Is Platner the Face of the Democratic Tea Party? (Neon Liberalism #67, with Chance Phillips)

According to all current polling, Graham Platner will be Maine's next senator—despite a Nazi tattoo, a history of controversial social media posts, and an almost-total lack of political experience. To try and understand what this tells us about the direction of the Democratic Party, Chance Phillips recently traveled to Maine to speak with Platner's supporters. (You can read Chance's full essay here.) Chance and Samantha Hancox-Li discuss his findings on this episode of Neon Liberalism. Democratic elites may want moderation and conciliation—but the Democratic base has different opinions.

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Transcript

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:10]
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I am Samantha Hancox-Li. On this channel, we talk a lot about the need to take the fight to Trump, to beat Trump in the streets and on the ballot box. But equally important as the fight against Trump is the fight that's happening within the Democratic Party, a fight that's about how to beat Trump, and not just how to beat him, but what's going to happen afterwards. What are we going to do with power if we attain it?

And one of the biggest flash points of this internal party battle has been the Maine Senate election, and especially the Maine primary on the Democratic side, where Graham Platner and Janet Mills are competing to see who's going to run against incumbent Susan Collins, a moderate Republican who currently occupies Maine's Senate seat. This has generated a lot of discourse online, a lot of heat, maybe not so much light, and so I'm really excited to welcome onto the podcast Chance Phillips. Chance is a PhD student at UMass Amherst in economics and, more relevantly, recently traveled to Maine, traveled around with Platner's campaign, or following Platner's campaign, going to these events, talking to Platner supporters, to try and figure out why they've supported the man. So yeah, Chance, thanks so much for coming on Neon Liberalism.

Chance Phillips [00:01:44]
Yeah, so do you want me to start off with just sort of describing my trip, or do you have a specific question you want to start with?

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:01:50]
Well, I mean, I guess, let's set the stage a little bit. I mentioned Platner, Collins, Mills. Who are these people? And why does this matter?

Chance Phillips [00:02:01]
So Janet Mills is the current two-term, well, currently in her second term, governor of Maine. I believe she is 70 years old. She made some headlines early in this second Trump administration for pushing back against threatened funding cuts over trans kids in sports, and announced that she'll be running for Senate to replace current Republican Senator Susan Collins.

In October, Graham Platner announced. Earlier than that, in August, I believe, he quickly got an endorsement from Bernie Sanders and was very quickly sort of the major candidate in the race up until Mills announced, sort of, people say, encouraged to do so by Schumer and by the DSCC.

So Graham Platner, as a person, is, sort of famously in a lot of his ads, he is an oysterman, former Marine. Also worked as a military contractor for a time period afterwards, and as he describes at his various town halls, was sort of recruited to run, I believe, after some consultants, union-aligned folks saw him in an ad pushing back against some local project or something like that.

And so we sort of have an incumbent versus a very much political outsider who I think his main political experience prior was being the local Harbor Master and also on a local zoning board. So this was the stage.

And then it's complicated by Platner's history before running for office. So what appears like happened is that the Mills campaign, as part of their opposition research -- because this came to light very shortly after she officially announced -- found his Reddit history going back to at least 2013, through the Biden administration. So over a decade of posts. A couple of those posts, specifically from the 2013-2014 time period, have featured very heavily in Mills' and in public discourse around the Platner campaign. Specifically him asking why Black people don't tip, and a comment on an Indiegogo or other crowdfunding campaign for some sort of underwear that was supposed to help people prevent sexual assault, where he suggested that in order to avoid sexual assault, men and women should avoid drinking to excess, avoid being stupid -- similar sort of victim-blaming comments.

And there's also a tattoo that he describes getting, I believe, as a Marine on shore leave, and that he describes as a skull and crossbones. A lot of other people, accurately, based on visuals, say it's a Totenkopf, which was a symbol used by a Nazi unit in the 1930s and '40s. He has since had it covered up after revealing this in October, after the sort of initial what appears like an opposition research dump, and had it replaced with a Celtic dog design.

And so we have an outside candidate who I wanted to sort of observe in the wild, in vivo, so to speak. And we have the sort of two-term governor, the much more tested candidate, but who polls into -- it just currently doesn't seem like she's likely to win the primary, and she'd be less likely to win the general, based on the last three polls, than Platner would be. I think that's my high-level overview.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:06:03]
Thank you, Kat, for your contributions. But also sorry, my cat is being a little needy here. She's had surgery. But anyways, I want to start with your last comment, which is that based on the polling right now, unless something very unexpected happens, Graham Platner is going to be the next senator from Maine. This is not an endorsement. This is a prediction. This is a prediction that I am making. I think he is going to crush Mills in the primary, and I think he's going to beat Collins in the general. That's just where the numbers are right now.

And so I think it's worth understanding why people are supporting him, supporting him as strongly as they do, despite -- like you say -- some stuff that, right now we're using words like "controversial," but maybe in a previous era of politics would have been pretty much instantly disqualifying. The tattoo in particular is -- I mean, you can call it a skull and crossbones if you want, but that's a Totenkopf. So yeah, that's a lot.

