Graham Platner Isn't Backing Down

Summary

POD SAVE AMERICA — EPISODE 1128: “GRAHAM PLATNER ISN’T BACKING DOWN”

Release Date: March 1, 2026
Host: Jon Favreau
Guest: Graham Platner, U.S. Senate candidate, Maine Democratic Primary

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Episode Overview

This episode features Jon Favreau in conversation with Graham Platner, a progressive U.S. Senate candidate in Maine’s upcoming Democratic primary, running against Governor Janet Mills for a chance to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins. The episode digs deep into Platner’s political evolution, campaign strategy, policy philosophy, lessons from controversy, and his vision for Democratic renewal, while also touching on the personal impacts of a broken healthcare system.

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Key Topics & Discussion Highlights

1. The Campaign Journey: From Long Shot to Front Runner

[03:21–07:58]

• Platner has gone from unknown to leading candidate, surviving controversies over old internet posts and a controversial tattoo.

• He emphasizes campaign finance’s corrosive influence and the “political industrial complex.”

• Quote [04:48]:
  "There's a whole industry around this stuff." — Graham Platner

• Platner calls attention to the difficulty for "regular people" to run for office, with money, opposition research, and public scrutiny being significant barriers.

• Quote [06:16]:
  "It's borderline impossible for regular people to pull this off... I can see why people don't want to do this." — Graham Platner

2. Scandal and Redemption: Dealing with the Tattoo Controversy

[08:14–12:17]

• Platner openly discusses the Nazi-symbol tattoo from his time in the Marines, which he covered up immediately after public scrutiny.
• He frames the episode as part of a larger story about growth, change, and transparency.
• He describes a campaign strategy rooted in relentless retail politics, holding public town halls and engaging every corner of Maine to build trust beyond attack ads.
• Quote [09:30]:
  "I'm happy to talk about all this stuff. When that whole thing started, it never crossed our minds to run away from it... Most of us have not always been who we are today." — Graham Platner

3. A New Approach: Ground Game Over TV Ads

[10:49–14:35]

• Platner prioritizes grassroots organizing and hiring local Mainers to build campaign capacity, de-emphasizing out-of-state consultants and negative TV ads.
• Learning from the failed 2020 Gideon campaign, he stresses authentic connection and accessibility as key.
• Quote [14:35]:
  "We've held 40 town halls and we're going to hold 20 more before the primary... Making myself accessible in a way that isn't controlled... drives the comms team insane, but I think that's how you make yourself accessible." — Graham Platner

4. Contrast With Governor Janet Mills

[15:06–18:33]

• Platner’s main critiques:
  • Mills’ repeated vetoes of pro-labor legislation.
  • Her opposition to expanding rights for Maine’s Wabanaki nations.
  • Vetoing tax increases on the wealthy, even bipartisan bills.
• Quote [15:25]:
  "If anything, I am very much a labor candidate... The governor has effectively vetoed every single pro labor bit of legislation that's come across her desk." — Graham Platner

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5. Political Roots and Worldview Formation

[21:17–27:15]

• Platner’s political consciousness developed from a fascination with history, radical writers (Chomsky, Zinn), and especially military service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• He became disillusioned with American foreign policy, seeing wars benefitting corporations rather than regular people.
• Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts inspired him to believe that grassroots organizing could challenge elite power structures.
• Real-world organizing in his hometown around school board elections cemented those beliefs.
• Quote [25:07]:
  "The book really talks about the difference between organizing and mobilizing, developing a deeper theory of power... power is for everybody, but it requires organizing to bring it around." — Graham Platner

6. The Small Town Laboratory: Lessons from Sullivan, Maine

[32:39–35:54]

• Sullivan, Maine—a rural swing town—shows that populist economic messaging can resonate across partisan divides.
• Many Trump supporters, Platner argues, are motivated by anti-elite, anti-corporate sentiment that Democrats have failed to counter sufficiently.
• Quote [33:02]:
  "One of the reasons they voted for Trump is because Trump came along and he told them the one thing that they knew was true... they live in a system that is not built for them and somebody somewhere is robbing them blind." — Graham Platner

7. Where Democrats Went Wrong

[37:46–44:17]

• Platner points to the post-2008 bailouts, the party’s ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the decline of labor support, and free trade policies like NAFTA.
• He calls for stricter anti-monopoly enforcement, ending corporate-friendly donations, and returning to a working-class agenda.
• Quote [44:00]:
  "Until we use the tax code to go after the money that in my opinion has actually been stolen from working people... until we do that, I think people aren't going to trust us." — Graham Platner

8. Economic Populism vs. Culture Wars

[44:17–53:34]

• Platner argues that economic populism can win back culturally conservative voters, citing anecdotal evidence and favorable polling with independents.
• Culture war issues, he contends, are distractions "invented to keep us all from having the conversation about taxing billionaire wealth and breaking up corporate monopolies."
• He criticizes the party’s tendency to lean into these issues while neglecting fundamental economic reform.
• Quote [50:04]:
  "Some of them don't even take the bait. Some of them rise to it on purpose because they don't want to have the other conversation." — Graham Platner

9. Healthcare and Medicare for All

[55:00–64:54]

• Platner frames his support for Medicare for All in personal terms: as a disabled veteran, free point-of-service care gave him opportunities that millions lack.
• He highlights the need for a national system, envisions a positive economic impact for individuals and small businesses, and notes that incremental reforms (ACA subsidies, etc.) merely enable insurer profiteering.
• He acknowledges the challenge and necessary transition period, but stresses that almost every developed country provides a better model.
• Quote [56:22]:
  "It allowed me to start a small business... That basic element of foundational support just around healthcare is what allowed me to become a successful small business owner." — Graham Platner
  Quote [64:03]:
  "As long as there is a substantial profit motive with a substantial middleman, unless we address that part of the problem, subsidies won't be enough because somebody's going to figure out how to pull more money out of the thing." — Graham Platner

10. Foreign Policy and War Powers

[64:54–69:52]

• Platner slams the White House rhetoric on potential war with Iran, describing the D.C. foreign policy establishment as dangerously cavalier.
• He calls for a robust antiwar stance and a return of congressional authority over war powers.
• Draws from his infantry service to highlight the human and social costs of war, arguing antiwar politics should define the Democratic Party.
• Quote [65:17]:
  "I hate everything so much. I think it's disgusting that we've got people in the White House who are literally sitting around thinking about how do we sell a war? I mean, I went, we, we went through the run up to the war in Iraq. At least then the Bush administration had the decency to really try to trick us... At the end of the day, that's usually what happens. War is a racket, and there are people that make an immense amount of money off of it." — Graham Platner

11. Personal Note – Healthcare and IVF in Norway

[69:52–73:09]

• Platner and his wife traveled to Norway for IVF due to U.S. costs and limited insurance coverage.
• Recalls being treated with care, dignity, and reasonable costs abroad—contrasting it with U.S. healthcare.
• Quote [70:06]:
  "Even with the travel, staying in an Airbnb for two weeks, the plane tickets, it was one quarter the cost of just the baseline of doing it here in the United States... Norwegian hospitals where no one is sitting there worried about how much this costs." — Graham Platner

