At The Dunbar Store, a small grocery store off Route 1 in Sullivan, Maine, Graham Platner has a very specific nickname. “We called him ‘footlong ham and cheese guy,’” Josh Winer, Dunbar’s owner, says. Most days, he’d pick up a ham and cheese and a Moxie—a New England-specific soda tinged with bittersweet gentian root—before he’d board his boat at the nearby launch to go oystering.
But Platner hasn’t been at Dunbar’s quite so regularly since he launched his Senate campaign in August. In fact, after his campaign launch video went viral, amassing more than two and a half million views in its first 24 hours, he’s found his schedule rather packed. The oysterman has been catapulted onto the national stage as part of a vanguard of progressive, young candidates who have gained widespread support by appealing to working class voters.
Central to his campaign is his work as an oysterman, and it’s hard to imagine someone who loves oystering as much as Platner.
“This is my office,” he boasts, holding his arms out to a stretch of Frenchman Bay, its waters shimmering under the bright sun, where his oyster cages bob up and down happily. As he hauls up cages, he explains that his oysters will have a flavor different even from oysters grown a mile away. That they’ll have a unique terroir—ahem, merroir. It’s clear that Platner takes enormous pride in the oyster farm he’s helped build. “The fact that this place that I love so much creates these things that people love so much, it’s incredibly special,” he says. “It’s deeply emotional.”
He shucks a few oysters on the boat, and hands them over on the condition that we chew, not slurp. They are particularly meaty, bright and salty from the ocean water, and remarkably buttery and unctuous like uni. He continues to shuck, tossing spent shells back into the bay, as he muses on some of the finer points of aquaculture and his oyster business. “We sell everything locally. Nothing gets shipped,” Platner says. “If you want to eat these oysters, you’ve got to come to this part of the world.”
The same local-first, community-minded thinking on which he’s built his oyster business has become the foundation for his politics—or maybe it’s the other way around. “I don’t know if oystering colored my politics,” he says, “or I’ve just fallen in love with it because it’s in line with my politics.”
His ideas have generated significant energy in Maine voters. In the eight weeks since its launch, the campaign has recruited 9,000 volunteers across all 16 counties in the state, and raised an impressive $4 million. Of these donations, 82% are from in-state donors, and around 90% are under $100, suggesting that Platner has major grassroots support from voters. He has appeared on MSNBC, scored an endorsement from Bernie Sanders, and has regularly pulled in hundreds of supporters at rallies.
In that original viral campaign launch video,