Graham Platner Isn't Backing Down

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favre. 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 changes, 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, Graham Platner didn't just decide to stay in the race. He's now the frontrunner, 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. Thanks a lot. It's good to be here. Welcome back. It's good to have you here in person. No, it's an absolute pleasure, man. You've been running for Senate for six months. Yeah, we launched the campaign on August 19th. Okay. So, yeah, whatever that is now, around that. You've gone from a 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, frontrunner. Yeah, it's been quite the whirlwind. 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? 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 I, 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. Yeah. And, and like, and that has been. really eye-opening. I mean, the political industrial complex, so 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 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 mad. But you're like, just interacting with it. It's like, man, this is, there's a whole industry around this stuff. Is it the time suck? That's really? It's the time. Totally. And, like, it's, I'm not going to say I understand why people go the kind of like corporate pack 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. I like just sort of political foundation that I have. 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. Right. Although, I mean, that's not in any way should have reform 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. I'm like, 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, it's just this very... And it's not always good. Not mostly good. No, it's such a, yeah, it's a very, like, it's just very surreal. Yeah. And I, uh, 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 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. I think about that often because especially with people our age 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 that you've said quite a bit about politics in your time and everyone knows now. And everybody knows. I mean, like, and for me, like it's a, when I got into this thing, I'm an older 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. Yeah. 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, and then what's the point of doing any of this? 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. Yeah, actually I had it covered up like two days after that. I remember. I remember a few weeks after that. I had a main voter who I know say to me, I like Graham Platner. I'm leaning Graham 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 Graham 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. Yes. Just campaigning around Maine. Totally. And general voters, to be honest. Maine's not very big. 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. What will your response be and what is your strategy to push back? So this response is going to be exactly what it was, which is like, I'm happy to talk about all this stuff. 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 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. One, 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. 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 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. You might meet everyone in Maine then. 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 going to 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. Have you had conversations with people who are skeptical about all the... The tattoo stuff or any of the old Reddit posts or any of that. Oh, yeah. I mean, how do those go? They go great. I mean, because I, it's because I explain it. And frankly, most people are like, that all sounds eminently reasonable. And it's, and I think in Maine folks, I mean, it's like, I don't know how to say this, but. When people meet me, they'd then be like, okay, so he seems exactly like a normal human being. So it's helpful. It's helpful. So there's that. And then, I mean, honestly, we're also just going to 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 going to, I mean, there's so much money is going to get spent on this race, which drives me insane. Yeah. Because if I had my way, we would just take that money and, like, write everybody and made a check. Frankly, we'd be better off. Every cycle when you hear how much is being spent on the biggest Senate races. It's nuts. It's just like, oh, what a fucking is. Although I 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 going to. We're going to have Mainers learn how to be organizers in their communities and have them on staff. Like we want the money that we spend to primarily be spent in Maine, not just give it to some DC consulting firm that makes 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 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 going to 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, The Saraginian race outspent the Susan Collins race almost three to one. Yeah. They had some money left over. 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 DC came in and ran the race, like an old school DC race, which is not going to win against Susan Collins. And Susan 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, which is really important to remember. And I think that that to me just shows that it's not really about the ads or even the money spent. There's another, there's an X factor in there 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. Yeah. 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. So you're running against Janet Mills. She is a, you know, a popular governor who...

You know, who's accomplished quite a bit in comparison to other governors, even other Democratic governors, big health care expansion, free community college, more school funding. What governing decisions has Janet Mills made that you disagree with? So if... If anything, I'm 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 it gets to the primary, we're probably going to have the vast majority of unions in Maine. because they have a not great relationship with the governor. And 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 disputes, 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 going to 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 main 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 legislation to impact them, they need to be named. specifically. So they have to have people in Washington to make sure that malicee, Pinaab Scott, Passamaquoddy, that that gets added as words into bills. There have been multiple attempts to fix this and the governor has opposed to 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 and rather big one I think is I think we have to tax the rich