And I guess let's start right there. You've talked to people on the ground. It seems like a lot of them were aware of the tattoo, the Reddit comments, the controversies, etc. How are people on the ground responding to that?

Chance Phillips [00:07:28]
Yeah, so one of the things that the Platner campaign has really foregrounded sort of since October, and to an extent in that initial Politico interview where they sort of showed this wedding footage of Platner shirtless with the tattoo showing, is sort of like, this is part of Platner's growth over the last decade.

It's, the story is he was a very drunk person at the time. And when I say story, I'm not implying false. I'm just saying that is the narrative that is being shared. He was very drunk at the time. Later on, when he's making these posts in 2013, in the early 2010s, he's struggling with various mental health problems he's been very open about.

But now, sort of getting rooted in his Maine community, becoming an oysterman, serving in these various local positions, getting involved in community organizing -- like Acadia Action, I believe, is an organization specifically -- this has really sort of helped improve him as a person. Make him less crass, more suitable as a political candidate, I guess, in the simplest sense.

And when I was talking with people -- I guess the caveat is the people I'm looking at are people who choose to go to Platner town halls in Farmington, Jackman, and Greenville, right? So in economics terms, a bit of a selection bias there. But the people I was talking with, the supporters who are willing to go to a town hall, all sort of said yes, this kind of put me off at first. But they all seem to believe this narrative that he has grown, that he is now a suitable candidate who is going to go to Maine, fight for the people of Maine, fight against the Trump administration. He's made several commitments on that point. And this is seen as a viable, good alternative to what is seen as more of a sort of status quo politics represented by Mills.

So he has this past. But more than one, a couple-few people I was talking with, either directly said, "He has this tattoo we didn't like. Well, I also got these tattoos I didn't like in college," right? Or, looking at younger people, obviously they're gonna have -- Platner is 41, so he's not young by my standards. He plays young for a candidate. So these younger people, they've grown up with more social media. Obviously, Platner is going to have -- well, these younger candidates will have objectionable social media comments.

People seem like, this is not very recent, and they're saying, we think he has matured in these past decades. And then they have this sort of, "He might not be ideal," to varying extents, "but we believe that he is earnest about what he's saying now." Platner is not currently saying we have to back away from trans rights or anything. He is fairly clear about -- he's very amenable to what might be conceived as the Liberal Currents positions on a lot of issues.

So he's not backing away in a way like a Dan Osborn -- the independent Senate candidate in Nebraska, I believe -- who also ran on a sort of union-backed populist campaign, I believe also endorsed by the United Auto Workers. But Osborn was very right-leaning on social issues. I believe he cut an ad sort of talking about how he would help build Trump's border wall.

So Platner is not a Dan Osborn figure on social issues. And it seems like people sort of believe the current presentation of Platner as just a very populist, liberal candidate who is willing to fight for economic justice. He's very sort of big on this antitrust angle of things. That's the reason he got Bernie Sanders' endorsement in August, pretty much days or weeks after his Senate campaign launched.

And who, again, is not necessarily someone they expect will back down on these other issues that they care about when he goes to DC.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:11:59]
Yeah, I mean, I think that years ago, decades ago now, there was always this worry about crypto-Nazis, right? About people who were hiding their power level on one kind of social issue or another. And I think there's still some of that worry about Platner. Like, I don't know, maybe does he have anti-Semitic sympathies? Does he have reactionary social views that he's just kind of hiding? But you're saying that's not the narrative that people believe. People believe what he's saying, that he's like, "Yeah, I was young. I said some shit, but that's behind me. I'm with a progressive agenda."

Chance Phillips [00:12:27]
Well --

Chance Phillips [00:12:36]
I would also say that I think there is, besides just what the campaign has said, what Platner will tell people at town halls, I think there is evidence for these claims.

There's an article in the socialist magazine Jacobin. The title is "You're Being Lied to About Graham Platner." Bit of a provocation. I'm not saying people are being lied to, but this goes through -- because we don't just have the Reddit posts that got printed, we have the entire Reddit history up through the Biden administration.

And the columnist -- I forget his name right now -- goes through this and sort of shows that Platner has many, many comments talking about opposing fascism, or Republican candidates, or lamenting that Sara Gideon lost the last Senate race against Susan Collins. And he's saying that this is because the DSCC messed up candidate selection, which is something Platner sort of spoke with me about again when I was at one of his town halls.

Or, attacking Marines for sharing naked photos of women. We have this decade of Reddit history, and a lot of it's irrelevant to politics. But a lot of the political content is very sort of disaffected, but very pro-Bernie, sort of more populist Democrat.

So I think we have a decent body of evidence that Platner seems to be who he says he is. That's not necessarily something that gets brought up in the media coverage a lot. People in Jackman, Maine are not reading Jacobin, right? So this is not something people know about. But I think we have, as more informed people, evidence that this narrative is not all just for the sake of winning the election. I think it's, to varying extent, a reflection of what actually happened in Platner's life. Yeah.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:14:23]
Okay, so I feel like a lot of the discourse about Platner is tied up, at least on Bluesky, the Twitterati internet, in these controversies, and there's less attention to his platform, to the actual message that attracts people or the persona that attracts people. And I want to ask you about that, but first I want to ask you about Mills. I know you didn't interview Mills or anything like that, but it seems kind of like the elephant in the room. Is it that people are attracted to Platner, or are they rejecting Mills? I'm curious what your take is on that.

