David Remnick: Since Donald Trump's populist rhetoric first began to resonate with voters, particularly disaffected white voters, the Democratic Party has been looking for candidates who could talk more convincingly about economic insecurity and other related issues. There's been an emphasis on people who seem to be outside the party establishment, particularly working people and military veterans too. Graham Platner checked a lot of those boxes. He had served in the Marines and in the army, and coming home to Maine, he took over a small oyster farming business. Platner was recruited to run for the Senate seat that's been held for a long time by Susan Collins, but early in his campaign, the picture got a little complicated. Comments that Platner had made over the years on Reddit and elsewhere began to surface, and you probably heard about this. He called police officers bastards and said victims of sexual assault should, "take some responsibility for themselves." He used homophobic slurs, and he made remarks about Black people, rural whites, kind of everybody. One of his tattoos was said to resemble a Nazi symbol, though he points out that he didn't quite realize that when he got it.

Platner apologized, and he apologized repeatedly. He covered up the tattoo, but some progressive groups have said, maybe this guy is just not cut out for the job. Graham Platner's campaign will be, among other things, an indicator of how much the rules of politics have changed, and not only in the MAGA movement. I spoke with Graham Platner last week. Graham, from what I know, you were recruited to run for senator. What was happening, you were driving around in your car and some guy calls you up and say because we want you to run for Senate. Tell me the story.

Graham Platner: No, not quite, no. My wife and I were down in Brooklin, Maine, where we shuck oysters at the Brooklin General Store. We were driving home. It's about a little over an hour drive. It was like nine o' clock at night, and I got a phone call from an unknown number, and it's a gentleman asking if it's me. I said yes. Saying that they were at my mother's restaurant, they'd stopped in for dinner, and that they wanted to talk to me about a project to recruit a candidate in Maine to run for US Senate. I've been engaged in a lot of community organizing, and through that, I've made lots of friends around the state in the organizing world.

I assumed that they were just calling to ask me for names. I was like, "It's late at night. We can't, so if you want to come over tomorrow morning before I go out on the boat for coffee, that sounds good." They agreed.

David Remnick: What time do you go out on the boat?

Graham Platner: Well, I wanted them to come over at 4:30, but my wife told me that was too early to invite people over to the House. So I told them 6:00, I think, or 5:30, something like that. They came over and made it clear that they were part of this project with the Maine AFL-CIO, a couple of labor union groups trying to recruit a candidate. I started listing off names, and essentially they were like, "No, you don't understand. We think you would be a good candidate."

My wife and I laughed and said that's insane, because it is. We make $60,000 a year, and the Senate is not for people like us, or at least we don't really-- I never thought of running for United States Senate. Then essentially, they came back with the harder sell and an idea about how this could actually look. At that point we decided that it was the right thing to do.

David Remnick: Tell me a little bit about your political experience. You refer to community organizing. You're working a long day. Tell me about the time that you spent outside the workday and what you were doing.

Graham Platner: It's farming is farming is farming. You've got your in season-

David Remnick: Sure.

Graham Platner: -where you're out, for me, I'm out on the boat pretty much all day long, all summer. It's very busy. In the winter months, starting after December through April, I tend to have a bit more free time. In that time, I put time into organizing around mostly local economic justice issues or social justice issues. It's the extent of my politics, outside of local governance, where I've been the chair of the planning board and also was Harbor Master. Those are areas that I enjoyed thoroughly. It is something to be able to write policy, implement it, and then essentially see the outcome of it within a week's time. Only at the local level do I think you actually get to engage with things like that.

David Remnick: Graham, tell me a little bit about you, for a very brief time, were at a pretty distinguished prep school.

Graham Platner: Very briefly. Didn't last very long.

David Remnick: What happened?

Graham Platner: I got thrown out.

David Remnick: What'd you get thrown out for?

Graham Platner: I didn't go to class. I went to a very small, rural middle school, and my mother wanted me to have a better education, I suppose, so she had me apply to a bunch of these New England prep schools. We got a really good financial aid package from Hotchkiss in Connecticut.

David Remnick: Right.

Graham Platner: She sent me down there. I didn't want to go. I went down and just had a-- I'd never been around that level of wealth before. I felt out of place. Then I figured out very quickly that if I didn't go to class, then I got to go home. That is exactly what happened.

David Remnick: That was the conclusion you drew.