Blinds.com has been around for 29 years and has covered over 25 million windows, making them the number one retailer of custom window treatments. Right now, blinds.com is giving our listeners an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more. Just use code crooked at checkout. Limited time offer. Rules and restrictions apply. See blinds.com for details. 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? 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 doing that. In high school, I was introduced to more critical thought like Howard Zinn and Jomsky. I, you know, at that point, but I remember reading those things and 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 was 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 two, 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 Dan 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 folks in political power. Like, it really is, and that began to, so I became, it became very critical of American foreign policy. which as I then that kind of just sent me on a road of being well if I'm critical of foreign policy why is our foreign policy like this so I became more critical over political structures and once you start being critical to political structure you're like well why is our political structure like this 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 in 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. And 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. 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. Well, obviously, so obviously you're like shaped by your experiences in Iraq. You come home, all the, everything you just said, you know, 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 want to change in your community specifically? And like, what did you find about the work? What was challenging? What was fulfilling? I forget what year this was, but I read a book called No Shortcuts by Jane McAleavy. 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 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 my 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 to my community and I'm in I live in a town of a thousand people it's the 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's actually not that complicated. It's just really hard. And that there is no graduate version of it. It's all 101 stuff. And it's hard because it is difficult to get people to participate, to care, to break down barriers. 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 where I 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're like, you're my neighbor. That bums me out. But you have to do it. We had a number of issues 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. Outside packeting involved in a local school board race in Dan Sullivan. Yeah. Technically in Franklin. But yeah, we have an RSU, so a regional school unit. And it was this moment for myself and a few other people where we watched this happen. And 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 was 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 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 a thing I care about. It's like, I care about that too. And we're like, go forth and make that a campaign.

And it worked. Like we actually wound up like winning the next school board race. And like we're still like kind of now we're trying to get candidates to run for county commission or 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 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 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. I mean, I'm convinced we're not just going to beat Susan Collins in November. I think we're going to. Troutes Susan Collins. And if the worst thing happens and we have an election that is contested or called into question, well, 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 is not going to get its 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 winds we're going to need down the road. I'm a nerd, so I looked up the election results in Dan 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 1,000 people. Jared Golden barely wins in 18, barely flips to Biden in 20. Trump squeaks out a win in 2024. I'm sure you know most of the people there. What are their politics like? What do people believe there? It's a, I mean, everybody works really hard. Eastern Maine is... economically depressed. We have, 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 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, and 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 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 really walked away from that. And I think working people walked away from them because of it.

