For much of its history, Maine has not been a hotbed of firebrand politics. The bellwether state was known for producing soft-spoken senators like Ed Muskie, Bill Cohen, and George Mitchell, typically described with words like “thoughtful” and “statesman.” But then, in 2014 came hard-edged Republican Paul LePage, a Donald Trump–esque populist smashmouthing his way to two tumultuous gubernatorial terms, during which he slashed the state’s social safety net and generated headlines with “wanted” posters targeting his political enemies and a profanity-laced tirade impugning an opponent.

Onto this scorched political earth now comes Platner. Like LePage, he is a mirror opposite of the soft-spoken New England Yankee stereotype. But Platner is also the pro-union, anti-oligarch antithesis of Vacationland’s former MAGA governor, which is why he scored an early high-profile endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders that supercharged his Senate campaign. And so far, his candidacy seems to appeal to each of Maine’s three political demographics.

“ I would describe Maine as crunchy Vermont progressivism, Massachusetts liberalism, and West Virginia conservatism,” former Democratic State Rep. Andy O’Brien told me at a Portland Elks lodge, where Platner was being endorsed by the Maine AFL-CIO. “ We’ve had this mass movement of people from New York, California, and Massachusetts especially, who are coming up here and retiring. But if you go to interior Maine, it’s Rust Belt, it’s Northern Appalachia, it’s a lot of devastated mill towns.”

The seventy-three-year-old Collins has won five Senate terms against opponents who were more traditional progressive Democrats. Those opponents typically lost independents and self-described moderates who liked the Republican’s pragmatic image, and they were routed among rural working-class voters abandoning the Democratic Party amid its embrace of cultural liberalism and economic neoliberalism.

Platner has said he does not use the “progressive” label to describe his politics because such terms mean different things to different people and are part of what he sees as a media-manufactured “political narrative that has been built specifically to keep us divided.” He is a social liberal (pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+ rights, etc.) and an economic populist, but he is also trying to avoid a similar fate as past Collins challengers by galvanizing a whole new cross-partisan coalition of so-called “anti-system” voters of varying ideologies and political labels.

He is wagering that liberals, moderates, and independents are now totally polarized against Republicans thanks to new wars, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and the White House’s endless self-enrichment schemes. His bet is that those voters will no longer prioritize manners and moderation and peel off from Collins, who they see routinely voting for Trump’s agenda, including his Iran war and two of his Supreme Court nominees.

At least one trend suggests this particular calculus is correct: In the Trump era, Collins has seen her share of Democratic and unaffiliated votes precipitously decline. Exit polls show that before Trump’s presidency in 2014, she won 39 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of unaffiliated voters. But in 2020, with Trump in the White House, she won just 13 percent of Democratic voters and 46 percent of unaffiliated voters.

But in politically divided Maine, Platner isn’t just relying on center-left voters to carry him to victory. He’s also wagering that the anti-Trump normie vote has been so radicalized that they won’t be offended by the kind of brash, torch-the-system message that might concurrently appeal to disillusioned working-class MAGA voters.

So far, the bet is paying off. A survey released in late May shows Platner nine points ahead of Collins, with a 12 point lead among self-described moderate voters and a whopping 20 point lead among female voters. Just as telling: another recent poll shows Platner is only behind Collins by 4 points in Maine’s rural and more conservative Second Congressional District — a worrying sign for national Republicans trying to hang on to their Senate majority.

The success of Platner’s unorthodox campaign so far might explain why even now, with the nomination all but sewn up, he hasn’t tried to avoid taboo topics that more traditional Democratic candidates typically eschew.

Case in point: he recently used a New York Times interview to declare that “I do swing kettle bells, I lift weights, I work on the ocean with my hands, I shoot guns. . . .  I want us to be able to reconnect with a healthier version of masculinity.”

It is the kind of testosterone-filled message that the newspaper’s liberal readers may be uncomfortable with. It is also the kind of message that has never been tried against Collins, who hasn’t faced a male general-election opponent in eighteen years, much less a late-millennial dudebro from outside the political class.

(Platner told me one reason he’s rooting for Michigan’s fellow late-millennial Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is “because I need a fucking lifting buddy” in Congress.)

