De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
In Maine, Graham Platner is betting centrist and right-leaning voters want economic revolution more than culture war.
Dit artikel komt uit The Economist
Graham Platner, the oyster farmer rocketing to Democratic celebrity nationally as he campaigns for Senate in Maine, is testing two hypotheses that could reset his party’s direction: that the censorious left can sometimes ignore past, regretted transgressions such as fascist tattoos or bigoted social-media posts; and that voters in the centre and even on the populist right are far more drawn to economic causes such as universal health care than they are repelled by cultural ones he also believes in, such as welcoming transgender athletes into girls’ sports.
Mr Platner’s commitment to the second hypothesis has already helped him prove the first. Revelations of past misbehaviour have not slowed his momentum. A little hypocrisy in politics should surprise no one; it is simply more obvious on the high-church left, as it also is on the Evangelical right, because of the particular stress those movements place on purity. But just as the right has withheld its sanctimony from champions of its own, such as Donald Trump, the left has embraced Mr Platner because he looks to be their kind of winner.
Janet Mills, the sitting two-term governor, gave up a bid for the Senate late last month. Despite her own popularity with Democrats, she bowed to the inevitability that Mr Platner—a college dropout whose previous public roles were serving as a harbourmaster and chair of his local planning board—would crush her in the primary in June. He is the presumptive choice to run against Susan Collins, a Republican in her fifth term, in a race Democrats see as essential to winning a majority in the Senate.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
Mr Platner is right to argue that, if anything, attacks over his tattoo (now inked over) and social-media posts (deleted) have helped him. They remind voters—or, at least, those Democrats paying attention—of what captivates them, that he has been hewn by hard knocks into a candidate struggling Americans may recognise as one of their own. As a Marine infantryman, Mr Platner, 41, served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He got the tattoo, of a skull and crossbones, while on a break with comrades, not knowing it was associated with Nazism, he has said. He has said he wrote extreme statements on Reddit, a social-media site, in a time of alienation and depression brought on by his trauma from combat. Returning to his hometown of Sullivan in eastern Maine to work on the water led him to „feel connected again”.
It certainly helps Mr Platner that, as he speaks in his gruff baritone, he radiates sincerity. It also helps that his explanations are reasonable (and that some of his posts were anti-fascist diatribes). „Rage-posting on Reddit was a thing, you know,” says Caitlin Murphy, a Marine, recalling her own return from service as she waited to hear Mr Platner speak at a veterans’ hall in Portland on May 17th. „What do you expect? He’s come a long way. He’s grown.”
It probably most helps Mr Platner that he is not a heretic like Jared Golden, another Marine and Democrat who, four times, has swum against the political rip tides to win Maine’s rural, Republican-leaning second congressional district. Partly because of vicious criticism over his conservative votes, Mr Golden is not running again. Mr Platner’s brand of politics is usually more at home in Maine’s first district, centred on prosperous, Democratic Portland. As fluent in the acronyms of the left as in those of the Pentagon, Mr Platner switches codes easily. He offhandedly recited the alphabet of persecuted identity—„LGBTQIA”—when, before a Democratic audience in Kennebunk, he lamented the party was failing to „fight tooth and nail for marginalised people”.
Mr Platner believes Democrats with progressive social values can win centrist and even right-leaning voters. To him, America’s cultural disputes are used to divide the working class by „the enemy”—the oligarchy and the political establishment it pays for. In a brief conversation after speaking to union members in downtown Kittery on May 19th, he argues that economic concerns far outweigh social ones. „When the hospital closes in your part of rural Maine, and you now no longer have access to good health care for your family, the rest of it begins to not matter nearly as much,” he says. „We can argue about all the other stuff down the road ad nauseam, once we’ve got decent health care, once people’s wages are keeping up with inflation.”
Mr Platner is a sure-footed, often fierce candidate with a potent account of Maine’s, and America’s, predicament. America had 90 billionaires in 1990 and now has 900, he says in his stump speech. „Do our paychecks go ten times as far?” he demands. When he was young, he knew people in Sullivan who earned enough digging clams to put their children through college. Now some of his neighbours work three jobs and spend more than 60% of their income on rent. That reality, he says, „is directly tied to the existence of Elon Musk”. Billionaires „stole” their wealth by distorting national policy. Mr Platner’s story of disillusionment with the wars of this century, and of the price he and his comrades paid, lends weight to his account of establishment betrayal, and the war on Iran is now sharpening its edge.
What a strange twist of history that the Republican Party happened to beat the Democrats back to populism. In 2016 Mr Trump upended his party’s establishment, while Bernie Sanders lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton. But the contest was just starting. Like other charismatic newcomers such as Zohran Mamdani, Mr Platner was inspired by Mr Sanders. Mr Platner would be just one vote in the Senate for such policies he favours as freezing electricity rates. But, he said in Kennebunk, his success has already caused „a bit of an earthquake” that may move Democratic senators his way. „The last thing they want to do is face a challenger like me next cycle,” he said. He is surely right about that.
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