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On campaign finance and access:
  "[It's] borderline impossible for regular people to pull this off." — Graham Platner [06:16]
• On transparency:
  "Most of us have not always been who we are today." — Graham Platner [09:30]
• On anti-populist trends in Democratic politics:
  "There should be no such thing as a labor Democrat. That should just be being in the Democratic Party." — Graham Platner [43:45]
• On economic populism’s appeal:
  "When you just go out there and talk about the fact that billionaires are robbing you, a lot of folks are like, yeah, that's what I'm here for." — Graham Platner [45:11]
• On healthcare and small business:
  "That basic element of foundational support just around healthcare is what allowed me to become a successful small business owner." — Graham Platner [56:22]
• On war:
  "War is a racket, and there are people that make an immense amount of money off of it." — Graham Platner [69:39]
• On global healthcare comparisons:
  "Even if it cost the same, we still would have done the Norwegian version because it's just so much more pleasant." — Graham Platner [71:55]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Campaign origins, lessons from scandal: [03:21–08:30]
• Relationship with party establishment, small-dollar fundraising: [04:48–06:16]
• Strategy for overcoming attacks: [09:25–12:17]
• Contrast with Janet Mills: [15:06–18:33]
• Roots of political worldview, impact of military service: [21:17–27:15]
• Organizing after Trump's re-election, local organizing story: [28:31–32:39]
• Lessons from Sullivan, Maine voters: [32:39–35:54]
• Democratic Party and loss of labor/economic populism: [37:46–44:17]
• Populism vs. culture wars: [44:17–53:34]
• Medicare for All policy, challenges, and potential: [55:00–64:54]
• Foreign policy, war with Iran, Congress and war powers: [64:54–69:52]
• Personal healthcare story, IVF in Norway: [69:52–73:09]

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Tone & Language

The tone is candid, occasionally irreverent and always direct, befitting both the style of Pod Save America and Graham Platner himself. Platner leans on personal anecdotes and plainspoken accounts of systemic failings, favoring accessibility and authenticity over technocratic detachment.

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Summary

This episode offers a revealing look at Graham Platner’s insurgent Senate campaign, prioritizing economic populism, grassroots movement-building, labor rights, and anti-corporate accountability. Platner presents himself as both personally transparent—owning up to his past and pivoting it into a story of growth—and sharply critical of the existing Democratic establishment. His political approach fuses lessons from on-the-ground organizing, military disillusionment, and an unflinching moral critique of both foreign intervention and economic inequality. The conversation’s deep policy dives and focus on lived experience lend it an unusually substantive, urgent, and intimate feel, with Platner making the case for a new kind of Democratic politics rooted in organizing, not consultants—and a new kind of senator from Maine.

Transcript

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[Graham Platner]

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[Jon Favreau]

Welcome to Pod Save America. Jon I'm Jon Favreau. Our guest this Sunday is Graham Platner, who's running for Senate in Maine. He's currently in a Democratic primary race against Maine Governor Janet Mills that will be decided in June, and the winner will try to finally defeat Susan Collins in November. Graham has been on the show before. You might remember that his interview with Tommy in October is where he revealed that he got a skull and crossbones tattoo as a young Marine that he says he later learned was a Nazi symbol. And right after his PSA appearance, he got the tattoo covered up. I of course, asked about that, but I mainly wanted to learn more about what Graham Platner actually believes about politics, what life experiences shaped his beliefs, what his theory of change is, what kind of a person he is, and what kind of a senator he'd be. All important questions. Because despite the early controversies over the tattoo and his long trail of Reddit posts. Platner didn't just decide to stay in the race. He's now the front runner, at least according to the polling averages and fundraising totals. At the very least, judging by the crowds he's getting and the organization he's building, he will be a formidable challenger to Mills. And this will be a very competitive and much discussed primary in the months ahead. With that said, I really enjoyed the conversation and I hope you do too. Here's Graham Platner. Graham Platner, good to see you.

[Graham Platner]

Thanks a lot. It's good to be here.

[Jon Favreau]

Welcome back. It's good to have you here in person.

[Graham Platner]

No, it's an absolute pleasure, man.

[Jon Favreau]

You've been running for Senate for six months.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah, we launched the campaign on August 19th.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay.

[Graham Platner]

So, yeah, whatever that is.

[Jon Favreau]

Now around that you've gone from completely unknown challenger to rising star to scandal plagued candidate who face calls to drop out to fundraising leader and maybe, if you believe the latest polls, front runner.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah, it's been quite the whirlwind.

[Jon Favreau]

How has your thinking about politics and campaigns and being in public life changed since you started running? Like, what have you taken away so far from this journey?

[Graham Platner]

What I've taken away, I mean, I was already pretty cynical about money in politics and that has. That cynicism has just been supercharged. I mean, it is like, and the problem is like, you clearly need to raise money to compete for this stuff, but there is just a whole apparatus that seems to exist just to suck up money. And that has been really eye opening. I mean, the political industrial complex or the campaign industrial complex, whatever you want to call it. And it is this kind of like, it's a wild thing to actually interact with personally. I mean, we're lucky because our fundraising has been some so much small dollar stuff and because frankly, the establishment of even my party wants nothing to do with me. It kind of keeps all of that at arm's length, like automatically. So I'm not that, that mad. But you like just interacting with it. It's like, man, this is. There's a whole industry around this stuff.

[Jon Favreau]

Is it the time suck? That's really.

[Graham Platner]

It's the time, totally. And like, it's. I'm not gonna say I understand why people go the kind of like corporate pac, dark money route because, I mean, just ideologically I can never really grasp that. But from a practical perspective, there is an element where I can see someone who might not have the same sort of political foundation that I have being. I mean, if Somebody comes along and says, hey, you never have to make a phone call again, and you don't have to go beg anybody for money. I can see someone being like, oh, well, that would mean that I could do more other stuff.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Graham Platner]

Although, I mean, that's not in any way, shape, or form remotely worth it. But it's. And then there's just the. There's just kind of interacting with the whole media landscape and political world as a pretty normal guy up until August. And so, like, that's a whole wild experience. Like, I open my phone and see my name, and I'm like, I don't. Nope. No, no, no. I don't want to see that. Like, that's. It's just this very.

[Jon Favreau]

And it's not always good. Not mostly good.

[Graham Platner]

No, it's. It's. It's. It's. It's such a. Yeah. It's a very. Like, it's just very surreal. Yeah. And. And I. I also very much understand why. I guess the biggest lesson I have learned is, structurally, it's borderline impossible for regular people to pull this off. Like, if you're a regular human being.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

With not a lot of money and having lived a pretty normal life, who doesn't want to, like, just get your entire existence ripped to pieces? I can see why people don't want to do this.

[Jon Favreau]

I think about that often because. Especially with people our age.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And younger. Like, and everyone younger. Because we've. And if you. Look, if you've never spoken about politics or posted about politics your whole life and have lived a perfect life. Maybe. But you've obviously found out.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

You've said quite a bit about politics.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, your time. And everyone knows now.

[Graham Platner]

And everybody knows. I mean, like. And for me, like, it's a. When I got into this thing, I. I'm an elder millennial. I've spent most of my life on the Internet. I was well aware when. The moment I said yes to this whole experience, that somebody was going to come along with a bunch of resources and dig up every single thing I ever did on the Internet and try to use it. Like, I knew that was coming. And when it came, I was happy to talk about it, because, quite frankly, I think it's a pretty standard story of people that aren't trying to get into politics or just regular human beings in general. You go through phases in life. Yeah. You believe things when you're younger, you say things, you do things, and then you learn new things, and then you change, and then you become a different version of yourself, which, I mean, in my experience is pretty much just like what most people go through. So it was actually very kind of ironic that that whole thing blew up as if it was this huge scandal. And in reality, I think it actually really strengthened the campaign because a lot of people could, like, directly engage with that feeling of, like, yeah, I have not. Most of us have not always been who we are today.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

And we also have to very much understand that if we're going to build a better future, we need to keep an opening for a lot of people to change. Because if we're all stuck right now in some ossified political thought and nobody's capable of changing, then what's the point of doing any of this?