Similarly, Platner used a recent Pod Save America interview to reject the historical revisionism about the Democratic Party being spewed by Barack Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau. During a discussion about the financial crisis, Platner told the program’s liberal audience that Democrats’ insistence on protecting big banks as millions were foreclosed on was part of what disillusioned so many working-class voters.

Platner also refuses to code-switch on matters of war and peace, as he campaigns against the culture of permanent war. During our car ride north from Portland to the rally in the barn, he spoke openly about the duality of protesting the Iraq War as a teenager — and then soon after enlisting for the thrill of combat.

“ I was against it, and I did everything I could — I protested, I got thrown out of a George W. Bush rally, I was fundamentally against it,” he said, referencing a now viral clip in which you can hear a teenage Platner screaming an antiwar jeremiad at Bush and a beaming Collins. “I still also had this deep, deep sense of patriotism and did my best within my rights to stop this thing from happening and now that it has come, it’s better that I should go than somebody else should. I also wanted to have the experience. And then also I was an angry young man, and the Marine Corps infantry is the repository for angry young men.”

For her part, Collins responded to Platner’s oft-repeated allegation that she “voted to send me to Iraq” by seemingly trying to blame him for enlisting in the first place.

“That was Platner’s decision to serve; he was not drafted,” declared Collins, who cast votes to block Senate legislation to end the war and bring Platner and other troops home.

One other matter Platner refuses to moderate on: the use of power.

“ I’m not a reform candidate — I do not see myself as entering the system and then just working only within its confines,” Platner told me as we drove past what he admiringly identified as the state’s largest oyster farm. “I believe in political revolution. Reform candidates only think about power within the context of the institutions they’re going to work in, and I think that power is far more expansive than that.”

That comment summoned a long-lost memory from almost exactly twenty years ago to the day, when, amid a Republican president’s second term, another fortysomething rising Democratic superstar said he saw institutional power very differently.

“This is a classic conflict within the left: Are you a revolutionary or are you a reformist?” a young Barack Obama told me in 2006. “I think within the institutional structures we have, we can significantly improve the life chances of ordinary Americans.”

Multiple wars, bank bailouts, recessions, and election disasters later, Platner was arguing the opposite.

So what would an aggressive, revolutionary use of power mean in practice?

For Platner, it would in part entail traditional legislation. Platner in his campaign is championing bills to raise taxes on billionaires, cap electricity rates, expand Medicare to cover everyone, regulate artificial intelligence, more strongly enforce antitrust laws, and tax the “ever-living hell out of the companies that made a lot of money on fossil fuels while they destroyed the planet.”

But his plan goes well beyond legislation.

“I think activism plays an intense role,” he told me. “I think mass mobilization plays an intense role. I think things like nonviolent civil disobedience, withholding labor, these are centers of power that we have essentially forgotten are part of the political landscape.”

And when speaking to the crowd in that Appleton barn, he said that wielding power also means a revolutionary use of congressional authority.

“If we get the majority of the Senate, we are going to shut the White House down,” Platner said to cheers, describing a planned barrage of investigations, subpoenas, and impeachment proceedings against Supreme Court justices, all aiming to grind the MAGA movement to a halt. “ If we don’t get the majority and things continue to get worse, I will promise you that I’m going to be arrested as a United States senator.”

The first time I saw Platner was well before he became American politics’ version of the Most Interesting Man in the World.

It was a late summer morning last year, and a short video clip flashed across my iPhone screen during my morning doomscroll. Platner was a total unknown, so I didn’t recognize him, but his deep voice, staccato rhetoric, and blonde hair kindled a memory of a professional wrestler. As a one-time Hulk Hogan fan, I stopped and watched. And then, I heard a line I had been waiting my whole life to hear from someone — really, anyone — running for office in America.

“I am not afraid to name the enemy,” Platner said to a crowd of 6,500 Mainers roaring through my iPhone. “And the enemy is the oligarchy.”

Platner was speaking at a rally with my old mentor Sanders, who had endorsed his campaign. To me, he sounded like a cross between the Vermont senator and another old boss of mine, Brian Schweitzer, a rancher who became a popular Democratic Montana governor toting a rifle, using a branding iron to veto bills, downing the occasional whiskey shot, railing against corruption, and touting Canadian-style health care. Only Platner seemed to be offering a younger, even sharper version of their politics.

