General Discussion

Though a newcomer to politics, Platner turned out to be a natural on the stump. In October, at a low point in his campaign, I went to Maine to interview him and attend one of his town halls. Watching him address hundreds of people crammed into a small-town school auditorium, I could feel the charge in the air — that rare alchemy born when a politician is able to pull a crowd into a shared vision of the future. One attendee likened it to seeing Barack Obama when he first ran for president.

Platner spoke about the struggles of working people for whom a decent life seemed out of reach, about the disastrous wars he’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about the need for a Democratic Party with New Deal-scale ambitions. And he spoke to people’s feelings of being abandoned to Trump’s depredations by a weak and fumbling Democratic Party. “Nobody is coming to save us,” he said, positioning himself as a leader who could help people save themselves.

Since then, Platner has used his campaign to organize for causes besides his own election. He rallied against a ballot initiative that would have required voter ID and restricted absentee voting. (It lost.) When ICE came to Lewiston, Maine, a town with a significant Somali population, he urged people to resist the agency the way that the citizens of Minneapolis had, celebrating those who, as he said in a fiery speech, “do real things to impede ICE’s operations and physically protect our communities.” He collects donations for food pantries at his events. His campaign feels, to many of his impassioned supporters, like a movement.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Maine candidate — and I don’t care who they are, Angus King, Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe — nobody has ever had this kind of response or support,” said Hurley.