At The Dunbar Store, a small grocery store off Route 1 in Sullivan, Maine, Graham Platner has a very specific nickname. “We called him ‘footlong ham and cheese guy,’” Josh Winer, Dunbar’s owner, says. Most days, he’d pick up a ham and cheese and a Moxie—a New England-specific soda tinged with bittersweet gentian root—before he’d board his boat at the nearby launch to go oystering.
But Platner hasn’t been at Dunbar’s quite so regularly since he launched his Senate campaign in August. In fact, after his campaign launch video went viral, amassing more than two and a half million views in its first 24 hours, he’s found his schedule rather packed. The oysterman has been catapulted onto the national stage as part of a vanguard of progressive, young candidates who have gained widespread support by appealing to working class voters.
Central to his campaign is his work as an oysterman, and it’s hard to imagine someone who loves oystering as much as Platner.
“This is my office,” he boasts, holding his arms out to a stretch of Frenchman Bay, its waters shimmering under the bright sun, where his oyster cages bob up and down happily. As he hauls up cages, he explains that his oysters will have a flavor different even from oysters grown a mile away. That they’ll have a unique terroir—ahem, merroir. It’s clear that Platner takes enormous pride in the oyster farm he’s helped build. “The fact that this place that I love so much creates these things that people love so much, it's incredibly special,” he says. “It's deeply emotional.”
He shucks a few oysters on the boat, and hands them over on the condition that we chew, not slurp. They are particularly meaty, bright and salty from the ocean water, and remarkably buttery and unctuous like uni. He continues to shuck, tossing spent shells back into the bay, as he muses on some of the finer points of aquaculture and his oyster business. “We sell everything locally. Nothing gets shipped,” Platner says. “If you want to eat these oysters, you’ve got to come to this part of the world.”
The same local-first, community-minded thinking on which he’s built his oyster business has become the foundation for his politics—or maybe it’s the other way around. “I don't know if oystering colored my politics,” he says, “or I've just fallen in love with it because it's in line with my politics.”
His ideas have generated significant energy in Maine voters. In the eight weeks since its launch, the campaign has recruited 9,000 volunteers across all 16 counties in the state, and raised an impressive $4 million. Of these donations, 82% are from in-state donors, and around 90% are under $100, suggesting that Platner has major grassroots support from voters. He has appeared on MSNBC, scored an endorsement from Bernie Sanders, and has regularly pulled in hundreds of supporters at rallies.
In that original viral campaign launch video, a bearded Platner, his strawberry blonde hair tousled, introduced Maine voters to the issues central to his platform, namely, broad economic populism, taxing billionaires, and universal healthcare. In a deep, gravely voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in a truck commercial, he talks about his decade of military service, and “farming oysters to feed my community.” Interspliced are shots of him hauling up oyster cages, sliding a knife into an oyster to shuck it, handing a fresh oyster to a little girl. “I’m not afraid to name an enemy,” he growls. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”
It’s fitting that he centers his work on the water in his campaign; should he win both his upcoming primary and the general senatorial election that would follow, Platner will become the first commercial fisherman to be a United States senator.
Working as an oysterman has informed his views on issues like climate change and secure foodways, but it’s also shaped the way he relates to others—even those with whom he might disagree. His experience working on the water, he says, will directly inform how he moves in Congress. “There's a level of cooperation that exists on the sea,” Platner says. “Out here on the water, everybody's got a whole bunch of different political opinions, but if someone's in trouble, everybody shows up. And that gives me a hell of a lot of hope.”
Platner’s hyperlocal business is reflected in his platform centered around working-class issues, like making housing affordable, and supporting Medicare and Medicaid. His oysterman image is an important part of building his identity as an everyman working an honest job, a friend to the middle class.
It’s an image that resonates with voters. At an early October rally in Brewer, Maine he spoke about creating structural change to cheers from the crown. “Overturn Citizens United!” someone in the audience shouted, referring to the 2010 case which overturned restrictions on political fundraising, paving the way for super PACS. The audience erupted into applause. “It's nice to have somebody that is actually working in Maine, and part of that working class, to be there to represent the rest of us,” said Sabrina Williams, a 30-year-old Mainer, as she stood outside the rally shifting foot to foot to keep warm in the frigid Maine air.
Platner’s progressive platform places him squarely within the burgeoning class of populist political hopefuls—Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race, and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race, to name two—who have seen success in grassroots campaigns which lean heavily on progressive issues. But the candidates’ similarities go beyond their policy. They share a direct, plainspoken quality distinct from the vague, focus-grouped language voters are used to. “We ALL agree we’re all getting f***ed by the system,” Platner wrote in a recent Reddit AMA.
This emerging genre of politician touts an anti-establishment, anti-oligarchy lens which differentiates them from their establishment Democratic peers and opponents. Platner often says he won't accept super PAC money. And, he doesn’t mince words about Maine’s Republican senatorial incumbent Susan Collins whose long record of voting to cut Medicare and Medicaid stands in direct opposition to his position on healthcare. “Susan Collins is a tool of the billionaire class,” Platner wrote in the same AMA.
That messaging has been instrumental in breaking through the political noise to energize and connect with voters, many of whom seem to prefer Platner over Democrat-backed Janet Mills, Maine’s 77-year-old governor. “Graham Platner is the man for the job. No more establishment dems,” reads a comment on Mills’ recent campaign launch video. In an era of gerontocracy and career politicians, Platner, the 40-year-old oysterman, is a breath of fresh air on the national political stage.
But oysters are more than an image-builder for Platner. “Food has been a close part of my entire life,” he says. And, aside from military service, he’s spent most of his time in food and restaurants.
Growing up, his mother ran a bed and breakfast and founded a smoked salmon company. Platner's first job as a kid was raking blueberries and picking strawberries. As a teenager, he washed dishes at Crocker House, a local restaurant in Hancock, Maine. Later, after his military service he worked at a string of Capital Hill bars—The Tune Inn, Justin’s Cafe, The Ugly Mug—while he attended George Washington University.
In fact, it was while bartending that Platner had something of a political awakening. “It made me cynical,” he says. “I worked on the Hill so you heard conversations.” Listening in on those conversations made him realize one thing: politicians are human. “That was around the time I became convinced politics is not special,” he remembers. “Nobody up here is special.”
To many voters, it seems, Platner’s ordinariness is part of his appeal. As Kayla Bryant, a cashier at Dunbar’s in Sullivan put it: “I think it's about time the little man gets to decide something.”
