PORTLAND, Maine — Graham Platner, the Maine Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate whose candidacy initially lacked support from party leaders, carries himself as an underdog against a well-funded Republican opponent.
“We’re about to be outspent almost 5 to 1 in the next couple of weeks against the Republican super PACs that are pouring millions of dollars into the state,” Platner told MS NOW in a one-on-one interview Friday. “But I don’t think that that’s what wins, and I don’t think that’s politics.”
Indeed, Republicans are flooding the zone with attack ads, such as this one, highlighting the unconventional progressive candidate’s past behavior — with a promise of more to come — now that Platner is the Democrats’ only hope to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, with Gov. Janet Mills having bowed out of the Democratic primary.
Mills’ departure clears a path for the oyster farmer and Marine veteran, whose past controversial actions and statements have factored heavily in his campaign despite a groundswell of grassroots support, to take on Collins in November.
“We are not just raising a bunch of money from corporate power, hiring a bunch of D.C. consultants blowing a ton of money on all these TV ads,” he said.
Platner, 41, told MS NOW that he is not worried about the GOP ads against him, which he dismissed as outdated tactics from establishment politicians. He said Democrats need to quit doing the same. “We’ve played that playbook. That’s why we lose,” he said. “We’re doing something entirely different.”
Referred to as an outsider or inexperienced by his critics, Platner’s left-leaning agenda has already won him the endorsements of Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. But his past behavior cost him early support from the Democratic Party establishment — namely from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has now lent his 11th-hour support for Platner after Mills, his handpicked candidate, had to end her financially strapped campaign.
He acknowledged to MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” on Friday that his past poor judgement was the result of immaturity and ignorance from tough, bygone days.
“I got back from my four combat tours and I was a pretty isolated and angry young man,” Platner said. “And I went on the internet and I expressed that. And I had opinions and beliefs and said things in the past that do not reflect who I am now.”
Last October, Platner apologized for getting a tattoo on his chest in 2007 of a widely recognized Nazi symbol when he was a Marine in his 20s. He disclosed on the “Pod Save America” podcast at the time that he was inebriated when he got the tattoo and would have the body art — which he said he did not realize was antisemitic insignia — covered up. That followed his apology for a series of offensive online posts.
Bucking traditional establishment politicians, on both sides of the aisle, has been a main talking point during Platner’s campaign events.
“This is a system that is built to extract time and labor and wealth out of working people to put it into the bank accounts, in the pocketbooks of those who had enough already. It is a system that has been built diligently over decades by establishment politicians who have passed policies that have been written by and are in the service of those who donate the most money to them,” Platner said Friday at an event at which the local AFL-CIO chapter in Maine endorsed him.
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Platner told “Morning Joe” on Friday that he welcomes the newfound support from leaders like Schumer, with whom he spoke by telephone Thursday night. He declined to share details but said, “I’ll just say that nothing brings people together like wanting to get Susan Collins out of office. That is the priority for me, that is the priority for Senator Schumer.”
Recent polling shows Platner the favorite among Maine Democrats, with Mills, 78, gaining less than half his support since October 2025. An Emerson College poll in March showed Platner leading Mills 55% to 28%.
Platner, who opposes President Donald Trump’s unauthorized war with Iran, has pushed for expanding Social Security, providing universal health care, expanding funding for public schools and hospitals and raising the federal minimum wage. He is also a proponent of legal gun rights.
Still, it will not be an easy race to Washington. Collins, who has a substantial campaign cash advantage, has held the Senate seat since 1997, having successfully fended off several challengers in the Pine Tree State. But Collins is an outlier. She is the only senator to hold a seat in a state that has not backed her party’s presidential nominee in decades. Kamala Harris won Maine in 2024, as did Joe Biden in 2020, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama in his two presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
Platner told MS NOW in the interview here in Maine that he believes the only way toward real change is to move against the establishment politicians. “I think people have been consumed by an ossified, transactional political structure that cares far more about raising money than interacting with voters and answering questions from constituents,” he said.
“I have the experience of having been sent off to fight in Iraq as an infantryman,” Platner added. “Susan Collins, my senator, voted to send me over there, just like she’s recently voted to continue the war in Iran.”
Platner said he witnessed horror during his combat experience in Iraq. “I then came home to a country that didn’t know what to do with me, and I struggled for years after that,” he said. “Because of it, I had the experience of trying to figure out how to reintegrate into the society, but I also had the experience of returning to my hometown, building community and building a business and learning how to make a living on the sea, which in many ways saved my life.”
“Those struggles, those are the struggles that I think a lot of Americans can identify with, even if they didn’t go through them themselves, the experience of knowing how to have the highest forming, performing stock portfolio on the U.S. Senate,” the Senate Democratic hopeful said. “That’s not the experience that we want, and that’s not the experience that this political moment is asking for.”
Maya Eaglin is a reporter at MS NOW covering breaking news, politics and current events around the country. She was previously an award-winning national correspondent at NBC News specializing in digital storytelling.