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. No, and look, we appreciate you coming on here. I know you talked to Tommy in an interview, which became part of the story, because he asked you about a lot of the old posts. He also asked you, and then you talked about the tattoo. You've since had the tattoo covered up.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah, actually, I had it covered up, like, two days after that.

[Ad Sponsor/Announcer]

I remember.

[Jon Favreau]

I remember a few weeks after that, I had a main voter who I know say to me, I like Platner. I'm leaning Platner. I don't think he's a secret Nazi. But then they said, you know, my concern is, I saw that a few people left his campaign. One of them said Platner knew the tattoo was a Nazi symbol when he started running. Someone else told CNN the same thing. I'm just wondering if I can trust him. Now, if you win the primary, because I'm sure you've probably been able to meet a lot of primary voters just campaigning around Maine and general voters.

[Graham Platner]

Maine's not very big.

[Jon Favreau]

Right. If you win, of course, Super PACs will run millions of dollars of ads to this effect. Can we trust him? Is he telling the truth? What about all these positions to reach voters who aren't politically engaged or aren't as politically engaged or aware as maybe some of the voters who've come to your events?

[Graham Platner]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

What will your response be, and what is your strategy to push back?

[Graham Platner]

So this response is going to be exactly what it was, which is like, I'm happy to talk about all this stuff. I. When that whole thing started, it, like, never crossed any of our minds to, like, run away from it. It was just kind of like, no, I mean, this is just. It's part of my life, and in many ways, it's kind of part of my political journey. And so I'm happy to discuss it. 1. What we're doing in Maine is we are truly trying to build a real, on the ground, organized, broad coalition of, frankly, working class power. And in the doing of that, in a state that's as small as Maine is, by the time we get to the general, I'm going to have either directly connected with a substantial portion of the electorate or. Or a bunch of people who are just going to tell their friends. And the way Maine tends to work is that people trust their friends and their neighbors more than they trust TV ads from political groups. And part of our strategy, quite frankly, is just to cut through all of it by engaging as many people as possible and personally interacting with this. I do three to six public events a day. I mean, I do not sleep much. And that's fine.

[Jon Favreau]

You might meet everyone in Maine, then

[Graham Platner]

we very well might meet everyone in Maine, and we go everywhere. I mean, this is not like we're not doing some kind of weird math about, like, oh, we've got our win number and we're only gonna focus on that. Like, for me, we truly need to change politics. And to do that, we have to engage with everybody, even people who we might not agree with, even people who might initially be very either resistant or hesitant or even oppositional to the message. Although we have found that when we do engage with those folks, we have a lot of common ground.

[Jon Favreau]

Have you had conversations with people who are skeptical about all the tattoo stuff or any of the old Reddit posts or any of that?

[Graham Platner]

Oh, yeah. I mean, how do those go? They go great. I mean, it's. Because I explain it. And frankly, most people are like, that all sounds eminently reasonable. And. And I think in Maine, folks, I mean, like, I don't know how to say this, but when people meet me, they tend to be like, okay, so he seems exactly like a normal human being. So it's. So that's helpful. It's helpful. So there's that. And then, I mean, honestly, we're also just gonna push back on TV primarily, like, with messaging that's positive. I mean, I really, I'm. I know that once we get through the primary that, you know, the whole thing's gonna. I mean, there's so much money's gonna get spent on this race, which drives me insane. Cause if I had my way, we would just take that money and, like, write everybody a man a check. Frankly, we'd be better off every cycle.

[Jon Favreau]

When you hear how much is being spent on the biggest Senate races, you're just like, ugh, what a Although I

[Graham Platner]

will say for us, the way that we kind of fight back against that is we're like, we're building an on the ground organizing apparatus. So a lot of we hire Mainers and we're gonna, we're gonna have Mainers learn how to be organizers in, in their communities and like, have them on staff. Like, we want the money that we spend to primarily be spent in Maine, not just give it to some D.C. consulting firm that makes a. Another stupid ad that we've all seen a thousand times. It just changes little things, but we all know exactly what they are. So by, by building that and by sticking to a very, like, cogent, constructive message of the kind of future we want to build, the kind of policies that are gonna get us there, and a theory of power building that is also going to be necessary to get us there. I think that's how we push through all this stuff. And in my experience, like, negative TV ads, I don't think they actually moved the needle much in Maine. You know, in 2020, Sarah Gideon race outspent the Collins race almost three to one.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. They had some money left over.

[Graham Platner]

They had some money left over. An immense amount of money was spent on negative ads about Susan Collins. It didn't do anything. And honestly, living in the part of Maine I live in which is rural eastern Maine, a lot of the negative ads about Sarah Gideon also didn't change anything. It was really more about, like a feeling on the ground people couldn't really connect with the Democratic candidate, primarily because I think D.C. came in and ran the race like an old school DC race, which is not going to win against Susan Collins. And Collins was a known entity. And at that point people could still sort of frame her as this sort of moderate. Roe had not yet been overturned.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Graham Platner]

Which is really important to remember. And I think that that to me just shows that it's. It's not really about the ads or even the money spent. There's. There's another. There's an X factor in there of. About connecting with people and about really being able to make people think that you are, or not think, but letting people engage with you directly to show that you are, like, authentic.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

And which is why I. I mean, we hold. We've held 40 town halls and we're going to hold 20 more before the primary, and we're going to hold a bunch more after that. Like, making myself accessible in a way that isn't controlled. Like, we don't screen questions of these things. People just come and I literally pick on folks who raise their hands drives the comms team insane. They are terrified. But I think that's how you make yourself accessible. And we need politics to be accessible again to regular folks.

[Jon Favreau]

So you're running against Janet Mills. She is a popular governor who's accomplished quite a bit in comparison to other governors, even other Democratic governors. Big healthcare expansion, free community college, more school funding. What governing decisions has Janet Mills made that you disagree with?

[Graham Platner]

So if, if anything, I am very much a labor candidate. I believe in the need to strengthen unions. I believe in the power of organized labor within our society to advocate not just for like their union members, but kind of for the working class in general. The governor has effectively vetoed every single pro labor bit of legislation that's come across her desk. She's been an opponent of labor. I mean right now I have forget how many but a bunch of union endorsements. By the time we get to the primary, we're probably gonna have the vast majority of unions in Maine because they have a not great relationship with the governor. And you know, to me like we need to pass the PRO act, We need to expand the NLRB or have the nlb. We need to expand labor courts and have an NLRB that actually acts as a good faith intermediary in like unfair labor practice disp, which right now, I mean it doesn't even have a quorum right now. So it's all not even functioning. And like someone who's vetoed pro labor legislation over and over and over again to me is not someone that's like gonna go to the mattresses to fight for it in dc. I also think that Maine has a very fraught relationship with the Wabanaki nations. We have a specific law from 1980 which does not extend to the Maine tribes the same protections that all other 570 nationally federally recognized tribes get. So it means that the main tribes have to spend a bunch of money on lobbyists in Washington D.C. because for it for legislation to impact them, they need to be named specifically. So they have to have people in Washington to make sure that Maliseet Penobscott Passamaquoddy that that gets added as words into bills. There have been multiple attempts to fix this and the governor has opposed all of them, both as Attorney General and as governor. So like, to me that is also a pretty fundamental difference around. I don't like a foundation of political philosophy. Like I do not see expanding tribal sovereignty in Maine as a bad thing at all. I think it's good. And I also think it's morally the correct thing to do since we have been not good faith actors in our relationships with the tribes and so like there are. And then last but not least, rather big one I think is I think we have to tax the rich. And the governor has vetoed multiple bipartisan bills, some written by Republicans, that were trying to raise taxes on the wealthy in Maine. Creating three new tax brackets was completely reasonable and the governor vetoed that. And again, that just doesn't show a commitment to going after where the money is. Which I think as we move into this next phase in American history, I think that that's going to have to be like a pretty foundational element of our politics going forward.