I spent the next few weeks watching Platner’s viral clips hammering billionaires and corporate power amid MAGA’s rampage of corruption. The videos became a go-to salve whenever I became enraged at Washington Democrats following the advice of James Carville, who instructed them to “roll over and play dead” in the face of the Trumpocalypse.

After watching enough Platner speeches online, I began to hope that maybe this long-shot Senate candidate was the belated resurrection of the kind of New Deal populism that I grew up pining for, before I saw it drubbed out of American politics.

But then came my jaded internal narrator: Is this just another influencer rendering a character for Instagram? Is he hiding some more nefarious side? Is he some deep-state psyop, as one friend of mine suspected?

This was the question I explored with Platner back in October, when we first spoke via Zoom in the middle of his best-known controversies. As his campaign started gaining momentum, a video had popped up showing a bare-chested Platner years ago at a family event sporting a skull-and-bones tattoo he got when he was twenty-three and on shore leave with other Marines.

To most onlookers, the mark appears innocuous, but history buffs say it was a symbol used by Nazi regiments. Making matters worse for Platner’s campaign, there had also been a stream of headlines about his old Reddit posts that come off as racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and callous to some of his fellow combat veterans.

In one post, he wondered: “Why don’t black people tip?” In another, he wrote that while “rape is a real thing . . . how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?” A series of his posts use “gay” as an epithet and a punch line. Another post about a tax change for Americans living overseas suggested soldiers should “spend your leave banging hookers in Thailand instead of getting bitched at by the wife back home, and you could sell it as avoiding federal income tax.”

Responding to a video of a soldier taking machine-gun fire in Afghanistan, Platner wrote that “he managed to make every possible shit decision possible” and asserted: “Dumb motherfucker didn’t deserve to live. At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt. Poor marksmanship on the Taliban’s part is the only reason this mouthbreather made it home.”

During his Senate campaign, Platner has said he didn’t know about any links between the tattoo imagery and the Nazis — and in October, he had it covered with a new tattoo. Platner also repeatedly apologized for his old internet posts, insisting that his since-deleted online comments reflect the wrongheaded outbursts from a dark period that he has since grown out of.

“A lot of it isn’t even things I believed then,” Platner told the Portland Press Herald last year when the old posts first started making headlines. “A lot of them are just stupid joke comments. I look back now, and I don’t mean to be flippant, but it was just dumb stuff on the internet, and when I stopped being lonely and isolated, I didn’t use that as an outlet anymore.”

Republicans aren’t letting him off the hook. A pro-Collins super PAC has launched television ads and a website documenting what it calls “Platner’s hateful and bigoted beliefs” and declaring, “He’s radical. Dangerous. Too extreme for Maine.”

His critics cite the revelations not as proof that an angry young millennial went through a regrettable-but-common edgelord phase during bouts of post-combat trauma but instead as a signal that a Sen. Platner would be a Manchurian Candidate, one posing as a left-leaning populist on the campaign trail before transforming into a white nationalist version of John Fetterman, betraying everything he promised voters.

“As somebody who is deeply disillusioned with American politics, if I was me looking at me, I would have the exact same question — we’ve been burned before,” Platner told me about such concerns.

But he argued that some of his shitposting evinced a through line: “I had problematic views that were in relationship primarily to my military service, but even back then, I was fairly convinced that we have an economic system that screws people.”

How exactly Platner arrived at that analysis through his circuitous upbringing and career is yet another source of controversy.

Platner grew up in Sullivan, Maine, a town of 1,300 where his father was a local attorney and his mother ran a restaurant, plus at one point a bed-and-breakfast and salmon smokehouse. In a childhood he has described as “solidly middle class,” Platner told me he had jobs bagging groceries, dishwashing, landscaping, and maintaining the Appalachian Trail.

He also recounted a three-month stint on a financial aid scholarship at a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, where he said he experienced one of his radicalizing moments: when a visiting business magnate asked a student assembly which of them had ever had a job, his was one of the only hands that went up.