Chance Phillips [00:15:08]
I mean, I think it's both. I don't think -- because a lot of people I spoke to, I voted for Mills. So they told me when I asked, yeah, I voted for Mills when she was running for governor. But either I don't think she's right for this moment, or just variations on, "She's 78, should we be electing somebody to a six-year term at 78?"

There was an article in The Atlantic, which I referenced in my piece about this trip for Liberal Currents, where -- I can't seem to recall the author's name -- but the opening to the piece is she's joking about how she'll share her blood test results to show that she's young. And that just doesn't seem like a very convincing argument to me. When you're telling someone, "Hey, I'm currently in my late 70s," everyone remembers what happened just a few years ago. We had to swap out the presidential nominee last minute. But please send me to the Senate anyway, and I promise I will -- I promise I'll only run for one term and not run for re-election. People have said that. I think Adam Schiff said this.

If Mills was 20 or 30 years younger, I think this would be a lot more competitive. This is a competitive primary. I think it would be a lot more competitive. And there's a sizable chunk of Platner's support which the age thing would switch over.

But there's also, besides the age -- well, this is a bit correlated -- but yesterday the Platner campaign released some graphics and posts bragging about how they've had 50 different town halls. I believe that the town halls I went to were in the 40s, and they just got to the 50th one. And then they said, "We've done 50 town halls. Two for the other candidates." My understanding is both Collins and Mills have not done any town halls this election season.

So besides just the age thing, and Platner being sort of seemingly more energetic than Mills, it also seems like Platner is going around the state. And Mills -- the Atlantic article was focused on an event that was mostly press only. And that's -- maybe you can convince a lot of journalists in brief conversations where Angus King swings by halfway through, as happened in the article. But it doesn't seem like Mills is necessarily putting in the groundwork to sort of show everyone in Maine that she is perfectly able to be senator for the next six years, which may very well just be because she's also still governor and has to govern the state. I'm not saying it's entirely because of her age, but it seems like that is a notable gap.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:17:53]
Yeah, I mean, cards on the table, I'm going to say the age thing is extremely worrying. I mean, you can call it ageism if you want to. I think that's bullshit, because we've had multiple examples of very high-profile politicians just blowing up incredibly important political events because they got old and they got sick and they died or were unelectable.

That's Dianne Feinstein, who was clearly -- I'm sorry -- clearly suffering from mental decline in her last years in office, clearly barely knew where she was, and she was a senator. We had, like you mentioned, Joseph Robinette Biden, who decided, yeah, I'm going to take another run at it. And I don't think Biden had mental decline, but I do think he lost a step. I think he didn't have quite the energy that he did in his younger days. I think that people noticed and that it cost us the election. Let's put our cards on the table here. There's Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, equally, 70s, 80s, cancer diagnosis. She says, "Yeah, I'm gonna hang on a little bit longer," and then we elect a Republican. She dies and they replace her with a Republican. Changes the balance of the Supreme Court.

These things are -- you can't ignore this. And for me, it's like, no one is owed public office. Public office is not something that you deserve. Public office is a trust that is given to you by the people to do the people's work. And I don't know, I think that's an incredible risk to take, electing somebody of that age. So cards on the table, that's my little spiel here.

And I mean, I think from what you said, people respond to that. People bring up Mills' age quite often. But it's more than just age. You've talked a little bit about this insider-outsider distinction. Mills was, from what I understand, tapped by Schumer, by the DSCC, to put her hat in the ring. Whereas Platner, very much not. And I'm curious, how are people processing on the ground this insider-outsider politics?

Chance Phillips [00:20:11]
I do have one quick note about the age thing. Besides just the age and the capability to be an effective senator, a couple people did also just talk about seniority. One of Collins' sort of promises to Maine voters is that because she has all the seniority, she's able to deliver a lot of federal funding for the state. That's something that gets brought up at town halls. And because Mills has understandably promised to only serve one term, she won't be able to offer that in a way that Platner, in being reelected, could.

But to actually get to your question now -- one of the quotes that sort of really stood out to me at the third town hall in Greenville was, "If you go to Washington, don't go along with the process." This was something that someone said during the Q&A session of the town hall, a back and forth. And this was an individual who seemed just very frustrated that the current Democratic leadership did not seem to be pushing back enough against the Trump administration. I think he specifically called out Schumer, a couple other Democrats, and said, these people all sort of just obey the congressional process, but you shouldn't. When you go to DC, you should represent Maine, but that means doing innovative stuff to push back against the Trump administration.