Graham Platner: Much to my mother's chagrin.

David Remnick: How did she react?

Graham Platner: Poorly. She was very-- I did not get to go on the family vacation that year. I had to stay home with my dad.

David Remnick: How did they react to your decision to go into the military, and tell me about that?

Graham Platner: My dad became a teacher so he could not get drafted during Vietnam. He thought the war in Iraq was deeply stupid. I did too, to be fair. He thought my joining the Marine Corps, or enlisting, was not a good use of my time, and he was afraid I was going to go fight and die in a stupid war like he had seen friends from his generation, Vietnam.

David Remnick: When you look back on it, why did you go into the military if you thought the war was stupid? It was just a thing that a young man can do to rebel in some way?

Graham Platner: Since my earliest memories, I wanted to be a soldier. I grew up loving military history. I did Civil War reenacting. I don't know why, I don't have an answer. I think about this fairly often. It was just something that spoke to me. For me, it was an inevitability. After graduation, I was working for the Appalachian Mountain Club. I'd spent two years in the professional trail crew in the White Mountains. I went back to work for the AMC for the summer. Then I deferred a year to go to college to keep my parents happy, but I knew what I was doing. I knew that I wasn't going to go.

David Remnick: How did the reality of Iraq and being a soldier match with what you had imagined?

Graham Platner: I went into it, I think in many ways, more informed and already fairly cynical than most. I read a lot of literature from the Vietnam War in high school. One of my favorite books was A Bright Shining Lie by-

David Remnick: Neil Sheehan.

Graham Platner: -Neil Sheehan, about John Paul Vann, who was a very competent and great soldier who then found himself in a war that he thought was being fought and fought poorly.

David Remnick: Sure.

Graham Platner: When I got to Iraq, early on, I thought it was working. I remember coming home from my first deployment and telling people that I was wrong because I'd been against the war, and I was wrong that I was wrong. I was in fact right the first time around. What I interacted with was what I thought were tactical failures. I thought that we weren't doing the thing properly. I really believed in the concept of counterinsurgency. By the time I got out of the Marine Corps in '08, Petraeus and General Mattis had written the counterinsurgency manual. There was this whole ream of thinking that the United States military really needed to focus on this counterinsurgency concept.

I started reading all the old writings from the French and the British and Malaya, and I really believed, truly believed, that we had just been doing it wrong, that it wasn't that it as a concept was a failure. It's so funny now looking back on it, because you can read guys in Vietnam having the exact same realization and then coming to the exact same realization that I eventually did too, which is that it's not a tactical failure. This whole thing is a failed concept. It cannot work.

David Remnick: Strategically, yes.

Graham Platner: Strategically, it's not going to work. When you're young, and you're engaged in something, and you want to believe in it, you want to make it work, I threw my heart and soul into it.

David Remnick: Graham, I was thinking about you in the last couple of days, knowing that we'd be talking. This past Sunday was just a miserable day. The news from Providence, Rhode island, and then the news from Sydney, Australia, and then the day ending with the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. Then what followed is the President of the United States issuing a Truth Social post that just betrayed-- It wasn't surprising, in a sense, which is part of what's so awful about it. The idea that somebody holding that sense of responsibility would say something so morally bankrupt and worse.

We also know that human beings say some pretty stupid things over time, and you've had to contend with this. Your comments on Reddit from the past came up, issue of your tattoo became infamous because of the link to a Nazi symbol. You've apologized repeatedly. How do you view the notion of what mistakes people can make and then still hold positions of real responsibility like Senate?

Graham Platner: I think, one, did you do it when you were in power? I think that that's a really important thing. That if someone knows that what they say has so much gravity because other people are paying attention, how do you use that, how do you act in that manner? I do think that if we're going to-- I'm an elder millennial, I'm 41. If we're going to rehash everyone's social media posts from their existence, people from my generation, I don't know what politics is going to look like. We'll never get around to the policy part. I think that there is a--

If someone spends 20 years being an avowed white supremacist, that's probably a sign. If someone over the course of their time on the Internet uses slurs or stupid language and then ceases to do so, probably a sign of growth. Probably a sign of how many of us change over time.

David Remnick: How old were you when you were making these comments on Reddit and how do you look back on them?

Graham Platner: In my late 20s, early 30s.

David Remnick: Is that not old enough to know better?