He soon stopped attending class and got himself kicked out, eventually finishing high school at John Bapst Memorial in Bangor where he said he became obsessed with reading books on Irish and military history. Upon graduation, his classmates voted him “most likely to start a revolution”; Platner’s yearbook includes a photo of him holding a sign reading: “Free Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Kurdistan, Tibet.”

“Most of the time when somebody runs for office that you went to high school with, it’s going to seem ridiculous because you’re going to remember a stupid kid,” said Josh Keefe, a Maine journalist who was in Platner’s graduating class. “But with Graham, everyone I’ve talked to from high school is like, ‘Oh yeah, that makes sense.’ He was always so political and engaged and had these opinions about everything and was always very principled.”

At a local coffee shop across from Portland’s waterfront, Keefe recalled Platner coming to his rescue and bandaging his hand at a teenage party after he had one too many beers and fell down a set of stairs. He told me he and Platner were friendly, although not close friends, and the two lost touch after high school. But he was aware of Platner’s decision to skip college and enlist and considered it consistent with his you-only-live-once disposition.

“It seemed weird at the time, like, you know, you’re going to go fight the war you just protested, right?” Keefe said. “But he was eighteen and just full of piss and vinegar. He seemed like the kind of kid who was looking for an adventure. I think a lot of us were like, ‘We gotta get out of Maine. It’s too small, and let’s go see the world.’”

Platner recounted the next few years to me: Starting in 2005, he served two Marine tours of duty in Iraq, another Marine tour on a naval vessel in the Middle East, and then one in the Army in Afghanistan. He resettled in Washington, DC, in 2011, where he took college classes covered by the GI Bill, then bartended at the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill after discharging from the military in 2013.

By 2016, he was back in Maine in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in combat. Two years later, to make ends meet, he did a final, short stint in Afghanistan as a security contractor for State Department diplomats, where he said he became further disillusioned with the war.

He came home and secured a $200,000 loan from his father to buy a house in his hometown. There he launched an oyster farming business, met his soon-to-be wife Amy, and became a community mainstay on the local planning board and as harbormaster.

Platner’s winding path to US Senate candidacy has given rise to all sorts of critiques and conspiracy theories. Some claim that he’s an entitled, benefit-mooching loafer who’s “failed at life.” Others insist that he — and his Maine voters — are committed Nazis.

The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, likened Platner’s call for a “political revolution” to a plot for a violent coup. Online conspiracy theorists also posit that Platner is the avatar of a secret Tune Inn–to-Senate pipeline supposedly overseen by Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim.

Still others cast Platner as an outright phony, claiming his upbringing wasn’t sufficiently hardscrabble or working-class. Never mind that his opponent, Collins, is a multimillionaire who married a powerful lobbyist.

To Platner, a history autodidact, the debate over his class status is an ancient and cynical tactic to try to keep the working class fighting among itself.

“The number-one attack that the systems of power use against anyone that wants to stand up for working people always begins with some attack on their credentials as being, ‘Are you really working class?’” he told me.

He added that he “ grew up in Sullivan fucking Maine, and my mom is still working because she has no money. My wife and I are . . . we’re not, like, broke, but there’s no money at the end of the month.”

Then he shifted to his larger point.

“The real question here is, what is the definition of working class today?” he said. “And for me, it’s essentially everybody who isn’t just making all of their money on an immense amount of wealth.”

A few years ago, Leslie Harlow, Platner’s mother, sensed that her son’s twisting life journey wasn’t yet complete — that there was more to come.

“The oyster business and connection to his community and community organizing became a huge part of who he is, and it felt to me that with all of this, that it was all going to go somewhere bigger,” she told me on a drive to dinner on Portland’s pier. “But I had no idea what that would be.”

The destination began to come into focus last summer, thanks to a series of knocks on Platner’s door — including from Sanders 2020 operative Dan Moraff and Zohran Mamdani strategist Morris Katz. Knowing Platner was politically active — they’d seen a video of him speaking out in defense of the local aquaculture economy — they started asking if he would run for US Senate.

Platner had been approached before about running for the state legislature — and he’d politely declined. This time around, he was less polite.

“That’s the dumbest fucking idea we have ever heard,” he recalled telling them. “My wife and I are poor. I kind of know how this works, and I know that we don’t have the resources to ever make it happen.”