So one of Platner's promises made at the town hall, and recently, I believe, tweeted about, was that he, unlike several Democratic senators -- many of them -- has said that he will not vote for any nomination from the Trump administration. This is something that's been irking a lot of the Democratic base around the country, that a lot of Democratic senators will, even people like, I believe, Bernie Sanders, will vote to confirm, for example, Marco Rubio at the beginning of the Trump administration. And then this is not necessarily seen as something that is always reciprocated, to put it mildly, when Democrats are in the White House.

So people sort of see this senatorial collegiality being expressed by Democratic senators, and then they see the horrors of the current Trump administration, and they just say, these things don't match up. We don't want this sort of everyone just pretending it's the 1970s and we can be bipartisan. They want someone to go to DC and then be more proactive.

So at the town hall, Platner has said that besides the fact that he wouldn't vote for nominees to the Trump administration, he will point to specific senators that he thinks have been doing a good job. So he'll point to Chris Van Hollen and Bernie Sanders, these senators who, besides just having Senate meetings or public statements about how awful everything is, they'll go to these prisons, and they'll talk with the detainees. They'll go above and beyond. They'll use their status as a United States senator and use this platform to go beyond just voting on bills in the way that aligns with voters' preferences. They'll try to use it as -- he doesn't use this term, but I think it's like senators who are trying to be statesmen, who are trying to represent the will of the people in a leadership capacity, rather than just a sort of vote aggregation process.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:23:46]
Yeah, so this is something that I've been very struck by. I think after Trump was elected, there was an enormous crisis of confidence among liberal elites especially, and you can see it. This is both pundits, this is people in think tank world, this is certain kinds of politicians who are like, "Oh my God, we just lost. That means we got to moderate. We got to move right." All these New York Times pundits who are just trying to figure out which marginalized group they should throw under the bus in order to get back into power. And as you know, one of those marginalized groups that people are very eager to throw under the bus, I don't like this very much.

So there's the ideological moderation. There's this urge to, "Oh God, we got to be more institutionalist, we got to be more respectable, we got to be more buttoned down." And that's happening in elite circles. And the elites are getting really mad at their own base, because their base is frothing, white-hot angry with what's happening. I mean, you talk to ordinary Democratic voters and they're like, "Gotta drag these people out of here."

And so I think there's really been that split, and at the end of the day in a primary, people get a say. And it sounds very much like, yeah, Mills, she's an incumbent governor, she's favored by Democratic insiders like Schumer, she has the support of the DSCC, and she's going to lose because the primary voters don't want that. They aren't looking for an institutionalist. They aren't looking for a moderate. It sounds like people are looking for a populist -- somebody, in some abstract sense of the word, like Platner, who talks about fighting, who talks about change, who talks about dreaming big, and does not talk about bipartisanship and compromise and so forth.

Chance Phillips [00:25:51]
I would also say, besides just the primary, where again, it does look like Platner is -- the recent Emerson poll showed him up by like 20 points or something. And I don't necessarily know if I believe those margins, but there's also the University of New Hampshire Pine Tree State poll or whatever, which also showed him up by a decent margin. And then a third poll -- I forget the name -- but the last three polls that I've seen have all shown him up by a margin with Democratic voters.

But if you look at the general election, besides just, do Democratic voters want someone who'll fight, it looks like there's also -- I don't know if it's the populism element, or the fact that Mainers, based on the same polling, don't seem overly happy with Mills' performance as governor over the last two terms. I'm not a Mainer, so I don't know specific reasons why that might be, but her approval ratings are relatively low compared to a couple other governors in comparable states.

And it seems like Platner, per the polls I've seen, is doing a tiny bit better with Republicans -- not huge, like one or two points -- but meaningfully better with independents than Mills would be in these hypothetical matchups. If the election was held tomorrow and it was Mills vs. Collins, who would you vote for? And if it was Platner vs. Collins, who do you vote for? Independents seem to be much more willing to say, "Oh, I would vote for Platner."

And I think that seems like it could be sort of the reason why voters might be more willing to support him. It's just this populist message where people might be worried about AI, or things that I might not necessarily think of as a problem, like the corporate ownership of housing. But people see this, and they see these headlines, and they are very worried about it, and then Platner and these other populist candidates are willing to sort of harangue and complain and suggest policies to fix this.

So I think in the primary, a lot of it is about this willingness to fight and sort of age concerns from Democratic voters who feel burned by Biden having to drop out. But I think if we look at the general election polling, it seems like this is more a victory about this economic populism, at least. Yeah.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:28:17]
Yeah, so we've talked a bit about Mills and the age issue. We've talked about Platner's controversies. And we're still kind of circling around -- what's Platner's message? What policies does he stand for? How does he talk about politics? What would you say his message is to people that attracts them to him?

Chance Phillips [00:28:40]
So his economic message is very comparable to the message of either Warren or Sanders, with that same sort of register. He's more sort of Warren in his antitrust stuff, and more Sanders in his healthcare policy.

I think at all three of the town halls I attended, he would talk about how he believes that we have to support Medicare for All. He will compare that to his experience -- how moving to Maine, or moving back to Maine from DC, and getting into the Maine VA system, which he says is better funded, really helped him with his mental health struggles, because he was able to get support for that. So he says, access to healthcare was very important for me. It's very important for my ability to start a small business right now. As a small business owner, I think he says he has two employees. He says, "I can't afford to have healthcare for my employees, despite very much wanting to. It just doesn't pencil out." And if we have Medicare for All, this will help small business.