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[Jon Favreau]

I want to step back and ask about how you came to believe what you believe about politics. Like when did you start paying attention to politics and what was your worldview like back then and sort of how has it evolved?

[Graham Platner]

I mean I've always been politically. I was a big history buff when I was a kid, which in many ways kind of makes you sort of politically aware just because you're, you're doing that. In high school I was really, I was introduced to more critical thought like Howard Zinn and Chomsky. I, you know, at that point. But I, I remember reading those things and like being like yeah, some of this makes sense, but I also still was very much like a bit of a patriotic young man. So. And I always wanted to join the military. So I had this kind of, like, weird, like, militaristic bent that I really can't explain. But Since I was 2, I wanted to be a soldier. It was really after my military service that I began to think much more deeply about it, primarily because, I mean, I had four tours in the infantry, and I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I really came to believe that what we were doing was not what we were claiming to do. I could not figure out what the immense amount of violence I partook in, what that did for the town of Sullivan, Maine. And to this day, no one's ever been able to explain to me. I do know that some people made a lot of money off the wars that I fought in. And it wasn't the young men and women who did the fighting, and it certainly wasn't the civilians that we inflicted just wild amounts of violence upon. I. It's defense contractors and it's. It's folks in political power, like it really is. And that. That began to. I. So I became. I became very critical of American foreign policy, which as I then. That kind of just set me on a road of being, well, if I'm critical of foreign policy, why is there foreign policy like this? So I became more critical of our political structures. And once you start being critical of the political structure, you're like, well, why is our political structure like. And that takes you into, like, an economic critique, and you start to realize that, oh, I like, this whole system, in many ways, does seem to be built by people in power with wealth to maintain or expand their wealth and power generally to the. To the immiseration or diminishment of regular working folks. And I think, you know, the reason my. This campaign has sort of blown up the way it has is I think a lot of people are getting wise to this. I think a lot of folks are like, wait a second. Like this stuff that we all thought for years. We are getting a totally different outcome from what we claim we're trying to do. So are we actually trying to do the thing that we claim, or is all of this doing something else? And when you reframe the question of, like, does all of this exist just to, like, screw working people and make somebody else rich, suddenly a lot of decisions we make begins to become a lot more clear ye, like, man. And so that's kind of where I've. It's been a long journey. I mean, it's definitely not been. I didn't, like, have a day where I'm like, oh, I figured it out.

[Jon Favreau]

But, well, obviously. So obviously you're, like, shaped by your experiences in Iraq. You come home, everything you just said, you know, you could. You could have found out by just being on the Internet, right, and reading about politics and reading the news. But you decided before you. Long before you ran for Senate, to, like, get involved in community organizing, which I find really interesting. What got you into that? Like, did you. What did you want to change in your community specifically? And, like, and what did you find about the work? What was challenging? What was fulfilling?

[Graham Platner]

I forget what year this was, but I read a book called no shortcuts by Jane McAlevy, and she is a pretty storied labor organizer who sadly passed just a few years ago, which is a shame, because we could use her now. In it, the. The book really talks about the difference between organizing and mobilizing, developing a deeper theory of power in which power really is accessible for people who are willing to organize and to take it in many ways, in that we in our society, even in, like, liberal circles, still kind of have this vision that there is an elite who's, like, worthy of wielding power, and the rest of us kind of have to, like, you know, let them do it. And her argument is, like, that's simply not true. That really, power is. Power is for everybody, but it requires organizing to bring it around. It requires trust building and relationship building. And I read that, and it kind of changed my life, actually, because I began to think that, like, I spent a lot of time, especially coming back. My last trip to Afghanistan was in 2018, and it was just to call it disillusioning would be an understatement. I was there for six months, hadn't been there in seven years. And I was like, okay, well, nobody has any new ideas. This is insane. And I came back, and I was really kind of just at a loss of what to do, and I decided to kind of opt out. And I moved back to my hometown, became an oyster farmer, started working on the ocean, and really wanted to just check out. But while I did that, I also began to connect with my community. And I live in a town of a thousand people. It's a town I was born and raised in. I wound up on the planning board. I wound up being the harbor master. And in doing all that, I began to see, like, really the value of building trust and relationships and just organizing on the ground. And I also began to realize that organizing is actually not that complicated. It's just really hard. And that there is no graduate version of it. It's all 101 stuff.

[Jon Favreau]

And it's hard because it is difficult to get people to participate, to care, to break down barriers.

[Ad Sponsor/Announcer]

Well.

[Graham Platner]

And because you have to put a lot of time, unpaid labor into it, you have to believe and you have to go out into your community and you have to tell people what you believe, which is also hard. And it requires you to kind of open yourself up to a lot of people who, like, right. Like, people who. I know who you have to like, kind of say, like, this is what I believe. And sometimes people like, I'm not into that. You know, like, you're my neighbor. That bums me out, but you have to do it. And we had a number of issues in. In eastern Maine, for instance, there was a school board race and out of, frankly, an out of state pack came in with a bunch of money and backed a very anti trans candidate. And somebody who'd been on the board for 13 years, who was well respected in the community, who everybody liked, lost a seat. And a month later, the school district pulled back protections for LGBTQ kids that had been there for six years for no reason, just because outside packeting involved

[Jon Favreau]

in a local school board race.

[Graham Platner]

Sullivan and yeah, it's technically in Franklin, but yeah, it's like we have an rsu, so a regional school. And it was this moment for myself and a few other people where we, we watched this happen and we. It only happened because it was no organizing versus a little bit of organizing. They had people to knock doors and this guy had himself. It's a small town school board race and there was no apparatus to support him. There was no way of like getting people to knock doors for him. He was calling around almost like frantic, understanding what was happening. Like with a week until the election and there really wasn't anything that existed. And so a number of us, we'd already been. We'd already formed like kind of a small community organizing group. But we use this as kind of an example of. We understood that if we don't have people who can make signs and put them up, if we don't have people who can knock doors, who can make phone calls in their communities, talking to their neighbors, people that they trust or people who would trust them. If we don't build that, then we're going to lose this kind of fight. And so we just started to build it and we reached out to folks and we got a number of the other larger statewide groups. We reached out to local Democratic committee, we reached out to, frankly, just a Lot of individuals who we knew kind of had, who were worked up about this because every like a ton of people are angry. But again, there was no mechanism. And we kind of, we realized that especially right now after Trump's reelection, people want to do something, they want to fight, they want to get involved. The problem is in a lot of places there is no, there's no room to go into. There's no place. And we figured we just have to build the room. And once you build the room, people come into it and they start talking to each other and they start building relationships. And I mean, the way we did it was pretty non hierarchical. So essentially like folks who get together and be like, this is the thing I care about, she was like, I care about that too. And like, go forth and make that a campaign. And it worked like we, we actually wound up like winning the next school board race. And like we, and we're still like kind of now we're trying to get candidates to run for county commissioner, stuff like that. So there is a, to me, that was a direct. It was a moment where I realized, oh man, this kind of power building is very real. Yeah, it just requires people to really get out of their comfort zone and start building relationships again. And for me, it's, it's kind of, it was the foundation of when the campaign started. One of the reasons I agreed to do this was purely to use it as a statewide organizing like vehicle. With the visibility and the resources that we're going to get, we can take that kind of strategy, those kind of tactics, that kind of on the ground trust building that we do, and we can supercharge it and we can get the labor unions involved and we can get all the other community organizations around the state involved. And then we can bring in all these people who engage with politics via electoral campaigns and we can train them how to be organizers and activists in their community. And I think that's how you build the apparatus to knock on enough doors, talk to enough people and build enough trust. Where, I mean, I'm pretty. I'm convinced we're not just going to beat Susan Collins in November. I think we're going to trounce Susan Collins. And if the worst thing happens and we have an election that is contested or called into question, will we still have an apparatus to turn people out, to actually have people mobilize? And if we have to, you know, resist fascism in the streets with a mass movement, which is really the only way you can, and we're trying to build the apparatus to do both. And when we're done, we want it to stay. I don't want any of this to die because one single Senate seat's not going to get us universal health care. So we're going to need to have the power of people still on our side in order to, like, get the wins we're going to need down the road.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm a nerd. So I looked up the election results in Sullivan for the last decade. Quite a bellwether. Barely goes for Trump in 2016 by, like, less than 1%. Although, as you said, it's like a thousand people.