But his suitors saw an opportunity to flip an old script written by Rahm Emanuel, who, as a corporate-aligned Democratic congressman, recruited conservative-leaning military veterans to run for Congress in 2006. Platner’s courtiers envisioned a candidate with a similar martial credo, only with Sanders-esque politics that Emanuel types loathe. And so they persisted.

”Within five minutes I felt like, ‘Oh yeah, this guy’s the real deal,’” Katz told me, describing his first meeting with Platner. “He might meet the criteria of a generational talent.”

As they pushed, Platner started reconsidering.

“He and Amy had like a week and a half to make a decision, and they came to me a couple times to talk about it,” his mother told me. “And for me, it just felt like, sure, this is Graham. These things just sort of land in Graham’s world.”

Platner had a rare opportunity to mount a legitimate Senate bid from scratch, thanks to Sanders’s early endorsement as well as a rare glitch in the political matrix.

Ahead of the 2026 election, Maine’s most seasoned Democratic politicians had declined to crowd into a tough Senate primary for the chance to compete in a difficult contest with Collins. Instead, they lined up to replace term-limited Mills, a conservative Democrat whom party powerbrokers in Washington had anointed as their choice for the Senate nomination.

In most states, that would have been enough to clear the field. But Mills had so alienated organized labor with anti-worker vetoes that union leaders refused to go along and instead backed efforts to recruit Platner to challenge the sitting governor. It was a radical act of rebellion against Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and his powerful Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“ There was just a very strained relationship with the governor,” Maine AFL-CIO executive director Matt Schlobohm said, explaining why the Democratic-aligned labor federation defied the party hierarchy. “ It was based on a theory of change that we’re living in a populist moment, and we need to start running candidates who can name bad guys, have an analysis of the system, and can actually stand for something. And there was a deep feeling that the governor does not fit that bill.”

The recruitment efforts proved successful. Platner jumped into the race in mid-August 2025 — and soon after, he said party operatives began threatening to destroy him and his family. The attacks shocked his mother, a local Democratic activist, but Platner remained unbowed.

“Some people in the campaign got told by the Democratic Party that you will never work in politics again; people got told that their careers were going to be over,” Platner told me. “I got told they were going to fucking destroy my life and rip everything apart. And we all told them to go fuck themselves.”

Platner rooted his grassroots campaign in the labor movement in Maine, among America’s more unionized states, where one out of every seven workers is covered by a union contract. During my visit in May, his campaign schedule was dotted with union rallies, and his speeches cast organized labor as the only force capable of combating oligarchy.

“ We didn’t get an eight-hour workday, we didn’t get the weekend because somebody wrote another postcard to a congressman,” Platner told a group of carpenters at a barbecue rally in an industrial park’s loading bay. “We got it because working people organized and fought for what they needed in the streets, in the hills, and in the halls of power. We need to recognize that it is not about asking permission. It is about taking what we deserve.”

Platner’s theory of power — who has it, and who should get it — resonated with the workers. Their union soon endorsed him, and members spent the weekend knocking on doors for his campaign.

“[The endorsement] is by far the most progressive thing [the union] has done since I’ve been a member, so I had to come and support that,” said one attendee who had driven down from Augusta to meet Platner. “I think it’s because it’s caught on to people that all the money now is above us in a big pile, and we’ve really gotta tax the billionaires.”

The exuberant scene at the loading bay contrasted with a sullen, funereal gathering at the Portland Holiday Inn the night before.

While technically the Maine Democratic Party’s annual unity event, the dinner for party elite in the hotel’s low-slung basement felt like a wake for Mills, who had just dropped out. Speaker after speaker, including headliner Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), lauded the deposed Mills. Despite Platner sitting near the stage and being the party’s presumptive nominee in the state’s most significant race, I never heard anyone at the podium mention him by name. (I was thrown out of the dinner shortly before it ended because I was told the event was closed to journalists.)

Earlier in the evening, during the cocktail hour’s muted mingling, Maine’s former state house Speaker Hannah Pingree told me the party will ultimately rally around Platner.

“ I think Democrats are just so mad at Trump and many voters are wondering, why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” said Pingree, a former Mills appointee now running in the Democratic primary for a chance to succeed her as governor. “And I think they’ve started to realize, okay, we can actually channel our energy through elections and through candidates like Platner, who is unique. I mean, honestly, there isn’t anybody like that in Maine. He’s a unique communicator.”