Graham Platner: Which comment do you mean? I made a lot of comments that I'm not ashamed of. It's not as though I have this ream of comments in which I look back and I'm like, "Oh my God, I was a terrible person back then."

David Remnick: What about comments about victims of sexual assault, for example?

Graham Platner: One, that comment, I made that right when I got out of the infantry. I don't know if you've read it, but--

David Remnick: I sure have. Yes.

Graham Platner: The comment is that I said that people, men and women, shouldn't get too drunk and should take some personal responsibility. I also said that sexual assault didn't occur in the military as much as people said it did. It does. I learned that very quickly. I came out of the infantry. At the time it was a male only organization. I never interacted with it in the service. For me, those comments were very much informed by my immature mindset coming out of my, frankly, 20s in the combat infantry. I then very quickly met people and had conversations and realized that I was very incorrect. Sexual assault occurred often in the military and was often covered up. Those comments I made were at a time in my life where I was-- I came out of the combat infantry.

David Remnick: When you decided to run for the Senate, which is a gigantic leap for anybody, much less somebody who hasn't been in politics for a long time or conventional politics, did you think to yourself, "I'm going to have a problem because of these past comments"?

Graham Platner: No. If you believe in transformational politics, which I do, you need to believe in the ability for people to change, for people to grow. If we are all just ossified in who we are right now, then there is no point to this. If we can't ever give people the ability to change minds, if we can't give people the ability to grow as human beings, then we're all just stuck. We also know this isn't true. People grow all the time. For me, this, as uncomfortable as it is, and personally unenjoyable to have to talk about stupid things I said on the Internet 13 years ago, it also allows me to publicly model something I think is really important, which is that a lot of us go through transitions in life.

A lot of us change our minds, have new experiences, meet new people, are informed by those experiences and come to different conclusions. Our politics change, our views on the world change. Again, while it's not fun to do this, for me, it also really gives me the opportunity to very publicly show that you can believe things once and then you can, over time, believe other things. You can change your language, change the way you think about stuff, change the way you talk. I think that's a good thing to model, and that isn't something that you should be ashamed of. You should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person. You can think about the world in a different way.

David Remnick: I'm speaking with Graham Platner, who's running for a Senate seat in the state of Maine. We'll continue in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour.

[music]

David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Graham Platner of Maine. Platner is a Democrat and running for the Maine Senate seat held for 28 years by Susan Collins, the Republican. Democrats think that seat could be theirs in the next election if the right candidate runs against her. Janet Mills, the state's popular governor, is also running in the primary. Mills is 77 and considered more of a centrist.

It's early to cite polls, but at this point it looks like either Mills or Platner would be in a tight race in the general election against Susan Collins. I'll continue my conversation now with Graham Platner. I want to get into how you see the world, and I want to get a sense of how you see the Democratic Party these days and what you intend to do to help transform it.

Graham Platner: I think the Democratic Party today's biggest problem is that there is an element of it that has become as attached to corporate interests as the Republican Party is. By the way, this isn't just my opinion. Everybody thinks this. You hear people say things like, "I don't vote because it doesn't matter, both sides are the same," all that kind of stuff. I don't agree with that. There's a reason I'm running as a Democrat. There's a reason I'm running. If I thought that none of this-- if there was no hope, I wouldn't do this. I have an immense amount of hope.

However, I do think that there is an innate contradiction in trying to be a party that represents working people, representing those that struggle, those that labor, those that are often exploited or taken advantage of. It is impossible to represent their interests while also trying to represent the interests of those that exploit them. I think that that is a fundamental contradiction that you cannot get past. My problem is that the Democratic Party used to be the party that represented those people. It was the party of labor unions. It was the party of thinking of large structural change that brought about things like Social Security or Medicaid and Medicare. It was the party that understood that protecting working people was going to require some form of imposition on those with wealth and power.

David Remnick: When do you think the Democratic Party, in your view, abandoned that?

Graham Platner: In the 1990s, [crosstalk] under Clinton. I think the lesson that was learned after Reagan was that, I believe it was the wrong lesson, but other people can disagree. The lesson that was learned was that, oh, the money matters, and we do have to kind of lean into this government's bad, we should lean into the deregulation, corporate side of things. In doing so, the party sold out organized labor, and the party in many ways sold out the movement side of our politics.

David Remnick: Did you feel that Barack Obama, for example, was in the same camp as Bill Clinton in that way?