[Graham Platner]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

Jared golden barely wins in 18, barely flips to Biden in 20. Trump squeaks out a win in 2024.

[Graham Platner]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm sure, you know, most of the people there, what are their politics like, what do people believe there?

[Graham Platner]

It's a. I mean, everybody works really hard. Eastern Maine is economically depressed. We have. It's most. It's commercial fishing. It is a lot of construction, mostly because we have some pretty substantial summer communities nearby, which brings money in. And then across the bay from us, we have Acadia National Park. So there's a lot of folks that work in industries that are related to tourism. So it's a very. It's a very working class area, which I frankly, is, I think why it is this kind of weird back and forth between, like, Trumpism and not Trumpism. Because, I mean, Trump. I have a lot of friends who voted for Donald Trump three times, and they hate billionaires. They think corporate tech folks are, like, manipulating all of us. They think that corporate owned agriculture and food systems are exploiting all of us and essentially poisoning us. They think that hedge funds and private equity are, like, destroying working people's lives. I agree with all of this. One of the reasons they voted for Trump is because Trump came along and he told them the one thing that they knew was true, was true, which is that they live in a system that is not built for them and somebody somewhere is robbing them blind. And once he said that, they were willing to kind of forgive all the other stuff, because that's the core thing that people understand that we live in a political and economic system that does not have their best interests at heart. When you tell people that something they know in their bones is real, they're willing to kind of go along with a lot more, I think afterwards. And one of the biggest problems we as Democrats have had is that we didn't have a counter to that. We told folks that we had to protect the status quo. We told folks that, no, the economic system's actually doing great. Did you guys not see that? The Wall Street's doing fine. GDP looks great, Unemployment is record low. Yeah, but everybody works three jobs and they hate them. So it doesn't matter if unemployment's low. Working people are working themselves to the bone. I think that that's why I'm utterly convinced that economic populism going after the oligarchy, that is how we kind of rebuild trust with working people. And I mean, I say this, this is not like a radical idea. I mean, honestly, it seems pretty obvious. But the Democratic Party, at least elements of it, certainly in D.C. have, have really walked away from that. And I think working people walked away from them because of it. Foreign.

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[Graham Platner]

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[Jon Favreau]

So I want to talk about that a little more. Like, what do you think happened? Because Hancock county, where Sullivan is, went for Obama by 17 points, 2012. And you know, obviously I've heard you say, and I get it, that the Democratic Party has become too tied to corporate interests. Like where specifically has the party gone wrong in the last decade in terms of policies, decisions, positions? Are there things you can point to where you're like, that's what they are.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. The financial crisis, bailing out the banks, bailing out the big industries, letting people walk away with gold or jump away with golden parachutes while those banks still turned around and foreclosed on people's homes, while the average working person saw their, frankly, their retirement savings just disappear. And then we watched the political apparatus back up the people that broke the thing in the first place. I think that was huge. That broke a lot of trust. And then further on, you know, like the.

[Jon Favreau]

So I. So I was in, you know, I was there, I was in the White House. We sort of knew that this was gonna happen. We walk into the White House, Bush had already done the bailout.

[Graham Platner]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

And we can't really undo it at that point because we can't let the banks fail because the whole system goes under and we make sure that the banks pay all the money back with interest.

[Graham Platner]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

The fucking executives get away with the golden parachutes. And I remember like trying to. I remember talking to Larry Summers about it and I was like, he's like, we, it's contract. We can't claw back the bonuses. Like, it's illegal. We're gonna get fought. And I'm like, okay, you talk about contract law, but there's like people with pitchforks outside the White House.

[Graham Platner]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

So like, you know, same thing with like, why didn't anyone go to jail? Well, the laws aren't there. The doj. DOJ won't prosecute. Cause the laws aren't there. And obviously we can't direct the DOJ to do anything anyway. Obama gives an interview where he calls these people fat cats. He gets in trouble for calling them fat cats, let alone all the policies. I think looking back, there's plenty of criticism over our housing policy, though even then at the time, I remember being like, well, we'd love to bail out people who like, lost their homes in this, but what about. We don't want to bail out the people who bought second and third homes that they knew they couldn't afford, because then we're rewarding people who acted irresponsibly. So there was all this. We passed the Recovery Act. We passed the Affordable Care Act. We spend a whole bunch of money that then we lose the midterms over

[Graham Platner]

spending that much money.

[Jon Favreau]

And I only bring this up, not to defend any of it, because I often look back on it and think, like, we're gonna have another crisis and another crisis. And you get Republicans who are like, we'll let the whole fucking thing fail and we don't care, and then we'll just blame the immigrants.

[Graham Platner]

That's right.

[Jon Favreau]

And then you get the Democrats being like, okay, we're gonna try our best to solve the problem, and then it's not gonna be good enough. And then everyone's gonna hate us and say that we are tied to corporate interests.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, it's like, it's a hard.

[Graham Platner]

Totally. But I also think that that's why I'll just be entirely upfront. I mean, I think that's why we need to kind of change the political will of the Democratic Party to go a little bit further to. To actually go after. I mean, people should have gone to prison. I mean, Iceland put people in prison. And I understand that. I mean, but Trump administration's happy to abuse the Justice Department.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

And send them after folks. They send them after, like, Comey. Because he hurt Trump's feelings. I honestly don't think the American people would be angry if the Justice Department went after folks that, like, destroyed their retirement savings or kicked their neighbors out of their homes. It's a. And I. And that's the problem, I think.

[Jon Favreau]

But even before that, like, I mean, I assume. Yeah, maybe they would be upset. I assume we want to make sure the Justice Department only goes after people who actually broke the law.

[Graham Platner]

Who actually broke the law. Of course.