So that's one of his major sort of policy planks. He'll talk about Medicare for All compared to the VA, and talk about how it helps small businesses.

At the same time, he will also talk about antitrust enforcement, breaking up the big companies. And then policies I don't necessarily agree with, like preventing corporate ownership of living space, homes. And all of this is, again, as I describe in my piece, all in a very American historical register. He will say, "I am a New Deal Democrat," which I think is possibly inspired by the Oppenheimer line. He will talk about how Robert Bork messed up antitrust in the 1970s by introducing the consumer welfare standard. And really, we have to go back to a more comprehensive version of antitrust policy.

And he'll just say, we used to do all this great stuff and just have the government come in and deliver for people, and we've moved away from that. But we know that we can do all this. We created Medicare and Social Security. We created these programs, we can expand them. Or, we used to break up companies -- AT&T, which is a specific example he used. We used to break up companies. We know we can do it. We just stopped doing it because we made this mistake thanks to Robert Bork. And we can return to this more interventionist, pro-populist economic policy of the past.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:31:20]
Yeah, so there's a lot there. I was very struck by reading your piece. You talked about the invocations of American history, and in particular very specific episodes in American history, whether that's the Civil War, whether that's the New Deal, whether that's the civil rights movement, but this sense that we are once again at a kind of hinge moment in American history. That the problems have been compounding, that we are faced with a crisis, and that we can't think small, that we have to dream big and be willing to be like, "Yeah, actually we can change the system in a pretty fundamental way." Not just tinker around the edges, but make really big change to how America works.

I think that was quite striking. I think that is, again, a mark of this difference between Senate-brain Dems and maybe this new crop of Dems who have come of age in the Trump era, where on some level, Trump's promise was like, "Yeah, we're gonna change it." On some level, especially to elites, his promise was, "Yeah, we are gonna change how things work in America in a fundamental way." And he's going for it. And I think people who came of age politically in the Trump era are just like, "Yeah, that's just what politics is." You don't go to Washington to make a bipartisan compromise. You go to Washington to change America.

Chance Phillips [00:32:55]
I will also note, this is something I thought was very interesting when I was attending these town halls, is that Platner and his volunteers -- and to an extent his supporters -- Platner stresses that electing him will not fix Maine's problems. Which is a very interesting thing for a political campaign to do. You're saying, "Please elect me, but also electing me won't be enough."

And he says the reason why, referring to the civil rights movement, or the suffrage movement, or these various historical movements he will sprinkle throughout his speeches and his responses, he says these all show that we can't get real, radical change unless we have people in institutions of power, like the Senate, working with organized people outside of these institutions. Without having sympathetic leadership in the institutions working with the leaders of the civil rights movement, you don't get the Civil Rights Act. It's not LBJ alone that leads to this. That's something he might say.

And this is very interesting to me, because it's sort of undercutting the case for electing him, to an extent. But it's also something you see around the Mamdani mayorship in New York. The New York City DSA helped get Mamdani elected as a long-time DSA member, and then they are now trying to say, yes, it is good that we have this mayor who's very sympathetic to all of our policy outcomes, but we also have to push the governor, the state legislature, to actually try to deliver on these things.

So it's a sort of interesting parallel in terms of politicians who will say, "Yes, it's good to elect me, but also we have to have stronger unions who can pressure politicians to vote specific ways." Or other community organizing groups that allow people to pressure politicians or act in ways to actually enable this change.

And then again, just in terms of Platner offering change, one of the applause lines at the town hall is where he will call the current Trump administration "rising fascism." So when he's referring to the past, the inflection points in American history -- the New Deal and the Great Depression, or World War II and the fight against fascism, or the civil rights movement, or the 1860s and Reconstruction -- his sort of framing of this current time, just like these historical examples, is that the Trump administration is fascist in some meaningful sense, and that has to be stopped.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:35:55]
Yeah, so there's a lot in there. I definitely want to come back to that Mamdani parallel, which I think is very interesting. But I want to ask you about this organization theme, this kind of inside-outside politics that I tend to think is very important. I think he's right about that. How successful do you think he's been at getting people to organize outside of purely electoral politics?

Chance Phillips [00:36:20]
Yeah, that's the question. This is, like, constantly in his rhetoric. I --

Chance Phillips [00:36:30]
I don't know if I can speak to whether or not this will end up being successful. My understanding is that -- I was too young to experience this firsthand at the time -- but my understanding is that after Obama was first elected, there was this attempt to keep his sort of campaign infrastructure and general way of mobilizing people in place moving forward, but then that quickly fell apart.

With the Mamdani parallel, they had a taxi rally in Albany, I believe, but Mamdani didn't show up. So even in these candidates who seem very committed to sort of trying to encourage organizing efforts going forward, like Obama and Mamdani, it seems like they sort of believe this to be a good thing, and then it sort of falls by the wayside once you are in office. And how effective these things continue to be is up for debate.