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And I was like, he's like, we, it's contract law. We can't claw back the bonuses. Like, it's illegal. We're not, we're going to get fought and crime. I'm like, okay. We're talking about contract law, but there's like people with pitchfork outside the white house. Right. So like, you know, same thing with like, why didn't anyone go to jail? Well, the laws aren't there. The DOJ won't prosecute because 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 that being like, well, we'd love to bail out people who lost their homes in this, but 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. past the Recovery Act, we pass the affordable care act, we spend a whole bunch of money that then we lose the midterms over. Spending that much money. And I only bring this up not to defend any of it because I often look back on it and think like, We're going to 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. That's right. And then you get the Democrats being like, okay, we're going to try our best to solve the problem and it's not going to be good enough. And then everyone's going to hate us and say that we are tied to corporate interests. You know, it's a hard. Totally. But I also think that that's why I'm just being entirely up front. 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 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 and send them after folks. They send them after like James 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. Even before that, like, I mean. I assume, yeah, maybe they wouldn't be upset. I assume we want to make sure the justice department only goes after people who actually broke the law. Of course. But then the question is like, yeah. But also we need to pass the fucking laws. Well, 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. I mean, 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 to 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 think that the criticism is always correct, but the criticism is absolutely there. And it's driven like the kind of narrative. For sure. And that's why I honest, 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 at the Democratic Party. Yeah. 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 that the Republicans 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 used to have laws in place. There's a reason 2008 happened in 2008 and not 1994. I mean, 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. 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. Yeah. I have not seen the evidence that it can, and I realize the sample size is small, but like... You know, Bernie Sanders runs in 2016. Bernie Sanders runs in 2020. Yep. Gets a hell of a lot of votes. Still getting big crowds. Did not win either race, obviously. Yep. Your friend Sherrod Brown, who there's, you know, a perfect example of an economically populist Democrat who still holds, you know, liberal views on other issues has not sort of tacked to the middle on any cultural views. you know, held out in Ohio for a while and then just lost his last race and hopefully he wins again this year as well. Oh, fingers crossed. But what do you think about that? I think that it's, when I think the landscape has changed now, 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 is going to 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 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 independence. For a long time, the whole story was that independence 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. And 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 is 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. Yeah. 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 yeah you know I think that that when you put it into the greater context I think that's what's happened 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 it 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 and that those who are 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 is nothing for that. And we need to be very clear and cogent and blunt about how we're going to change it. And I think if we do that, I do think that there is an opening to do this. Do you think the Democrats have, I don't want to say, taken the bait, but engaged too much in some of these cultural wars? 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 want to 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. 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 but a lot of progressive cultural issues and i am like i do not back away from things right i think all the wins we've made for justice and equality we take no steps back from any of this stuff but i'm also very aware as someone who like now has money that you're like oh when your life is like comfortable, then you can say that, like, yes, it's important that people care about raising taxes and people care about health care, but also, are you going to be as angry about it as everyone else? And I think that, like, 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've been voting Democrat for a long time, I wonder if it's like the driving force for them. It might be, but we're not winning with that. Right. I mean, there's that, there's that great Chuck Schumer line where, you know, it's, and, and we, we did. For everyone we lose, like, for every working class person we lose, like out in the countryside, we're going to gain two voters in the suburbs. Suburb, yeah. And it didn't happen. Yeah. Donald Trump won. Yeah. 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. 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. Yeah. Which is everybody. Yeah. I mean, I'll just, like, I've had a bunch of folks be 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 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. Yeah. that realization will kick in, and we won't get 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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Well, I want to talk about Medicare for All because I know that's like central to your campaign. And I now feel like I have talked about health care for most of my life in politics and went through this in the 2020 campaign. Obviously, it had been there for ACA as well. So I've dealt with a lot of health care 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 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 like... real tradeoffs and transitions that I think average people who very much dislike their insurance companies are still concerned about. And, you know, like 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? Well, one is because it needs to be a national policy. Yes. I mean, like, like, especially small rural states, we don't have the money. Right. I mean, it's 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 your, 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 health care 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 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 health care to their employees. But, I mean, I've spoken to folks in Maine who are 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 a, 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 got rid of it. 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 used to 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 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 stood around being like, they were 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. 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, in rural Maine. Healthcare is collapsing now. Not next year. Not down the road. It's already happened. I know. I was going to say, like, one of the big problems or one of the big challenges with Medicare for All is that hospitals get 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. It's a four-year transition period. And also, I mean, to be fair, like I've read Bernie's full bill. And it's essentially universal health care 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 got to 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. 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. Right. Like, or who can't afford, who can't even afford ACA coverage now because premiums have gone up by like triple fold. Yep. And I mean, these are people I know. These are my neighbors. I mean, a relative of mine had to drop her health insurance. because her premium doubled because of the loss of the ACA extensions. And even that, it's like we're just, even if we keep expanding the subsidies and the credits for the ACA, you're just like 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. Yeah. And I'll just be entirely 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 think it's... I do not pretend that it will not be a transition period. I mean, it would be one of the largest projects we've really ever undertaken as a nation to transition from the health care system we have to a single-payer universal health care 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. 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? 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, 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. At least they really went out of their way. They made Colin Jerome Powell Sully his entire reputation at the UN. They like really, they put the work in. Yeah. And it's so, I mean, it's insulting to have these folks who are just like, oh, we're going to figure out a war in a week. Like, we're just, oh, man, this Epstein stuff's getting out of control. Iran. We're going to invade Iran now. The Venezuela thing, like, we did that. 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 disgusting.

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 when it comes to warmaking. I mean, the Constitution is pretty clear. Yeah. I saw that the war, that the Democrats think that the war powers resolution will now get a vote in the House. Yep. I don't know if it'll pass because I think there's a few Democrats who. 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. Yeah. Because 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. 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... Like, 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 and 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, 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

Last question, hopefully a lighter note, you recently took a campaign hiatus to travel to Norway with your wife. Yes. To try IVF. Speaking of healthcare. Yeah, exactly, in the hopes of having your first child. Can you talk to me about that decision and why Norway? 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 we're like, all right, IVF is the last thing. 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. It's 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 going to 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. So we, 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 Amies 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 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 exam, 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. And I'm like, yeah, we're definitely going, we're going Norway. I mean, this is, like, 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, that's 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. 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 costs the same, we still would have done the Norwegian version because like it's just, it's so much more pleasant. It's pleasant. And I mean, you go to like Norwegian hospitals where, you know, literally no one is sitting there worried about how much this costs.

They've really figured it out in those Nordic countries. We shouldn't invade Denmark. We should not invade Denmark. No war with Greenland. Yes, that's good. On top of all the other ones. I feel like that one might be the most. We think we can get that done. We shouldn't definitely, we should definitely not do that one. Well, good luck on your journey there. And also good luck in the campaign. And thank you for coming by. Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash 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 Cricket. Pod Save America is a Cricket Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Cherlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jim Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seiglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jay Jones, Ben Hethcote, Mia Kelman, Carol Pelaviv, David Tolls, and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.