[Jon Favreau]

But then the question is like, yeah,

[Graham Platner]

but also we need to pass the fucking laws. Well, that's. But that's the other thing. But that's the other thing. Like, we need people in the Senate and the House who want to pass these laws and also, frankly, put enforcement mechanisms in place. Yes, that's one of our biggest problems right now. We've got lots of laws, but then they get broken. I mean, the Trump administration breaks the law every day, and then a lot of people just stand around like, well, what do we do? Like, what's the mechanism to actually enforce this stuff? And again, like, I'M not, I don't, I don't think that the criticism is always correct, but the criticism is absolutely there and it's driven like the kind of narrative. And that's why I honestly, that's why I think that the only way to regain the trust of the American people as Democrats is to be radically different than what we've had to really become. Like there should be no such thing as a labor Democrat. That should just be being in the Democratic Party. We do need to cut ties with the, I would say the larger, the donor world that comes from the financial system, the donor world that comes from Silicon Valley. Like that wants to use AI to either put us all out of work or I guess maybe kill us all. As of a couple days ago, it's very insane. We need to cut ties with that and I think we need to do it in a very clear public manner. Until we do, I think a lot of folks are still going to see Democrats as beholden to the same corporate apparatus that the Republicans are. The problem is, is that the Republicans have the, have the weapon of just blaming marginalized communities, blaming immigrants. We need to blame the oligarchy. We need to blame the corporate power that resulted in the deregulation of the banking system. I mean, that's a big one. We, we used to have laws in place. There's a reason 2008 happened in 2008 and not 1994. I mean it, we changed rules and frankly a lot of Democrats supported that stuff. And until we become a party that doesn't do that, until we become the party that uses the tax code to go after the money that in my opinion has actually been stolen from working people in this country over the past four decades. Until we use frankly like the anti monopoly laws we already have on the books, we just have to stop having Robert Bork's wild reading of what a monopoly is. Until we do that, I think people aren't going to trust us.

[Jon Favreau]

I guess a big question I've had for much of the last decade is like, can Democrats win over people who have more culturally conservative beliefs with economic populism alone? Because I very much want to believe that the answer is yes. I have not seen the evidence that it can. And I realize the sample size is small, but you know, Bernie Sanders runs in 2016. Bernie Sanders runs in 2020, gets a hell of a lot of votes, still getting big crowds, did not win either race, obviously. Friend Sherrod Brown, who there's a perfect example of an economically populist Democrat who still holds liberal views on other issues, has not sort of tacked to the middle on any cultural views, held out in Ohio for a while and then just lost his last race and hopefully he wins again this year as well.

[Graham Platner]

Oh, fingers crossed.

[Jon Favreau]

But, but what do you think about that?

[Graham Platner]

I think that it's. When I think the landscape has changed. Now. I, I do fundamentally think that a lot of people even who hold culturally conservative views are realizing that they are in fact getting taken for a ride on the economic side. I think it's more clear now that it has been. Also, this can be a little. But the Epstein files also are showing people of all political stripes that there is in fact a class of people who lives above accountability and lives above and kind of sees the rest of us as like a, like this sort of amorphous blob to either just extract wealth out of so they can go live depraved lifestyles. I think that's actually really helpful one because it's, you know, people are realizing that it's true. Yeah, but, but in my experience in Maine thus far, I have a lot of people come up to me at events and in public who identify as Republicans, identify as conservatives, tell me straight up that they do not agree with some of the things I say, but that they think the fact that I'm fighting back against the establishment in the system, that that's more important and that's why they're going to vote for me. And it's anecdotal, but it's all. But it also pans out in the polling. I mean, we do really well with independents for a long time. The whole story was, is that independents are this like magic moderate middle and that if you have any kind of sort of, you know, populist or progressive, as we define it, views that you'll never appeal to those folks. Well, it turns out when you just go out there and talk about the fact that billionaires are robbing you, a lot of folks are like, yeah, that's what I'm here for. That's the. And so it's. So I think the landscape has somewhat changed. But like, you know, with Sherrod Brown, Sherrod was a victim of the larger failure of the Democratic Party. He was not a victim of his own politics. I think, you know, Ohio went from being a blue stronghold of unions to becoming this red stronghold of disenfranchised, angry working class people who 30 years ago were Democrats.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

Because they were all in labor unions. And then, I mean, it's not like in the 1990s. It's not like the Clinton administration really stood up for labor. You know, we. The Democratic Party has a lot of a role to play in the diminishment of labor power in the free trade projects like nafta that really did, in the end, screw a lot of working Americans. You know, I think that when you put it into the greater context, I think that's what's happening. And in this moment, frankly, just because of the material reality that people are living in, it is becoming very clear to a lot of folks, whether they're conservative or liberal or whatever you want or just in the middle and don't even care about politics, there's becoming a very clear awareness that they are, in fact, being taken for a ride by people with immense amounts of power.

[Jon Favreau]

And.

[Graham Platner]

And that those who are willing up. Willing to stand up to that power, those are the people they're going to look to and support. And I think they're willing to sort of not care, actually about a lot of the culture war stuff, which, in my opinion, and I say this often, I think was all invented to keep us all from having the conversation about taxing billionaire wealth and breaking up corporate monopolies. I think that's why we have to argue about all these culture war issues that in reality, I mean, it keeps us all divided, but it doesn't reopen the hospital, and it doesn't change the fact that your rent continues to go up or that the wages that you've been earning continue to stagnate while the prices of goods and services continue to rise. All the culture war stuff, there's nothing for that. And we need to be very clear and cogent and blunt about how we're gonna change it. And I think if we do that, I do think that there is an opening to do this.

[Jon Favreau]

Do you think the Democrats have, I don't wanna say, taken the bait, but engaged too much in some of these culture wars?

[Graham Platner]

Totally. And I think they have taken the bait. And I'll be entirely honest, I think some of them. Some of them don't even take the bait. Some of them rise to it on purpose because they don't wanna have the other conversation. I mean, there is an element, I see this all the time of, you know, more kind of establishment folks who are like, look, I don't want to talk about this, but they make me talk about it. And now I'm going to talk about how I don't want to talk about it for the next four hours, and I'll never talk about raising Taxes on billionaires. And I think there's an element within the party that actually likes this stuff because it gives them this ability to pretend they hate this, but it sucks up all the oxygen. So then you never have to get around to the structural or systemic reforms that we have to make.

[Jon Favreau]

Sometimes I wonder if it's because the coalition of the Democratic Party is now more college educated and upper income than it's ever been. Yep. That, like, what gets people angry and what gets people, like, eager to participate in politics are some of these issues which, you know, and I, I will say, like, I'm sure people feel strongly. I feel strongly about a lot of

[Graham Platner]

same people very much. And I'm cultural issues and I am like, I do not back away from things.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Graham Platner]

I think all the wins we've made for justice and equality, we take no steps back from any of this stuff.

[Jon Favreau]

But I'm also very aware as someone who, like, now has money, that you're like, oh, when your life is like, comfortable, right. Then you can say that, like, yes, it's important that people care about raising taxes and people care about healthcare, but also, are you gonna be as angry about it as everyone else? And I think that, like, I, I am because I am very politically engaged. But I think for a lot of people who just show up at elections who are like more suburban, upper income, stuff like that, who' voting Democrat for a long time, I, I wonder if it's like the driving force for them.

[Graham Platner]

It might be, but. But we're not winning with that.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Graham Platner]

I mean, there's that, there's that, there's that great Chuck Schumer line where, you know, it's. And, and for everyone, we lose for every, like, for every working class person, we lose, like out in the countryside, we're going to gain two voters in, in the suburb.

