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Across the bay from Bar Harbor lies the small town of Sullivan, Maine, population twelve hundred and nineteen. On August 16th, Graham Platner, the bearded, strawberry-blond co-owner of the Waukeag Neck Oyster Company, brought his Carolina Skiff over to the Sullivan Harbor launch. It was three days before a video titled “Platner for U.S. Senate” would drop, catapulting this local oyster farmer, harbormaster, and former marine onto the national stage.
The video was produced by Morris Katz, a top political strategist for New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani. “Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’ ” Katz recalled, of his first meeting with Platner. The video was meant to present the forty-one-year-old Maine native as a rugged and likable working-class Democratic candidate running to unseat Susan Collins, but it could just as easily have been the opener for a reality-TV show called “Oyster Man.” A macho pastiche with a Jeep-commercial soundtrack, it shows him diving in his wetsuit, chopping wood, hauling oyster cages, and doing kettlebell swings. There are closeups of his tattoos, along with shots of him holding hands with his wife, Amy Gertner, as they walk along a beach with their two dogs. Standing at the helm of his boat, Platner tells the camera, “When I tell people around here that I’m running for Senate, sometimes the initial reaction is, ‘What the ——?’ ” There’s a bleeped-out expletive, and Platner laughs. Then he gets serious: “It seems like the fabric of what holds us together is being ripped apart by billionaires and corrupt politicians profiting off destroying our environment, driving our families into poverty, and crushing the middle class.”
The campaign rollout, which was orchestrated by Platner’s senior adviser, Joe Calvello (John Fetterman’s former director of communications), raised half a million dollars in its first four days; volunteer sign-ups for the campaign averaged three hundred a day. “No one was expecting this,” Calvello told me. The Times, ABC, NBC, and Fox News covered the launch, focussing on Platner as a political novice who represented a new approach for the Party. “Platner has never run for office and seldom wears a suit,” Mother Jones noted. The launch video was viewed more than two and a half million times on X in the first twenty-four hours alone. The streamer and leftist commentator Hasan Piker showed it on his Twitch channel, where comments included “TAX THE RICH AND EAT THE OYSTERS” and “Wow this guy looks like a progressive mind in [a] MAGA body.”
I’ve spent almost every summer of my life on Frenchman Bay, near Sullivan, and, like many of my neighbors, I’ve had Platner’s number for years, and have picked up oyster orders from his boat. I’ve seen him shuck oysters at parties, fund-raisers, and at the local summer music series, where a half-dozen oysters go for twenty dollars; he also shucks them at Ironbound, a restaurant in the town of Hancock which is owned by his mother, Leslie Harlow. I first learned of Platner’s Senate run in late July by text from a friend who is close to Platner; she wrote, “Big news…” Soon, my friends were discussing over gin-and-tonics how they always knew he would be famous.
That morning in August, I met Platner at the launch, and he drove us out on his boat to his oyster farm on the bay. It’s situated off an island with a ledge so rocky that lobstermen know not to drop traps there; Platner keeps tow ropes on hand in case he needs to help stranded boaters. The haze from Canadian wildfires, which covered the bay for much of the summer, had lifted, and Mt. Cadillac, on Mt. Desert Island, was a bright green. Once we were moored, Platner pointed out the busy wildlife: bald eagles, osprey.
Earlier in the summer, a few weeks before Graham Platner fever swept Maine and beyond, a group of mostly millennial Democrats, coördinating with Maine labor leaders, community activists, and volunteers, many of them Bernie Sanders campaign alums, had been scouting the state for a candidate who could unseat Collins. These Democrats thought that the five-term, seventy-two-year-old Republican senator was vulnerable: her approval ratings were down, and Kamala Harris had won the state in 2024. After they saw a video featuring Platner—this one made by the local Frenchman Bay Conservancy in 2020, to stop a commercial salmon farm from building in the bay—they decided that he was exactly what they were looking for: a working-class guy with a military background and a deep connection to Maine.
Jason Shedlock, the president of the Southern Maine Labor Council, was involved in the search (and was the only member of the group who would speak on the record). “What we’re looking for is someone who understands that solidarity is not a spectator sport, it’s an action word,” Shedlock said. He heard that Platner was “the real deal.” They had their first conversation over Zoom. “The Zoom camera was bobbing up and down because he was on an oyster boat, and I just got off of a job site, and we had the conversation right then and there, with the wind blowing, and it was like talking to somebody who I would meet in a union hall.”
Several Maine labor figures reached out to Katz and Calvello, who closed the deal. Platner was taken by surprise by their interest. “They’re, like, ‘We think that right now Susan Collins is uniquely weak,’ ” he told me. “We think the Democrats are going to choose a bad candidate for this race specifically, and we think that you’re a good candidate for this. And Amy and I promptly told them, ‘That’s fucking insane. We work full time. We don’t have any money.’ . . . We’re just normal fucking people who have very busy schedules, and running for U.S. Senate is the most ridiculous thing that I could’ve ever heard for myself.” Platner pulled up a cage. He lifted out a mesh bag full of tiny oysters, each the size of a pumpkin seed, explaining that as the oysters grow they need more space. “It’s very much like gardening,” he said. “I’m just thinning.”
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Lisa Wood Shapiro
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