Platner unleashed those oratorical skills the following day at the far larger — and more proletarian — Maine Democratic Party convention inside a restored industrial building harking back to the blue-collar glory days Platner often references in his speeches. Candidates for offices up and down the ballot made their pitches to polite smatterings of applause. Then Platner took to the stage to blowtorch his general election opponent.

“We are taking back this Senate seat from Susan Collins,” Platner said in a stem-winder that Katz quickly turned into a television ad. “We don’t care that you pretend to be remorseful as you sell out to corporations. . . .  Selling out the same working-class voters who’ve delivered mandate for change after mandate for change is not forgivable. A performative politics that enables the destruction of our way of life is disqualifying for the role of United States senator.”

And then came another rallying cry on Platner’s favorite topic: power.

“I promise that I will never turn my back on the home that never turned its back on me, that I will spend every second of every day fighting for you, in service of you, of our shared vision for a Maine where no one is left behind, where the term ‘the powerful’ describes not greedy billionaires or corrupt politicians, but the people in this room, our friends and our families, our neighbors, our fellow Mainers,” he said to rising cheers. “Some believe that just by being here, we have done the impossible. But just wait until they see what we achieve as the powerful.”

At a Portland bar after the convention, I caught up with an elected official who remained concerned about Platner’s controversial past.

“Has he been vetted enough?” said the Democrat, who requested anonymity. “What Mills put into negative ads on him was like peanuts compared to what Collins has in the bank or what she has planned to do. It’s just a Democratic primary, so we shouldn’t presume that lots or most people even know that any of this is there.”

This Democratic elected official also cast Platner as a double-edged sword for the national party.

“One thing I will ask him now that he’s going to be the nominee is, ‘When do you stop burning against the caucus you’re about to be a member of?’” said the official. “And how much time should Democrats spend beating up Democrats?”

That’s a common lament among Democratic officeholders who often come to see party infighting not as healthy and necessary but as uncouth and counterproductive.

It is a view I personally disagree with, since I’ve witnessed those who cannot maintain their rage against the machine be subsumed by that machine. Two decades ago, while living in Montana, I saw farmer Jon Tester go up against Democratic Party leaders and win a contested Senate primary and a tough general election, storm into Washington seeming to promise a new era of populism — and then quickly become a go-along-to-get-along legislator, among the top recipients of lobbyist money and a powerful ally of Wall Street.

Those memories were rekindled when I heard Platner recently tell the New York Times: “I’ve spent a lot of time recently developing relationships with sitting senators, relationships that I hope will go far beyond just the professional. I want to be a functioning part of the Senate. I’m not going just to be a pain in everyone’s ass.”

When I asked him about the potential for a political newbie like him to be co-opted by all the enticements of Washington, Platner insisted, “ I don’t want to be their friends.”

His primary goal, he asserted, is simply to “get ten senators who can align on some very clear policy things and act as a bloc.”

But then, after a pause, his voice shifted back to the DGAF tone of his stump speeches.

“ There’s also the element that, like, I don’t want to fucking do this — this is not some lifelong thing I want to do,” he said of the Senate race. “I would rather be an oyster farmer. I love my life. It’s a good life. I worked real hard to build it. And if I’m going to go down to Washington and lose that life and have to go through all this bullshit, this is only worth doing if I can engage in the project I want to engage in. And that is a project of quite literally restructuring the American economy and restructuring the American political system. That’s the only reason I want to do this.”

He added that there will be “no amount of cozying up” to the establishment if he gets to Washington — and he refused to soften his criticism of Democrats to appease his party’s current officeholders.

For example, when I brought up the Obama presidency giving way to the Trump era, he explained it as, in part, a referendum on his own party.

“When Obama comes in, so many people are looking for this significant change, and then materially we kinda just continue with the same neoliberal policies,” he said. “It was still trickle-down economics in some ways. I mean, that’s bailing out the banks and not bailing out the homeowners. . . .  And we continue the forever wars. . . .  That engenders an intense amount of anger and frustration and I think total disillusion with the system itself.”

