In 2002, my classmate Graham Platner ran for student-body president of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, Maine. I remember watching him in our auditorium debate his fellow candidates. He was the radical, wearing a revolutionary proletarian costume: overalls and a red armband. (When I asked him about this recently, he told me he thought he had a history presentation to give that day.) I don’t recall the issues they discussed, but I do remember Platner proposing collective action to overturn some school policy — saying something along the lines of, “They can’t suspend us all.” The history teacher serving as moderator interjected to remind Platner and everyone else that, yes, in fact, they could.
Students elected the safe candidate, a future chiropractor. But Platner had other outlets for his energy and ideas. Around that time, he skipped school to protest the coming Iraq war when George W. Bush visited our local airport — and was forcibly removed by the Secret Service. In the high school yearbook, our class voted him “most likely to start a revolution.”
Nearly a quarter-century later, Platner, now 41, is not just the probable Democratic nominee for the Senate seat held by Republican Sen. Susan Collins; he’s arguably the most remarkable political story anywhere in the country. A former U.S. Marine and oyster farmer who, school elections aside, had never previously run for office, Platner’s August campaign launch once seemed destined to be a short-lived novelty. Not long after he announced his candidacy, Janet Mills, Maine’s two-term governor and a savvy politician who has been winning elections since before Platner was born, threw her hat in the ring. And Platner soon faced a succession of controversies. It turned out he’d spent years as a prolific Reddit poster, leaving behind a trail of comments — he called himself a “communist” in 2021; agreed in 2020 that “all cops” were bastards; used a homophobic slur in 2018; and, in 2013, argued women shouldn’t get blackout drunk if they were worried about sexual assault — that didn’t exactly scream “electable.” Shortly after those revelations, Maine voters also learned he had a Nazi-linked tattoo.