So I don't know if I can speak to, will Platner being elected successfully create a string of local organizing groups who do protests and help organize unions. I can't speak to that. I think it's most likely true that there will be some number of volunteers for the campaign who end up getting hooked into these organizing circles and then stay in there after the campaign. But I don't feel comfortable predicting the future after he gets elected based on the couple of examples where the promises don't necessarily match up with realities after the fact.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:38:05]
Okay. I mean, that's fair enough. I think this is a very interesting topic. I think Organizing for America -- there's a real history there about why, about how things shook out the way they did. But like you say, we don't -- I certainly don't have the expertise to decide, how is this going to shake out for Platner? Is he going to get people involved in other kinds of political organizing? But it is interesting that this is the message that's resonating with people.

I think you see on Bluesky, on the internets, a lot of this discourse of like, "Oh, there's electoral politics versus organizing," as if there are two separate roads to go down and you have to pick. And that seems kind of goofy to me. I mean, I think ultimately you need both. That's the civil rights story. How did they break the back of Jim Crow? How do we get federal civil rights legislation? Well, you need both the Democratic Party and a Democratic president who will vote for it and sign it, and you also need the organizers on the ground who are going to create that kind of pressure and create the kind of narrative. So I just don't see the conflict here. I think it's good. You should do both of those things.

Chance Phillips [00:39:24]
I will quickly note, as an example of that, there's the PRO Act -- the Protecting the Right to Organize Act -- that's been sort of a Democratic piece of legislation for the last several years, which would make it significantly easier to organize, add more penalties for companies that union bust. This would be very important for enabling organizing. It's something that you have to elect Democrats to pass, but it being passed would help a lot of unions like the UAW when they try to organize in the South. You need the legislation in order to enable the organizing, and you also need the organizing in order to pressure and elect politicians to pass the legislation. It's sort of a cycle which right now isn't turning very much.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:40:15]
Yeah. So I also want to kind of sound a little bit of a skeptical note here, because it's funny. I asked you, what's his message? What's his policies? And then we didn't really touch on policy too much and have circled around these larger themes of change and fighting and fascism.

And I think some people worry, are we about to get another Fetterman? We got this guy. He's got these working-class aesthetics. He's a big, kind of macho-looking dude, which people respond to. Turns out he says, "Oh, I'm gonna take the fight to Washington. I'm gonna fight, I'm gonna stand up to this or that." And Fetterman in office has turned out to be more conservative and more incoherent than I think a lot of people would have liked.

And I mean, you've mentioned a little bit about this. Platner can talk about antitrust, he can talk about Robert Bork, but he's also talking about banning Real Estate Investment Trusts, this kind of corporate ownership of single-family housing to rent them out. Stuff that I think is kind of goofy. Stuff that I think is not going to help anybody, but is kind of populist red meat. I'm curious what you think about that dynamic, or how that dynamic is playing out with his supporters.

Chance Phillips [00:41:42]
I guess where I would say, in terms of specific policy, my expectation is that Platner, if elected, would be along the lines of the populist Democratic senators we already have. He was endorsed again very early by Sanders -- again, Sanders is an independent -- but also recently, like a week or two ago, by Warren. And Warren has the same policy instincts on some of these issues as Platner has expressed, about the real estate investment and whatnot.

And I think the major betrayals of Fetterman, I guess, to liberal voters who supported him in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, would be on matters like immigration. And I don't know if I've seen Platner express much willingness to back down there.

I think Fetterman is just a very idiosyncratic case, because part of it is the fact that we had this sort of what seemed like a landslide victory for Trump, and then a lot of Democratic politicians started saying, "Well, we have to move to the right." So the passage of the Laken Riley Act, for example -- a lot of Democratic senators sort of tried to see how far right they can move on immigration and other things. And then various politicians made statements on trans kids in sports and this sort of thing, that maybe now, seeing how this wasn't a total vibe shift that lasted forever and ever, they wouldn't back up.

I think Fetterman as an individual is just a unique scenario. Saying that any candidate would be like him is just likely to be inaccurate. If you read some of the reporting about Fetterman's mental health problems, I don't think that his turn to the right is likely to be replicated by other candidates.

I think the worst-case scenario would maybe be more like a Josh Hawley on the left. Hawley will break out against the party at some points. He'll come out against Medicare cuts or whatever the case may be. But then he ends up being sort of admonished by Thune or whoever, and he votes to line up with legislation. He has his instincts, which might not align perfectly with what the party wants, but for the worst, he's ended up voting for these cuts to social safety net programs. He ends up falling in line to some extent.

So I think Platner would probably just be within the bloc of current populist senators we already have. I don't see the comparisons to Fetterman as all that realistic, considering the idiosyncrasies of Fetterman's specific situation.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:43:45]
Fair enough. Fetterman is my senator, and it's great. By "great," I mean terrible. Anyways, so I kind of want to ask you about this idea that what we're seeing is a democratic Tea Party, which is an idea you see bandied about in a few places. Where the Tea Party was this big movement after Obama was elected, of really increasingly radical anti-Obama Republicans sweeping out a lot of older, more moderate, more respectable Republicans in primaries.

