Graham Platner Hopes to Win Susan Collins’s Maine Senate Seat in 2026
On the other side of Bar Harbor Bay is the small town of Sullivan, in Maine, the population of twelve hundred nineteen. On August 16, Graham Platner, the bearded and blond co -owner of the Waukeag Neck Oyster Company strawberry, brought his Carolina skiff to launch the port of Sullivan. It took three days before a video entitled “Platner for Us Senate” drops, catapulting this local oyster farmer, Harbormaster and former sailor on the national scene.
The video was produced by Morris Katz, one of the main political strategists of the Democratic candidate of the New York Democrat town hall, Zohran Mamdani. “In a few minutes after talking to him, I was, as” this guy owes it to the country to appear in the “” Senate, recalls Katz, his first meeting with Platner. The video was intended to present the native of Maine, forty-one, as a robust and sympathetic democratic candidate of the working class who presents himself to overthrow Susan Collins, but he could just as well have been the opening of a reality TV show called “Oyster Man”. A macho pastiche with a soundtrack of jeep-commercial, he shows him to dive into his combination, cut wood, transport oyster cages and make Kettlebell swings. There are close -ups of his tattoos, as well as photos of him holding his hand with his wife, Amy Gertner, while they walk along a beach with their two dogs. Standing at the head of his boat, Platner says to the camera: “When I tell people here that I run for the Senate, the initial reaction is sometimes:” What is the ——? ” “There is a beep explanive and dish laughs. Then, it becomes serious: “It seems that the fabric of what keeps us together is being torn apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians taking advantage of destroying our environment, leading our families in poverty and crushing the middle class.”
The deployment of the campaign, orchestrated by the main advisor of Platner, Joe Calvello (former communications director of John Fetterman), collected half a million dollars during his first four days; Volunteer campaign registrations have an average of three hundred a day. “No one expected this,” said Calvello. THE TimesABC, NBC and Fox News covered the launch, focusing on Platner as a political novice which represented a new approach to the party. “Platner has never run to office and rarely wear a suit”, ” Mother Jones note. The launch video was viewed more than two and a half million times on X in the first twenty-four hours. The Streamer and commentator on the left, Hasan Piker, showed it on his Twitch channel, where comments included “Tax the Rich and Eat the Oysters” and “Wow this guy looks like a progressive spirit in [a] Maga Corps. “”
I spent almost every summer of my life on Frenchman Bay, near Sullivan, and, like many of my neighbors, I had the number of Platner for years and I picked up the oysters of his boat. I saw him break up oysters during parties, fundraising and the local summer music series, where half a dozen oysters go for twenty dollars; He also cuts them to Ironbound, a restaurant in the city of Hancock which belongs to his mother, Leslie Harlow. I learned for the first time on the Platner Senate race at the end of July by the text of a close friend of Platner; She wrote: “Big News …” Soon, my friends discussed Gin-And-Tonics how they always knew he would be famous.
That morning in August, I met Platner when launching and he led us on his boat to his oyster farm on the bay. It is located off an island with such a rocky edge that lobsters know not to drop traps; Platner keeps the towing ropes in case it needs to help blocked boaters. The mist of Canadian forest fires, which covered the bay for much of the summer, had risen, and Mount Cadillac, on Desert Mt. Island, was bright green. Once we have been moored, Platner highlighted the animated fauna: white -headed, Osprey.
Earlier in the summer, a few weeks before Graham Platner, the fever scans Maine and beyond, a group of democrats mainly from the millennium, cozy with the Maine Labor leaders, community activists and volunteers, many of them Bernie Sanders Alums, had spotted the state for a candidate who could stop Collins. These Democrats thought that the five -year -old republican senator and sixty -two years old was vulnerable: his approval notes were broken, and Kamala Harris had won the state in 2024. After seeing a video showing Platner – that made by the Frenchman Bay Conservancy in 2020, to stop a commercial salmon farm in the bay – he decided that they had exactly what they had exactly in Maine.
Jason Shedlock, president of Southern Maine Council, was involved in the search (and was the only member of the group to talk about the file). “What we are looking for is someone who understands that solidarity is not a spectator sport, it is a word of action,” said Shedlock. He heard that Platner was “the real matter”. They had their first conversation on Zoom. “The Zoom camera was swung from top to bottom because it was on an oyster boat, and I just got off a site, and we had the conversation right away, with the blowing wind, and it was like talking to someone I met in a union room.”
Several Maine labor figures contacted Katz and Calvello, which concluded the agreement. Platner was taken by their interest. “They are, as” we think that at the moment, Susan Collins is only weak “,” he told me. “We think that the Democrats will choose a bad candidate for this race specifically, and we think you are a good candidate for that. And Amy and I said to them quickly:” It’s fucking madman. We work full time. We have no money. “. Platner pulled a cage. He took out a net bag full of tiny oysters, each of the size of a pumpkin seed, explaining that when the oysters grow, they need more space.” It’s a bit like gardening, “he said.” I’m just thinning. “