He said he believes part of his job as a candidate — and, if he wins, as a senator — is to tell the full story of the rise of Trump, including Democrats’ complicity.

” For the Democratic Party to continue to exist, for it to have any hope in the future, it needs to excise from itself corporate power and a relationship with neoliberalism,” he said. “One of the main reasons I’m doing this is that we need to have very public and loud voices explaining exactly what the fuck happened.”

Now that Platner is Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Republicans are relentlessly castigating him for the tattoo and the Reddit posts, including with a Twitter video spotlighting his joke about masturbating in a portable toilet while in the military. GOP groups and conservative media outlets have sent operatives and reporters to record themselves aggressively hounding Platner about the controversies. The clips are instantly reposted by conservative pundits and operatives across social media.

The criticisms of Platner’s Reddit posts are pretty rich coming from a GOP that has prided itself on being anti-woke and whose Dear Leader has been accused of — and found liable for — sexual misconduct, bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, and impugned John McCain’s military service.

But hypocrisy aside, there is a significant difference.

Trump’s scandals merely confirm who he is and who he unapologetically remains. Platner, by contrast, has apologized for his past comments and his tattoo, insisting that these artifacts of his previous self are not who he is today.

“I fully abhor what I said then,” Platner told me last fall, when his old Reddit posts first started being unearthed. “I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

When I pushed him about why he would ever think — much less post — some of things he emoted, he described a process of “burn-it-all-down” disillusionment and subsequent transformation.

“I’d given up, and it was in the checking out where I got really involved at the local level on the planning board as the harbormaster, in community organizing,” he told me. “And I just completely rebuilt my hope because I realized that a whole bunch of people around me, all my neighbors, my community members, people I didn’t even agree with, they were all good people trying their best in a larger system that was not going to let them succeed. I lost that kind of more nihilistic version of things.”

This is the catch-22 of attacks on Platner’s past: they end up telling the story that he wants to tell, a saga of contrition, growth, and atonement that a down-on-its-luck country may be particularly receptive to.

But is he telling the truth? Is he really sorry? Has he really changed? I approach those questions with an X-Files attitude: when I hear Platner on the stump or discussing his own personal struggles, I want to believe.

And yet the only one who really knows what else might come out in the coming months — and what is really under Platner’s tattoo in his heart of hearts — is Platner.

But here is what I do know after a few days barreling around Maine with this soldier-turned-oysterman-turned-candidate: I know that to date, nobody has produced proof that the Nazi tattoo allegation was part of a pattern of Nazi behavior.

It’s the same for the online shitposting. So far, nobody has produced anything suggesting his outbursts were anything more than just the impulsive, primal screams of an angry young man.

Most important, I know nobody has produced anything suggesting that these incidents during the darkest parts of his life are consistent with any policy agenda he’s ever been shown to have championed or is now advocating in his campaign.

I know something else, too: I know what it is like to have the worst fleeting moments and mistakes of young adulthood cast as a summary judgment on one’s whole existence. I know from experience that most of us are not the sum of a handful of dumb choices, regrettable moments, and cherry-picked tirades saved on the Wayback Machine.

And here’s one other thing I may not know, but I suspect: Platner’s Republican and Democratic critics don’t actually believe his old Reddit posts and tattoo mean he’s the Nazi supervillain, anti-American traitor, or online deviant that they breathlessly depict him as.

No, I suspect that is all performative pearl clutching, and that most of the political class’s angst about Platner is about something far more existential — to them.

I suspect Republicans fear that Platner could usher in a different Democratic brand — a populist brand — that could electorally destroy the GOP and end its ruse of pretending to be a working-class party. And I suspect the Democratic elite’s fears are about the same thing. I suspect it fears that if Platner unseats a Republican in a must-win swing state by speaking his truth about wealth, power, and oligarchy, his win could radically alter the perception of what the party must do to survive.

In short, it could force Democrats to abandon their own outdated electoral formulas and into a conflict with the oligarchy — a fight they’ve been trying to avoid.

For most of our lives, the Democratic Party has been a top-down machine mass producing ladder-climbing, wait-your-turn, rule-following careerists advancing on their elite credentials and incrementalism. It has been a Democratic Party that internalized the cultural backlash to the 1960s and came to equate toughness with warmongering and economic enlightenment with anti-labor, anti-government, anti-regulation neoliberalism.