Graham Platner: Yes, I think so. 2008 financial crisis happens. Obama's on record saying this, there was a moment where there were two options, we give money to homeowners or we give money to the banks. We chose to give the money to banks.

David Remnick: To rescue the banks.

Graham Platner: To rescue the banks. That was an option. For me, that's just kind of indicative of this creeping influence in the Democratic Party. This is, I think, why we often find ourselves in this weird-- everybody is so confused as to what we're trying to do because we go from the-- We have Zohran Mamdani on one end and Joe Manchin on the other.

David Remnick: The argument, which you well know, is that the only kind of Democrat that's going to win in West Virginia is a Joe Manchin Democrat. Otherwise you're going to get a MAGA Republican in West Virginia.

Graham Platner: My counter to that-

David Remnick: Sure.

Graham Platner: -is that I think you can win someone in West Virginia if you run on working class populism. Joe Manchin also very much did not represent the-- He's the reason that we didn't get or we couldn't renew the child tax credit. Then we just chose not to continue doing that. That's not the behavior of someone that's representing the interests of working people.

David Remnick: Are you getting a lot of love from the leader of the Senate Caucus, from Chuck Schumer?

Graham Platner: No, I am not.

David Remnick: How would you describe the lack of love there?

Graham Platner: It's just been a lack of anything. I've made it very clear that I would love to have a conversation, would love to talk about what we're trying to do here. No one's reached out. We're almost five months into this thing. Not a single phone call, not a single email.

David Remnick: From the national party organization.

Graham Platner: Yes, from either Chuck Schumer or from the DSCC, and-

David Remnick: The Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Graham Platner: -I continue to not have been contacted.

David Remnick: Governor Janet Mills has decided to run, and you've got a hot race there. Is she getting the love from the Democratic Party establishment?

Graham Platner: Well, the DSCC set up to fundraise with her the day after she announced. So my assumption is yes.

[laughter]

David Remnick: It looks like Schumer and the DSCC is going to endorse Janet Mills in the primary. You've got endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna and others. How does that look on the ground in Maine? What are Maine Democrats actually feeling? How are the polls looking for you? Where are you having success? Where are you having difficulties?

Graham Platner: To be frank, the polls continue to be great for us. That mirrors what I feel on the ground. People are fed up. People are disgusted with the system as it stands, and they don't think that the answers are going to come from establishment politicians who've been chosen by Washington, D.C..

David Remnick: How will you run against Susan Collins, presuming that she's the Republican nominee, and she's been in that office for a very long time, and incumbents have all kinds of advantages?

Graham Platner: Essentially the exact same way. We are building a campaign that is focused on field organizing. We're focused on building the ground game. We've held 35 town halls around the state of Maine the past couple months. We've talked to tens of thousands of Mainers already. We have 12,000 volunteers. Maine's not a big state. Oh, it is geographically, but doesn't have a lot of people. These people are from all over the state. For me, this is very much-- It's a larger project than merely a Senate seat. This is about rebuilding organization, organization in communities, organization and cooperation between existing groups like labor unions, community organizations, the party itself.

In my opinion, we need to reconnect with that kind of politics, the politics of movement building. That speaks to what people are feeling right now, people, myself included, why I'm doing this, we feel unrepresented.

David Remnick: What do you want to get done in the Senate? What are, say, three top policies that you would concentrate on? Because you can't concentrate on everything.

Graham Platner: No. Continue pushing for universal health care and Medicare for all. We also need to restrict the ability of senators and congresspeople to trade stocks and bonds. It's essentially legalized corruption and it needs to end. We also need to fix the tax code because we cannot continue to tax wages at a higher rate than we tax wealth. That's a math equation that when you run to the end, it's easy to see who winds up with all the money.

I think those three things are going to be priorities for me legislatively. I know Medicare for all is going to be a heavy lift. The other two, I think, are going to be a much easier lift. We've already got some Republicans who are happy to come over on the stocks and bonds issue. Josh Hawley put something forward not too long ago, so I think there's definitely opportunity for wins there.

David Remnick: You've run an ad talking about how you refuse to accept money from AIPAC. Are there any other groups that you won't take money from?

Graham Platner: Oh, yes, yes. Fossil fuel packs. Frankly, any large corporate pack, any dark money pack, we don't take money from them. All the money we're taking in is individual donations.

