progressive principles.
He’s a manly man, with a thick beard and tattoos and deep, gruff voice. Platner prefers his shirts wrinkled and henley over starched and button-up. He looks like the kind of guy who’d have voted for Donald Trump, in other words, so perhaps he could be the Democrats’ bridge to winning back those types of voters.
Except Platner’s a pretty down-the-line progressive. He’s been endorsed by everyone’s favorite socialist grandpa, Sen. Bernie Sanders. And his lefty populist message concentrates on criticizing the “oligarchy” and the political establishment. Platner is the kind of candidate who talks about the need to build “schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza.”
Perhaps Platner is the answer to Democrats’ prayers in rural white America, a true-blue progressive who speaks the language of the white working class that Republicans have completely owned in the Donald Trump era. Maybe next year Platner will not only defeat his primary challenger, Gov. Janet Mills, but he will go on to finally topple the tenacious moderate Republican, Sen. Susan Collins.
But if Platner doesn’t win, his most viral video so far may be instructive. Released by his campaign last week, the video shows Platner taking a question from someone who asks what he will do about illegal immigrants who receive free government benefits. After a few of his supporters try to shout her down, Platner calmly tells the audience that it’s not okay to dismiss this woman’s concerns, before delivering a fairly condescending assessment of why people like this voter might be asking questions like that.
“People are propagandized, people are misinformed, but people are not stupid, and we shouldn’t treat them as such,” Platner says. “People are being robbed. They’re being robbed of their critical thinking. They’re being robbed of their empathy.”
His conclusion: “The answer to that is not shame. The answer to that is not anger. The answer to that is empathy and compassion.”
Or how about an answer to the actual question? At no point in the video (which has over 2.6 million views on X and over 260,000 likes on Instagram) does Platner actually respond to her concerns, though perhaps his substantive answer was edited out.
Regardless, I have lost patience with this sort of political legerdemain, particularly as we learn from CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski that Platner’s own postings online from a few short years ago belie a less compassionate view of rural, Trump-supporting Americans than he lets on today. It suggests he’s less of a wedge that could disrupt the other side’s coalition and more of a novel affirmation of his own side’s prejudices against their fellow countrymen.
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