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Graham Platner, an army veteran and 40 -year -old navy who made four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, launched his campaign for the Senate in Maine Tuesday, joining a growing primary democratic field seeking to face the Republican senator Susan Collins.
Platner, an oyster farmer born and raised in Sullivan, in Maine, will appear on a platform for universal health care, affordable housing and ending the United States in foreign wars.
“I feel the obligation to protect this place and protect people,” said Platner in an interview.
Platner joins a growing democratic primary domain that presents JordanA former chief of staff of the former representative Katie Porter, D-Calif., And and David Costellowho challenged the independent senator Angus King last year.
Democratic Governor Janet Mills said She is considering entering the competition, while the representative Jared Golden, D-Maine, chose against Joining the budding primary in what, on paper, could resemble the best opportunity of the Democrats to overthrow a seat in the Senate in 2026. Collins is the only republican senator to represent a state that Kamala Harris carried during the last presidential election.
But she proved a difficult opponent to Blue Maine. In her latest campaign, in 2020, she beat the Democratic opponent Sarah Gideon by more than 8 percentage points, even though Donald Trump lost Maine more than 9 points.
Republicans have a majority of 53-47 in the Senate, which means that Democrats should return four seats in the middle of 2026 to take the majority.
Platner said that his experience in the army had helped shape his political perspective when he was preparing his campaign.
“When I joined the Marine Corps, I joined myself because I really thought, really in the American project,” he said. “I wanted to fight for something I loved and that I thought I was good in Iraq and Afghanistan. I looked at the two failed policies, failed strategies, failed tactics used over and over. ”
“There is a time when you have to start asking yourself what it’s for,” he added. “Why are you doing this? And when I returned as a security entrepreneur in 2018, what I started to achieve is that I just looked at taxpayers’ large amounts of money on the pockets of defense entrepreneurs, security entrepreneurs, all this device that seemed almost unique that I started to look at our wider political system, our biggest economic system, and you are just starting to see the same exact thing. »»
Platner seeks to connect with working class voters who migrated to the GOP during recent cycles. He underlined Golden, Senator Bernie Sanders, i-vt., And the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Dn.y., as figures offering hope to the Democratic Party at the national level and in his state.
“If we mainly focus on the fight for the values of the working class, the struggle for policies that help people in the working class, by recovering a large part of the power that has been consolidated in the kind of higher establishment class policy, I think that if you stick to this kind of thing, you can win,” said Platner. “And being trained in several of these war fights of minor culture is not the response from a distance.”
“I do not only identify myself with the most left left of the party. People like Jared Golden do an excellent job. This is why he was able to keep a Democratic seat in a Trump district,” said Platner.
In its launch video, Platner has excited “billionaires and corrupt politicians benefiting and destroying our environment, pushing our families into poverty and crushing the middle class”, saying that his military experience did not have it difficult to “name an enemy, and the enemy is the oligarchy”.
“I am not fooled by this false masquerade of deliberations and the moderation of Collins,” he said.