David Remnick: Oh, okay.

Graham Platner: We will take money from labor packs, any kind of pack that exists that's not part of the corporate dark money apparatus, but that's it. We need to know where the money comes from. That's important for us.

David Remnick: I want to ask you a couple of questions in view of your military experience. We had former Secretary of Defense and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, on the show recently, and he said this about having thousands of troops stationed off the coast of Venezuela. He said, "We're putting our men and women in uniform in harm's way. We have to assure them that the orders we give them are not going to violate the law. We're going to, in fact, defend our national security in a way that is not legally questionable." What do you make of this, especially coming from someone who saw America's forever wars really up close?

Graham Platner: I agree wholeheartedly. At this point-- what we're seeing in Venezuela is just a rehash of what we saw with Iraq, but somehow even worse and even dumber, which is magnificent to behold.

David Remnick: How is it even worse and even dumber?

Graham Platner: With Iraq, we at least had, I don't know, 10 years of previous engagement. We had UN hearings. It was at least this sort of well crafted propaganda machine that a lot of people ate up. This is just laughable. We're just murdering people. I think the death count now is up to 95.

David Remnick: Yes.

Graham Platner: We're just murdering people. No declaration of war, no even concept of why this is a war. It's all happening, frankly, because the Republicans know that their policies are failing, the economy is getting worse, people are not happy, and the best thing to do is just drum up a war for political purposes. A lot of people can see it, including a lot of Republicans. That's what I mean by dumber. It's less sophisticated. The run up to the Iraq War, I think, was a sophisticated operation in propaganda. They realize they have the power and they can do it, and so they're doing it and that's it.

David Remnick: How long were you in the military, active?

Graham Platner: Eight years. I was four years in the Marine Corps, four years in the United States Army National Guard.

David Remnick: With that experience behind you, you've seen a lot of military leaders on the ground and you've experienced them from afar as well. When you look at Pete Hegseth, who's the Secretary of Defense, or he calls himself Secretary of War, what view do you have of him?

Graham Platner: I view a guy who is deeply insecure about his military service.

David Remnick: Why would he be insecure about his military service?

Graham Platner: I don't know. I'm always curious about that. Look, he was an infantry officer. He served at Guantanamo, and I think he did a deployment to Iraq. Not every deployment to Iraq is the same as other deployments to Iraq. I'm not sure what his was like, but you definitely get the feeling that this is someone who is trying to make up for something, is trying to be this vision of masculinity and warrior prowess that he, frankly, does not represent at all. If he did, why didn't he stay in? Why didn't he continue? Why didn't he go be a Special Forces officer? There were other places in the service to go to really embody that, and he didn't. He got out and became a talking head on television.

David Remnick: What was your deployment like?

Graham Platner: Oh, I did four. Two of them were fairly violent. One of them was kind of violent.

David Remnick: What does that mean?

Graham Platner: That's a good question. I was in Ramadi in 2006 with Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. That was a very, very violent deployment.

David Remnick: You were in active combat?

Graham Platner: Yes, we were at the government center in downtown Ramadi. It was a place that was-- Well, it was the government center for Al-Anbar Province. If you had a grievance with the coalition or the Iraqi government, you came down and expressed it, generally using direct fire, RPGs or suicide car bombs.

David Remnick: You were in the line of fire for an extended period of time?

Graham Platner: I was a machine gunner. Yes, I usually say I saw more combat than most, less than some.

David Remnick: There are currently 20 members of the Senate who are veterans. What do you think you all could be doing, assuming you get elected, and you darn well might, what should you be pushing for in terms of legislation for soldiers and veterans?

Graham Platner: I think the number one thing we have to do is claw war powers back from the executive branch. This is something that is--

David Remnick: This has been going on for decades.

Graham Platner: Decades. As ridiculous as what's happening in Venezuela is right now, we have to remind ourselves that this is the outcome of Congress abdicating its role in war making. We have handed off more and more power to the executive branch over decades, and now we're at a point where they're just dropping bombs on people's boats. That shouldn't even be an option, but it is, because we've let it become one. I'm a firm believer that we need to be passing legislation that is going to make clear that congressional input is necessary for military action. We cannot continue to go down this road.

Also, it's a constitutional duty. The Constitution lays out clearly who is supposed to be in charge of war powers. It is the bodies that represent the American people most directly, which is Congress.

