This post was originally published on Truthout.org under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is headed to Maine for a Labor Day rally with “progressive” candidates for statewide races — including Graham Platner, a candidate running to unseat Republican stalwart Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) whose campaign has garnered attention for its populist promises in recent days.
Sanders announced that his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour will stop in Portland, Maine, where he will rally with gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson and U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Platner launched his campaign last week to unseat Collins, who has held her seat for nearly 30 years, having easily survived previous Democratic challenges. She is up for reelection in 2026.
In his first campaign ad on August 19, Platner called her a member of the oligarchy who has helped to erode the lives of working class Americans across the country.
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“The enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, and the politicians who sell us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins,” he said.
“Why can’t we have universal health care, like every other first world country? Why can’t we take care of our veterans when they come home? Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children? Why are CEOs more powerful than unions? We’ve fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage,” he went on.
Platner rejects labels, but has garnered praise for his statements calling Israel’s siege on Gaza a genocide.
He posted a photo on social media of his high school yearbook, where he held up a sign that called for a free Palestine, as well as other besieged regions like Kosovo and Kashmir.
“There is a genocide that is occurring in Gaza,” he said to Zeteo’s Prem Thakker in an interview.
“And at some point in the not-so-distant future, we are all going to be looking around and realizing that we failed the ultimate moral test of our time.”
Platner is a former Marine, and served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He went back to Afghanistan as a security contractor for the State Department in 2018 as well.
He described feeling a sense of “cynicism and disillusionment” from those tours, saying that he witnessed fraud within the military industrial complex.
Now, he is an oyster farmer, criticizing Collins’s vote for the Iraq War and running on a platform in which he claims that he “will never, ever vote to send Americans into a pointless war.”