[Jon Favreau]

Suburb.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah. And it didn't happen.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

Donald Trump won and then he won again and we lost a lot of seats around the country. Like, so clearly that math did not pan out. I truly think that the only way forward for us as a party is to really become a real party of working people again. And, you know, when you do that, it doesn't mean you're like, also not. I mean, look, when I talk about working people, I literally mean anybody that just makes money from wages.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

Which is everybody.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

I mean, I'll just be like, I've had a bunch of folks like, well, what about the middle class? I'm like, yeah, man, in this America, the middle class is the working class. Quite frankly, somebody that started a business and has just worked their asses off every day ever since and might now have like a bunch of money, but still works, they're way closer to someone working three jobs in poverty than they are to a billionaire. Like, like you, like, we're all kind of down here and when we talk about policies about clawing a lot of that wealth back, we're not talking about going after small business owners, we're not talking about going after big business owners. We're talking about going after the people who used their wealth and power to change policies in the political system to then consolidate more wealth and power. They cheated. And we need to use political power to claw that stuff back. So I think that by becoming the party of representing working folks, we really would be becoming the party of like really representing the vast majority of Americans. And as people begin to realize that this right wing populism, it's not making things cheaper, right? And it's not reopening hospitals and it's not making your health insurance company any less awful to deal with, that realization will kick in and you know, even look at everybody. But I think we will start getting folks back. But we need to be there with open arms and we need to be there with policies that are very understandable. I mean, I think that's a big one.

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[Graham Platner]

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[Graham Platner]

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[Jon Favreau]

Well, I want to talk about Medicare for all.

[Graham Platner]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

Because I know that's like central to your campaign and I now feel like I have talked about healthcare for most of my life in politics and went through this in the 2020 campaign. Obviously had been there for ACA as well. So I've dealt with a lot of healthcare politics. I think insurance companies are horrible. I think that the for profit system is insane and I think it is a no brainer that if we were starting from scratch that we would have a single payer system or some version of a single payer system. I think that the, the figuring out how to win the political support to transition from what we have now to a single payer system, Medicare for all or something like it is a political challenge that is made more difficult in large part by all the money that the insurance companies and everyone else has. But there are also some real trade offs and transitions that I think average people who very much dislike their insurance companies are still concerned about. And they tried. They put it on the ballot in Colorado in 2016 as a ballot initiative. Medicare for all fails. Oregon fails, California fails. They pass it in Vermont, the only state that's tried and then they failed at implementation. Right.

[Graham Platner]

Well one is because it needs to be a national policy.

[Ad Sponsor/Announcer]

Yes.

[Graham Platner]

I mean especially small rural states, we don't have the money.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Graham Platner]

I mean in many ways we're talking about building a national risk pool. And the more people you have in a risk pool, the more effective I mean your insurance is, which really is what we're talking about here. Yeah, I'll just use my own experience. So I essentially get universal health care. I'm a disabled, I'm a disabled combat vet and because of that I simply get free point of service care. It allowed me to start a small business. It allowed me to take some time to figure out what kind of life I wanted to live after my combat service. Without it I would not have ever been able to be an oyster farmer because I would have had to work another job to have health care. It gave me a real material freedom that allowed Me to build something that today is a successful small business that employs people in eastern Maine never would have existed without my health care. That basic element of foundational support just around healthcare is what allowed me to become a successful small business owner. Not only do I think that providing that is going to unleash a lot of productivity in the real world, because this is important. We have a system and we have a lot of metrics that we use to judge our productivity that frankly mostly seems to be fantastical in the financialized system, but in the real world where people actually build things and exchange them with each other for money, that in that world I honestly do think that giving people just this simple foundational support is going to unleash a lot more productivity people have. People have the freedom to start small businesses or to engage in art, to engage in things that I think actually elevate all of us as a society. Also, we would take health care off the plate of small business owners, which. It's a nightmare. You know, if you're like a lot of small business, medium sized business owners, they want to provide healthcare to their employees. But I mean, I've spoken to folks in Maine who like if you have a company, 50 employees and up one of those employees job is to just deal with the health insurance stuff, paying the premiums, dealing with the companies, it's a frig. You take that off their plates, well now they can just focus on what their business is, not also having to be this intermediary around health care. I know that we can do it because the VA does it right. That program exists. The VA only has problems when Republicans cut its budget. When we fund it and we resource it, it does a spectacular job in Maine. The VA is awesome. And it's awesome because we have a small population and the resources and employees. The ratio for the population that's serving, it's a good ratio. So it works. I've lived in other parts of the country where the VA system is really hard to deal with because they don't get the funding and therefore the outcome. It's almost as though you get what you pay for. Whoever would have guessed? When I think about moments in American history where we had to address systemic problems, big ones, there are always going to be times of experimentation and frankly growing pains. And the only way it ever works is when you have people in positions of power who have the political will to try to drive it forward. I mean, this is what the New Deal was. The New Deal was FDR having built a broad coalition, having political power and then really just ramming things through, making them happen. Some of them failed. And then they changed. They allowed to be. They were imaginative. They experimented. Things worked. Things didn't work. I mean, the NRA worked for a little while, and then it kind of didn't. And so they. They got rid of it. And, like, and there is a. When we electrified all of rural America, it was done with an array of options, whether it was public ownership or public private partnerships, and sometimes just straight up private companies. But we. We used to do use our imaginations to fix problems. And I think our biggest problem recently has been we have a political class that has sort of forgotten how to dream big. Everything's a tax credit, everything's a block grant. Everything's like something weird. And when you try to explain it to people, like, you lose them in the. In like, five seconds because everyone's like, I don't even. What is this weird, wonky language you're using? Yeah. Which, I mean, it's one of my biggest, biggest criticisms of the Biden administration, where they did a lot of amazing things and then just never told anybody about them. Yeah. And then we all sit around being like. They're like, why did nobody. Like that we did this? I'm like, dude, nobody knew. And when you did explain it, it was always in this kind of very complicated legal language.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

And nobody engages with that when it comes to health care. I mean, I'll be honest. I think we have to do a lot of big things. We're going to need federal money to reopen hospitals. I think we need to start thinking about mental health care as being as much a part of health care as everything else and incorporating that into a larger system. I mean, we in rural Maine, health care is collapsing now. Not next year, not down the road. It's already happened.

[Jon Favreau]

I know. I was going to say, like, one of. One of the big problems or one of the big challenges with Medicare for all is that hospitals get a. Are open right now because they get reimbursed through. And if you suddenly have every hospital go to the Medicare reimbursement rate, suddenly, hospitals are closing all over the place. I mean, I think this is why Bernie and his plan has, like, a transition period where they.

[Graham Platner]

Four year transition period.

[Jon Favreau]

Four year transition period.

[Graham Platner]

And also, I mean, to be fair, when you. Like, I've read Bernie's full bill, and it's essentially universal healthcare with the name Medicare for All. Right. Like, as you really kind of get through it, I mean, it covers dental, it covers vision. Medicare doesn't cover those things. Like it's a. There, it's an expanded program that really is just a single payer universal health care system that is based around basic things like you can still get insurance if, for like, for higher level procedures that it doesn't cover, but it does cover all the stuff like if you get sick or if you get injured and you just don't have to like think about it. And I gotta say, having traveled a lot and been to a lot of other countries, I just have this element of me where I'm like, dude, everybody else does it differently. They all figured it out. And yeah, of course it's never perfect. These systems will always have, I mean we're talking about large bureaucratic systems. They're going to have some problems. They have a lot more problems when you get neoliberal policies in place that start taking money away from them. But everybody else has a better version of this and it's cheaper and the care in many ways is better for most people. And a lot of folks are always, well, in America, you know, like the rich come here to get great procedures. I'm like, that does no good for somebody with no money.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Graham Platner]

Like, or who can't afford, who can't even afford ACA coverage now because premiums have gone up by like triple fold.

[Jon Favreau]

Yep.

[Graham Platner]

And, and I mean these are people I know. These are my neighbors. I mean my, a relative of mine had to drop her health insurance because her premium doubled because of the loss of the ACA extensions.