David Remnick: We have a fair number of senators and congresspeople that come on this show, and I invariably ask them about if this job is so awful, and they all complain about it. They're one of many. They can't get anything done. There's no party discipline. Their list of frustrations is endless, and yet no one seems to want to give it up. Very, very few. Very, very few. In the Republican Party, if you look at it, and the MAGA movement, and how it has pushed people into being something they might not have been 10 years ago, they're willing to give up some chunk of their soul. What makes you believe you can come to Washington, put on a suit and a tie, if that's what you choose to do--

Graham Platner: I will, for the record.

David Remnick: You're not going to go the Fetterman route?

Graham Platner: I would like to be a senator that accomplishes things, and to do that, you have to be on the floor at some point.

David Remnick: Fair enough. What makes you think that you, as one of a hundred people, and as a junior senator, will be able to get much done?

Graham Platner: Because I think we are coming into a different era in American politics. I think we've already entered, actually, an era of American politics that in many ways is going to look a lot more like that of the late 19th and early 20th century than the last 50 years. We're entering into an era of politics, of power, an understanding of what power actually is. It's not merely knowing the rulebook. It's about understanding how to organize people and how to utilize a relationship between activists, and organization on the ground, and the more structural levers of power.

David Remnick: Where does Trump and Trumpism fit into your view of these eras of American politics? Is this a post Trump era, or did Trump, in his own way, exploit that?

Graham Platner: No, I think Trump exploited it. The reason for it is much like the end of the Gilded Age, there is an immense amount of working class angst in this country, and for good reason. This is something that I find very telling. I go around the state of Maine.

David Remnick: What are people talking about to you?

Graham Platner: Independents, Republicans, Democrats, if you ask any of them, do you think you live in a political or economic system that benefits you? Nobody says yes.

David Remnick: What would they have said 20 years ago?

Graham Platner: I think 20 years ago they probably would have said yes. Most of them might have said yes.

David Remnick: What changed?

Graham Platner: What changed is the fact that life got harder down here. We're also witnessing the ultra wealthy and corporate interests consolidate wealth and power in ways that we can hardly comprehend. Everybody understands that everything is owned by five companies now, right? People know that. Go around, ask the average person, they know. People understand that the reason that their healthcare is collapsing here in rural Maine is because of corporate greed. People are getting denied because an AI program gets run and tells them a life saving procedure isn't covered. Meanwhile, the people that run those systems go home with millions of dollars.

What changed is that we can see it. What changed is that us down here in the real world, we're not idiots. The wool has not been pulled over our eyes, and we're angry about it. What Trump did is Trump came along and he told people that what they knew was true was true, which is that they are being robbed, that the system is not representing them. He's giving them all the wrong answers. He's laying the blame at the feet of all the wrong people. Those of us who don't-- I don't agree with anything Donald Trump does, except for maybe a little bit of nationalizing of some companies.

If public money gets invested into a company, public ownership should come with it. Seems fair, but besides that, I don't agree with very much. However, I do understand why people voted for him. My neighbors voted for him, and I get it. It's because they're pissed because they feel like this whole thing does not represent them-

David Remnick: Have they stayed with him?

Graham Platner: -and it doesn't. It's cracking. The rising costs are just impossible to ignore. There's going to be an element of the base that's never going to leave them, but I think there are a lot of working people right now, they voted for change. He was a change candidate. Change did not come, not in the way they wanted. We are watching our healthcare system in rural Maine collapse at the moment. Hospitals are closing as we speak, services are diminishing, people's paychecks are going less far, and the housing crisis continues to be a problem in a rural state like this, which is wild.

David Remnick: When you look at it systemically, do you think the problem is distorted capitalism somehow, or is it natural to capitalism? Do you consider yourself a democratic socialist like Mamdani or Bernie Sanders?

Graham Platner: I don't consider myself a democratic socialist. I do say that I certainly have a critique of capitalism.

David Remnick: Would it be possible to have a viable political career in the state of Maine if you did call yourself a democratic socialist?

Graham Platner: Probably.

David Remnick: It would?

Graham Platner: It's not my politics. What I would say is that we need to engage with our economic system in a way that does not allow the worst version of it to run rampant, which is essentially where we are right now. Whether it's through taxation, whether it's through regulatory structures, whether it's through anti-monopoly law, which we already have on the books, we just choose not to enforce. These are mechanisms that we need to be utilizing to make our system not be one that is purely built on the exploitation of working people, which is what we have right now.

