Portland, Maine

“We are going to take back what is ours. Because for decades, they have taken. Piece by piece, store by store, hospital by hospital, home by home, they have taken,” Graham Platner told a crowd in Portland, Maine last night. “They took so much they began to think that we didn’t exist at all.” At this, the audience let out a “boo” in unison.

That picture of American decadence was proclaimed to an energetic, age-diverse crowd at an event space draped in US flags. Yet Platner, far from being a MAGA populist, is in fact Maine’s presumptive Democratic candidate for the US Senate, after Governor Janet Mills suspended her campaign last month. Come November, he seeks to defeat incumbent Susan Collins, a pro-war establishment Republican who has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997. Multiple polls have him poised to do so, while, at the time of writing, Polymarket gives him a 73% chance of winning.

Platner’s politics aren’t entirely new. He’s running with the enthusiastic endorsement of Bernie Sanders, who also spoke at yesterday’s Memorial Day rally. Like Sanders, he promotes a class-focused opposition to the concentration of capital and the funding of endless wars. Yet Platner, who owns AR-15s and is happy to lean into Right-coded patriotic aesthetics, is still a fresh type of Democrat — one who can appeal to hip Portland progressives and inland conservatives alike.

Attending the rally were the typical New England progressives clad in quirky outfits and Birkenstocks, with some even wearing “Fuck ICE” t-shirts. But there were also many others who you wouldn’t immediately assume voted for the Democrats; perhaps, normally, they do not. Platner spoke of the “lies” of the system to which his opponent Collins belongs, decrying that “there is always money to blow up someone else’s children and never enough to feed our own.”

Platner’s power may be that he can articulate the classic Marxist conception of emancipation in a way that does not appear “anti-American” to the average voter. In his own speech, Sanders mocked his congressional colleagues who display large US flags in their offices while failing to advance youth prospects: “If you love America, you love the children of America.”

The Vermont senator pointed to the example of Zohran Mamdani in New York, and said that if Platner can win in “one of the most rural states in this country”, Mainers can “show the world” the power of class-based solidarity in electoral politics. Mamdani is post-woke in the sense that he focuses more on economic issues, but he hasn’t fully left that subculture behind. In Portland last night, the mood was different from a Mamdani rally — but the broader effect is the same. What matters is that a new crop of Left-populists is breaking with Democratic Party orthodoxy on key issues and, it appears, winning at the same time — in the broader discourse, at the very least.

The whole event in Portland was predicated on the promise that a new order is possible. It was, in other words, about making America great again. And — in a strange way that deconstructs all the American political binaries to which we are supposed to adhere — as the Left takes more cues from MAGA, it actually moves further to the Left in the truer, historical sense. That is, focused on class and economics, rather than pronouns and trans people in sports and racial extremism and all the other distractions. The only question remaining, then, is to what extent Platner can deliver on this idealism. “No one is coming to save us,” he warned last night. “We need a political revolution.”

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Nikos Mohammadi is a student at Columbia University.

NikosMohammadi

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