The Tea Party had their costumes and they had some goofy aesthetics, but they also very much did win a lot of primaries, and they very much created a major change in Republican politics. A lot of us feel like for the worse, but it is what it is. It happened, God, almost 20 years ago now. What do you think about this idea that what we're seeing is a democratic Tea Party?

Chance Phillips [00:46:05]
I think a lot of Democratic voters do have some of the same "the Democratic leadership has failed us, we have to replace them" feeling, in order to have preferred policy outcomes or to stop what is currently happening. And again, I wasn't very politically engaged when I was eight years old or whatever. So my comparisons to the Tea Party are all secondhand reflections.

But I wouldn't say -- I think a lot of Democratic incumbents could adapt to the mood of Democratic primary voters. I don't think all of them will be successful in doing so. Primarying an incumbent is always a very difficult task.

I think it's more likely we see -- I guess what I'll say is, I don't think we're going to see a ton of incumbents being successfully primaried from the left or from the more anti-Trump side, if that's not a strict left-right divide. I think it's more likely we see more populist or more vocally anti-Trump candidates being nominated in open primaries across the country.

Like Maine -- Mills is the current governor, but she's not the current senator for Maine. There's a handful of DSA candidates in New York who seem likely to do well, but they are all running in open primaries, as I understand it. And I think they're likely to win, in part because of this messaging, and in part because they have the mayoral support. But I think if they were trying to replicate AOC winning against Crowley in 2018, I think that would be less likely to succeed. But Brad Lander is running against an incumbent -- I think he is likely to win, in part because of the same attitude -- running against Goldman.

So I think we're going to see some things. I just think, in terms of the mood of the electorate, I think that's similar. I just don't personally see -- I hope I'm wrong -- but I just don't see a lot of incumbents losing their primaries over the next year. I think it's just going to be in these open seats where we're going to see a lot of this outrage being manifest. Yeah.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:48:23]
Yeah, I think this is interesting. Actually, at first you said that it's like, are we going to be facing challenges -- incumbents are going to be facing challenges from the left? And then you corrected yourself, and I think that's right. When we talk about these challengers, we have people like Zohran Mamdani, who is a socialist. He'll say, "I'm a socialist." We have guys like Platner, who's not a socialist. He's not a member of DSA, as far as I know. And we also have people like Brad Lander, who is, in some ways -- you look at the guy and you're like, that is a normal Democratic politician type guy, type career arc. He's certainly not a socialist. He's not exactly a populist like Platner is, but he's very much a "we got to fight these people" figure. He's been arrested for protesting ICE, if I understand correctly. So it definitely feels like it's a kind of -- it's orthogonal to the traditional debates about, are you right or are you left in the party?

Chance Phillips [00:49:24]
I would actually -- I believe Lander used to be a DSA member. I don't think he is presently. And I know that Platner very much does not identify as a socialist right now, but he did in the Reddit posts as Jacobin documented, and I believe he assisted in training or similar socialist kind of organizations and stuff. One of the comments that initially got headlines when the Reddit post history was being dug through by a bunch of journalists was him calling himself a communist, which is something he's since distanced himself from.

So I would say, these candidates are not necessarily appealing because they are on the left. I would say that I think all of them are to the left of their opposition -- between Mamdani, Platner, and Lander. But I agree that we could very well see candidates elsewhere trying the same thing.

And if you look at the Lander-Goldman primary, Goldman is trying to really play up his anti-Trump credentials in order to defend himself from this primary challenge. So it's obvious from that that this is one of the axes of debate that politicians believe is going to be very important when it comes to primary elections actually taking place. Politicians recognize this.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:50:44]
Yeah, I think that's fair. It's not exactly about left-right policy, but it's not not about left-right policy. Yeah, there's just this little awkwardness there.

All right, what else do I want to ask you about? I kind of -- I do want to ask you more about Mamdani and about populism. I mean, I think people are always inclined to read a little too much into the New York City mayoral elections, because New York City is a very unique place in America. It has a unique politics. But in this case, I mean, the whole saga with Eric Adams -- like, is he the future of the Democratic Party? No, he won a very complicated primary, and he was nuts. I mean, legitimately, just a really strange guy in ways that are hard to really capture without just doing a supercut of him saying goofy stuff.

But anyways, Mamdani versus Cuomo definitely feels like kind of a microcosm of where we're at. Cuomo -- I mean, he's disgraced because of the many sexual harassment, sexual assaults that he very much did commit, the mishandling of COVID and the nursing homes. But in many ways, he's an establishment Democrat. He's been around for a long time. His name is Cuomo. He's the son of a former governor of New York. Has a lot of institutional support from certain quarters.

Versus Mamdani, who is a young, Muslim, immigrant, socialist, but also very much, "I am going to get elected and I'm going to change things. I am going to get elected and I am going to take the fight to Trump as best I can." And all this stuff. So I'm curious if you see Mamdani as a parallel with Platner here.

Chance Phillips [00:50:55]
Yeah.

