In-depth article by Platner's high school classmate

[mainer]

In 2002, my classmate Graham Platner ran for student-body president of John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. I remember watching him in our auditorium debate his fellow candidates. He was the radical, wearing a revolutionary proletarian costume: overalls and a red armband. (When I asked him about this recently, he told me he thought he had a history presentation to give that day.) I don’t recall the issues they discussed, but I do remember Platner proposing collective action to overturn some school policy — saying something along the lines of, “They can’t suspend us all.” The history teacher serving as moderator interjected to remind Platner and everyone else that, yes, in fact, they could.

Students elected the safe candidate, a future chiropractor. But Platner had other outlets for his energy and ideas. Around that time, he skipped school to protest the coming Iraq war when President George W. Bush visited our local airport — and was forcibly removed by the Secret Service. In the high school yearbook, our class voted him “most likely to start a revolution.” ...
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He joined the Sullivan Planning Board and started volunteering with the progressive Maine People’s Alliance (which has endorsed his campaign). He also got turned on to the work of labor organizer Jane McAlevey, who died in 2024. McAlevey argued that labor and social movements have wrongly been seen as separate when in fact they are both key to building worker power and driving change. “True organizing in the workplace and true organizing in the community can and does win,” McAlevey wrote.

He helped revive a defunct group called Acadia Action, which started setting up small mutual-aid projects. Along the way, Democrats began to notice Platner and tried to recruit him to run for a Maine state Senate seat in 2020, an offer he declined because, he told me, he was still busy ramping up his oyster business. But last summer, when political operatives representing unions — including Daniel Moraff, the activist who recruited mechanic and U.S. Navy veteran Dan Osborn to run for U.S. Senate in Nebraska — approached him about running for Collins’ seat, the time was right.

https://themainemonitor.org/graham-platner-success-explained/