Last December, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was interviewed on the socialist podcast Left Reckoning. The hosts asked him about his approach to voters who are swayed by Trumpian demagoguery and played a clip from one of his town halls. In the clip, a woman in the audience asks him how he plans to deal with the alleged horde of “illegals” getting “free benefits” in Maine. The crowd of Platner supporters reacts with impatience and starts heckling her. Platner interjects to defuse the situation. “If you listen to what she was saying,” he says, “at its core, she’s angry about the same things you are,” only that anger was being channeled in the wrong direction.

Discussing the clip with hosts David Griscom and Matt Lech, Platner said that “when economic systems fail people” and the lives of working-class Mainers get worse as a result, then “right-wing populism arises” to provide misleading answers and “always blames marginalized communities, immigrant groups, those who are weakest.” The solution is to give a better answer, rooted in “left-wing populism, or progressive populism, a populism that is there to address the underlying economic failures.”

As he warmed to the theme, he dredged up something he vaguely remembered hearing several years earlier. “I forget whose quote this is but . . . be forgiving with people, be brutal with systems.”