This Democratic Party became convinced it could win elections by shunning populism and instead touting institutions, norms, and “democracy” to liberals who buy NPR tote bags, watch West Wing reruns, and hate Trump mostly for his slobbery. Indeed, Schumer screamed that quiet part when he triumphantly and wrongly predicted in 2016 that “for every blue-collar Democrat we will lose” in rural areas being pulverized by deindustrialization, “we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs.”

Everything about Platner embodies a rejection of that ideology.

He is a regular guy who has led an irregular, adventurous, imperfect, and at times reckless zigzag of a life and who never bothered with a status symbol beyond a Marine rank.

His toughness is represented not by bragging about whom he has killed on the battlefield but instead by his attacks on the ideology of permanent war and the genocide in Gaza — and also by standing up to demagogues who want to bully immigrants and LGBTQ people.

Perhaps most mold-breaking of all, Platner flipped off his party’s gatekeepers in Washington, jumping into the Senate race despite their threats to destroy him. Now he’s adding to that blasphemy by rejecting the kind of campaign Schumer and Democrats have long demanded. He isn’t interested in courting suburban country clubbers with promises of incrementalism — he is focused on winning over their country clubs’ disaffected workers with calls for “political revolution.”

“If Platner wins, it will widen the aperture for the kinds of candidates Democrats are open to and may change how risk-averse we should be when looking at potential 2028 nominees,” wrote Obama’s former communications director Dan Pfeiffer.

It will also prove that Democratic voters accross the country should ignore party bosses in Washington trying to tilt local primaries toward corporate-friendly nominees in the name of “electability.”

Those kinds of shifts are terrifying to a Democratic elite and liberal gentry that has such enormous emotional, spiritual, and financial stakes in maintaining the status quo — and preserving their own power.

“We are just a continuation of the same fight that Bernie was part of, which is a continuation of the same fight that the civil rights movement was and the labor movement was,” Platner told me the last day I spent with him. “Going back to Thomas Paine, Americans have been engaged in this project of trying to make us live up to the revolutionary promise of America at the beginning. The folks in DC, they contextualize none of this stuff. . . .  It’s never in a grander story. It’s never placed in history.”

It was Sunday evening, and we were in the attic of an old theater just outside Bangor. As the wood floors creaked, we could hear a standing-room-only crowd packing into the seats beneath us. Platner’s driver, a bearded fellow former Marine named Matt, has nicknamed his candidate “the grunt” because he never says no to any event added to his schedule. But for the first time since I’d met up with him, Platner looked bone-tired.

I was there to film a short video of Platner responding to the meanest tweets about him that I could find. He seemed numb to all of it.

“They’re going to say awful things about me over the next few months . . . because the last thing they ever want to talk about is policy,” he said, groggy after a short nap on a dusty couch:

The last thing they want this race to be about is raising taxes on the rich or changing our health care system [or] increasing the power of organized labor. These are conversations that they know they’re going to lose, and so they’re going to spend every single dollar they have making sure that we try not to have them. We’re just going to keep talking about the state of life for Mainers, and the reason why things got harder down here.

Platner’s press secretary pointed to the clock: showtime. But before the weary candidate headed to the stage, Platner returned to his favorite topic — in a different way. Still astonished by Mills’s abrupt withdrawal three days earlier, he started thinking aloud about not just how he wants to use power in the future as a senator but also about the power he suddenly has right now.

“We have an immense amount of leverage in this moment,” he said, as if realizing that new reality as he spoke the words.

For Platner’s entire life, corporate Democrats have screamed, “Vote blue no matter who!” insisting they must bend the knee to the lesser of two evils in order to stop Republicans. But having somehow torn a Senate nomination out of the arthritic hands of his party’s establishment, Platner sees that at least for now, Democratic leaders must bend the knee to him and his anti-oligarch politics.

“Everybody wants to beat Susan Collins, and we are the only ones who can do it, and they’re going to have to come to us if they want to beat Susan Collins,” he said, as the crowd downstairs grew louder in anticipation. “I’m happy to have them come along and be supportive. But they don’t get to tell us what to do.”