[Jon Favreau]

And even that. It's like we're just, even if we keep expanding the subsidies and the credits for the aca, they're raising prices and we're all just subsidizing the higher, like at some point you have to figure out how to contain the cost of the healthcare system.

[Graham Platner]

Yeah. And I'll just be entirely upfront. As long as there is a substantial profit motive with a substantial middleman, we're just going to like, unless we address that part of the problem, subsidies won't be enough because somebody's going to figure out how to pull more money out of the thing. Costs will go up. So I, I think it's, I do not pretend that it will not be a transition period. I mean we're going to, it would be one of the largest projects we've really ever undertaken as a nation to transition from the healthcare system we have to a single payer universal healthcare system. But we also have to do it because what we're doing now is insanely expensive and it's terrible in many places in rural America. It's totally unsustainable. It's absolutely falling apart.

[Jon Favreau]

I want to ask you about this because it's in the news and by the time people hear this, Trump could have already launched a war with Iran. I did want to get your response to what a White House source told Politico about selling the war. Quote, there's thinking in the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us and give us more reason to take action. Thoughts?

[Graham Platner]

I hate everything so much. I mean one, I think it's disgusting that we've got people in the White House who are literally sitting around thinking about how do we sell a war? I mean I went, we, we went through the run up to the war in Iraq. At least then the Bush administration had the decency to really try to trick us. Yeah. You know, at least they like, they really went out of their way. They, they made Colin Powell sully his, his entire reputation at the U.N. they like really, they put the work in. Yeah. And it's so, I mean it's just, it's, it's, it's insulting to have these folks who are just like, like, oh, we're going to figure out a war in a week. Like we're just, oh man, this Epstein stuff's gotten out of control. Iran, we're going to invade Iran. Now we tried the Venezuela thing. Like we did that. Now we're still screwing around down there. We need to start another one. Let's just go to war with Iran. And I mean that's what they're doing. All this is, is posturing. And as somebody who fought a war too, it's, it's disgusting. And it also is, I think for me, I mean one of the reasons I want to go to the Senate specifically is we need a Senate who's really going to take their power back.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

When it comes to war making, I mean the Constitution is pretty clear.

[Ad Sponsor/Announcer]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

I saw that the Democrats think that the war powers resolution will now get a vote in the House.

[Graham Platner]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know if it'll pass because I think there's a few Democrats who,

[Graham Platner]

I mean this is, dude, this is, I mean this is. And by the way, you want to talk about like one of those reasons why working people or regular people don't. It's also because of this stuff. Cuz there is this connection like we just should be the anti war party. I mean the fact that there is an element of the right. That this kind of isolationist version of it that actually gets to almost take on the mantle of being. That only works when we have elements of the Democratic Party that are, like, willing to go along with this stuff. We shouldn't be fighting wars. I'm sorry. We should not be sending young American men and women off to kill a bunch of people in foreign countries. I mean, for essentially any reason. Like, I'm. It is hard for me to see any intervention Post World War II that in the long run, really worked out well. Korea, maybe. You could make the argument. Everything else, though, and it is a. I'm not a pacifist, but at this point, I've become essentially anti war when it comes to, like, the nation writ large and how we use our power internationally. Because every time we do this, when you go back and look at it, in hindsight, it's pretty much always a bad idea. But more importantly for me, like, there's a human cost to this stuff that you've seen. Yeah. That you felt like. I know what it looks like when American made high explosive, interacts with children. Like, I've touched it. It's a horrifying thing. You know, I know what it feels like to have friends die and to have a lot of other friends of mine, myself included, have to deal with the trauma of that for years afterwards. We need more people in positions of power, frankly, who either understand it because they've experienced it or who are just kind of ideologically opposed and don't want us to do this kind of stuff. And it's not just about, like, the moral component. It's about the fact that, like, this stuff, it doesn't make us safer. It doesn't make the world safer. It tends to quote a famous Marine who came long before me, war is a racket, and there are people that make an immense amount of money off of it. And when you go look at a lot of the wars we fought, frankly, certainly in my lifetime, at the end of the day, that's usually what happens. And I do not see a war with Iran falling into a different category. In fact, it seems to be almost like. I mean, I said this about Venezuela as well. It's like Iraq, but dumber.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Graham Platner]

But we need people in places of political power who are really willing to call it exactly for what it is and to stand up against it. I mean, this can't happen.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. Last question. Hopefully a lighter note. You recently took a campaign hiatus to travel to Norway with your wife.

[Graham Platner]

Yes.

[Jon Favreau]

To try ivf.

[Graham Platner]

Speaking of healthcare, yeah, exactly.

[Jon Favreau]

In the hopes of having your first child. Can you talk to me about that decision and why Norway?

[Graham Platner]

Yeah. So we've been. Amy and I have been dealing with infertility for about two and a half years now and went through all the previous steps, eventually got to the point where, like, all right, IVF is the last thing. And because of. I mean, the VA doesn't cover it if it's not, like, clearly my problem. And Amy's not a vet, so it doesn't cover her. Kind of weird. Which needs to be changed, by the way, because to have children, you do need both people. But whatever, that's a whole other thing. I'm gonna work on that when I get to the Senate. We. Her insurance didn't cover it, the VA stuff didn't cover it. And so we started to look into doing it in the United States, and the cost is astronomical. And in New England, there's only one clinic, and their only clinic is in Portland, Maine, which is three hours away from where we live. So we'd have to be traveling. Anyways, we started to look into it. We saw how expensive it was, but we really weren't sure what else to do. And then a friend of Amy's had either a relative or someone who had gone to Norway. They're like, you know, in Norway, it's really cheap and everybody's really nice, and it's an. It's a wonderful personal experience. And so Amy reached out to a clinic in Norway, like on a Monday, and we had like an hour long intake exam with the surgeon on Thursday. And the moment I knew we were going to go is at the end of an hour long intake examination. I was like, okay, how much do we owe you guys? And they were like, why would you give us money? Like, nothing has happened. I'm like, yeah, we're good. We're definitely. We're going Norway. I mean, this is. It was amazing. And it was amazing. It was a. And in the end, even with the travel, staying in an Airbnb for two weeks, the plane tickets, it was one quarter the cost of just the baseline of doing it here in the United States. It's insane. And you get treated like a human being. Like, the clinic is small. Everybody's really nice to you. They don't look at you as, like, just something to pull more money out of. They, like, treat you like a human being, which, as you're going through infertility, you know, very helpful because it's an emotional experience. And, you know, we developed, like, a really nice relationship with those folks. And so it, yeah, it was a very, I mean, we're still in it and we're still kind of going through the process. But it's been, we actually, I mean, I talk about this, we joke about it, that even if it cost the same, we still would have done the Norwegian version because, like, it's just, it's so, it's so much more pleasant. It's pleasant. And I mean, you go to like, Norwegian hospitals where, you know, literally no one, no one is sitting there worried about how much this costs.

[Jon Favreau]

They've really figured out in those Nordic countries, yeah, we shouldn't invade Denmark. They're pretty nice.

[Graham Platner]

We should not invade Denmark. No. War with Greenland. Yes. On top of all the other ones. But I feel like that one might be the most.

[Jon Favreau]

If we can get that.

[Graham Platner]

We shouldn't definitely, we should definitely not do that one.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, good luck on, on your journey there and also good luck in the campaign and thank you for coming by.

[Graham Platner]

No, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

[Jon Favreau]

If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to qriket.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a crooked Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Churlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanter is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Naomi Segment Engel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Hayley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Kiril Pelaviev, David Towles and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Did you know Fred's appliance has been

[Graham Platner]

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