David Remnick: Tell me about your own life. You say you and your wife have an income of $60,000?

Graham Platner: Yes. Roughly, in the aggregate.

David Remnick: What's your experience of, not to put a too fine a point on it, what's your experience of being screwed by the system in recent years?

Graham Platner: When I got out of the service, I was going to college on the GI Bill and I was--

David Remnick: Where'd you go?

Graham Platner: I went to George Washington down in D.C.. There was a moment where, at the time, I still wanted to go work for an intelligence service or maybe federal law enforcement. That was my kind of plan. Although because of my combat service, I became quite cynical and jaded, and began to not want to do that anymore. So I was in school and then living in Washington D.C., I just became close enough to the power. I met people, I had interactions, and I was like, "You're the ones I fought a war for? You guys?"

David Remnick: What pissed you off?

Graham Platner: Oh, the fact that these people didn't seem to care about the human cost. To them this was all political stuff. They were just making decisions based upon like, "Well, this might be good for us next election," or something like that. I'm like, "People are dying. We're killing people." The toll, it's not theoretical. The human cost is real, and yet in Washington, nobody seems to think like that. Well, there's some, but on the whole, it really does seem that all of this has just become so academic.

David Remnick: When you got back to Maine and started building your life there, what was your experience as a veteran?

Graham Platner: Oh, this is why my politics are the way that they are. The reason my life is the way that it is, is because I am lucky enough to be a disabled combat veteran. I get healthcare. I don't think about it. I don't deal with insurance companies. I don't deal with co-pays or premiums. When I need help, when something feels a little funny, I go to the doctor, and I do not think about the cost. It is provided to me by the VA. If it wasn't for that support, I would not have been able to build the life I lived, but because I didn't have to go get a job that was going to provide me with health insurance so I could get treated for things, it gave me an immense amount of freedom.

It gave me the freedom to take some time and think about what kind of life do I actually want to live. I found that I wanted to work on the ocean, and then I got to put the time into working on the sea. I became a diver. I became an oyster farmer. I got to learn the skills, how to fix outboard engines, how to do fiberglass work, how to dive in the cold and murky waters of the Gulf of Maine. Technical skills, real things that take a lot of time and commitment, quite frankly, to mastering.

I got to do that because the VA gave me healthcare. I look around at a community that I'm from, where I was born and raised, full of extremely hardworking, creative people who don't get to start those businesses, who don't get to figure out how they want to live, who don't get this kind of freedom to live a life that fulfills them, that brings them dignity. Instead, they are stuck just scraping by, trying to make it, trying to afford rent.

David Remnick: In your area, what does scraping by look like?

Graham Platner: I have a friend of mine, she works three jobs. Her rent is 60% of her monthly income.

David Remnick: Jesus.

Graham Platner: Her rent just went up, because rent everywhere is going up. The reason she told me, is because she's thinking about moving. The problem is she doesn't know where to move to.

David Remnick: Where would you go to?

Graham Platner: Exactly? This is eastern Maine. We're a poor community. There are already not a lot of options, and the fact that people here are struggling and can't make it, where does somebody with that kind of income go? Where else in the state or the country is she going to go? More importantly, why should she have to go anywhere? This is where she's from. This is her home.

I refuse to believe that I've watched people in my community watch their material conditions deteriorate at the exact same time that we watched Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk exist. I refuse to believe that these two things are not connected. I'm sorry, I fundamentally cannot believe that I'm watching my community suffer and become harder and harder to live in for working people while we watch the richest people in the history of people exist. Those two things are not disconnected.

David Remnick: Graham Platner, thank you so much.

Graham Platner: Thank you, David. I really appreciate it.

David Remnick: Graham Platner is running for the Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins. He's a veteran of the army and the Marine Corps, and he runs an army oyster farm in the state of Maine. Now, are you the kind of oyster guy who is so sick of oysters he can't stand the sight of them, or do you eat them all the time?

Graham Platner: No, I eat them all the time. Straight up.

David Remnick: Okay. No cocktail sauce bullshit, none of that.

Graham Platner: Cocktail sauce is heresy.

David Remnick: [laughs] I agree. Okay.

Graham Platner: I will allow occasionally maybe a spritz of lemon or some mignonette. Mignonette can be quite nice.

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