The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Adrian Cole is a writer and editor who lives on Chebeague Island. His writing can be found at www.adrianvcole.com.
Whatever accounts for political appeal, it’s not your resume. Consider the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for one of Maine’s U.S. Senate seats.
Janet Mills is a two-term governor (and the first woman in the office). She is a former attorney general. She secured $60 million in storm relief funds for communities and working waterfronts. She was the first Maine governor to be invited to address the United Nations General Assembly, in 2019, where she discussed her bold climate action initiatives. She’s grown a $1 billion rainy-day fund for the state. She is a feminist hero — co-founding the Maine Women’s Lobby and passing significant legislation supporting gender equality. She led Maine through COVID-19. She stood up to President Donald Trump in support of transgender rights, and she was the architect of free community college.
I think most people agree, she is accomplished.
Her opponent, Graham Platner, is an oyster farmer with a truncated resume in public service. A few short years ago he was busy “shit posting” on Reddit, during what he has called a dark time, related to PTSD, alienation and disillusionment following military service. Many of these posts were highly offensive in nature — homophobic, misogynist, condescending and crude. He protested the wars he then enlisted and fought in as a younger man, because he kind of just loved war, which explains why he worked for the private military contractor formerly known as Blackwater.
Oh, and he has a Nazi tattoo.
Mills appears to be exactly the kind of accomplished Democrat that should inspire confidence from the party’s base. Platner is … risk with a human face.
And yet Platner is galvanizing voters statewide. He entered the race as an unknown in August and built a momentum that gob smacked seasoned political observers. By the end of the fourth quarter of 2025 his campaign reported raising astonishing sums. In a recent poll from the University of New Hampshire he is significantly ahead of Mills. The prediction markets suggest he will trounce her. The United Auto Workers union has recently suggested that Democratic leaders throw their weight behind Platner, not Mills.
You could be forgiven for yawning and saying,“Duh, she’s 78. Case closed.” Mills would indeed be the oldest freshman senator in U.S. history if she’s elected.
But it’s not just Mills’ age. Platner channels a visceral anger, and voices frustrations with persistent and real problems. He has also managed to associate not just Republicans but the entire ruling class with a betrayal of the working and middle classes. And then the term the “Epstein Class” was coined, and it dovetailed nicely with his own talk of fighting the “oligarchy.”
Platner, despite his own elite schooling and complex personal history, is perceived through a lens of authenticity and relatability by many — a contrast to Mills’ institutional gravitas, which while impressive, places her on a dais reserved for the political classes, the group of smooth-talking, besuited professionals who are sometimes hard to tell apart.
Platner’s “insurgency” exposes this vulnerability. And for his part, voters seem willing to forgive imperfections if they believe a candidate will fight for them.
One last element of Platner’s “rizz” (charisma) remains to discuss: The idea of a “grand narrative,” of his framing the political moment in the context of the long durée. This was really unveiled during his recent awkward and rather extraordinary “fireside chats.”
In one of these, seated on a wooden chair, surrounded by books, he invoked President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and characterized it as a transformational period in U.S. government. The New Deal, he reminds us professorially, arose from a fundamental reassessment of the role of the U.S. government. As FDR’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, put it, the role of government was not merely to let business run rampant, it was to provide good lives to all people under its jurisdiction. And not for nothing, Platner tells us, that our infrastructure today is crumbling: It was largely built under FDR, with massive investment and political will.
This is certainly not the first time a Democrat has sought to reanimate the New Deal. Platner reminds us that, in Mark Twain’s words, history does not repeat itself, but it does often “rhyme.” Platner’s contextualization of the political moment, therefore, comes down to recognizing the need for the Democratic Party to provide a government for and by the people.
Mills might have been quietly and politely working away on this project issue by issue. But quiet and polite (and elderly) may not be the order of the day.