Chance Phillips [00:51:35]
Yeah.

Chance Phillips [00:52:43]
Well, yeah. So both candidates obviously promised, or are promising in Platner's case, a lot of political change. They're both very much willing to play to the voters and engage in economic and rhetorical populism.

I would say that another parallel, which, again, I think people who don't live in Maine might not be familiar with -- it's just that it seems like they're everywhere. During the election season, Mamdani was constantly releasing videos where he would be walking through all of New York, or talking with taxi drivers working the night shift, or just going to all these events. It seemed like every day there would be new videos of him in some new mosque or a church or a public gathering. And then Cuomo, relatively, was very sort of shielded from the public eye during that campaign, at least. I don't live in New York. I was there for a couple days of the campaign season, just as a tourist. But that's my understanding, reading Hell Gate or other local news coverage of that election season, and then just watching the Mamdani campaign's very skillful social media work.

Platner, again, as I mentioned earlier in this conversation, he just did 50 town halls, while the other two candidates did basically none. And my understanding is he's also been very visible at other anti-ICE, or anti-war-on-Iran rallies.

So besides the offering for change, maybe because they're younger, but maybe just because they're outsiders and they recognize the challenge, they just show up everywhere. And this might not work at the presidential level when you're trying to win over millions and millions of people. When you have a relatively smaller state like Maine, or you have one city like New York, you can actually meet a very large share of the electorate. Or at least have people know someone who's met you and has good things to say, especially when it's relatively dense like New York.

But again, I went to town halls in Farmington, Jackman, and Greenville. Farmington has a chapter or branch of the University of Maine, so that's a decently sized college town. Jackman has a population, per the 2020 census, of under 700 people. And then Greenville has a population of, I think, like 1,100 or something for the last census. He's trying to go to every single town in the state. And this doesn't always mean that there's a lot of people there. As a writer for UnHerd, that publication, pointed out, there was, I think, 10 or 12 voters at the Jackman town hall. Very small town, turnout wasn't insane, but he's showing up. And even if there's only 10 people there, that's 10 people who just met a candidate for US Senate, who they're now much more likely to vote for in June.

So I think part of it is the change messaging, but another part of it is just the fact that these candidates -- maybe because they're more ideologically predisposed to the "meet everyone, shake hands with everyone, defend your positions in these open Q&As without pre-screened questions" approach, and less cautious because they realize that they only have some small chance of actually winning this thing and they have to take these risks -- they just seem a lot more willing to go out there, presumably knock on doors, go to these town halls and do all this additional stuff that the establishment candidates like Mills and like Cuomo just seem less likely to do, for whatever reason. Yeah.

Samantha Hancox-Li [00:56:32]
I think that's exactly right. We've talked about messaging, we've talked a little bit about policy, but it seems also very much like a certain comfort with social media. There's an older style of politics where control of your own image is the most important thing. We're going to have events. They're going to happen in a very specific way. We're going to pick reporters we like. We're going to cut ads in a very professional, produced way and blast them out on TV stations.

Whereas in the social media age, Mamdani came out of nowhere because he just says yes to everything. If you want to talk to him, he'll talk to you. He'll cut a ton of little videos talking to people. And they're produced, he's good at it, but there's a level of "we're just gonna throw stuff at the wall and some of it will go viral," and you just can't exercise the same level of control over the product in this way. But you just have to trust that you're good enough and that you're skillful enough at communicating with people to get out there.

Which I would love to talk with you more about. But we are coming up on the end of our time here. So yeah, any last words about this Platner versus Mills fight, and maybe what it means for the future, or not? Any last words here?

Chance Phillips [00:57:55]
One last thing on the Mamdani-Platner parallels, which is besides these sort of seeming kind of similar from the outsider change-candidate perspective, they also do have a not insignificant overlap in the people who are advising the campaigns. I believe Morris Katz worked on both and also on the Osborn campaign. There's a pool of people who are sort of moving between these populist outsider campaigns. So some of the similarities in strategy might just be due to staff overlap, the same people saying we should do the same things, and then it works to a varying extent. So just as a note there.

I would also say, you opened this interview by sort of saying that it looks like Platner is going to win. And again, the three most recent polls all sort of suggest he is likely to win. I also think that if Mills was the nominee, I think she would beat Collins right now, just based on the polls also showing that she has a small lead. And I don't see the favorability of Republicans growing anymore over the rest of the year.

I also think that Trump yesterday said, "Oh yeah, Collins, she's very good," while critiquing Murkowski. So if you have audio clips of Trump praising the Republican candidate when Trump is very unpopular, seems like that'll be a demerit for that campaign.

So I'm not -- I probably would have predicted Sara Gideon would win in 2020, but it seems like -- I think that whoever the candidate is, is likely to win. So I don't think it's -- I think that's an important point.

The point I was trying to make is that if right now the polls suggest Platner is going to win, Mills is beginning to run attack ads highlighting these old comments and the tattoo and so forth. So I'm not -- I personally will not predict that until we see supporting polls next month after these ads have been really running, because I do think it's possible that some of the voters who are not showing up to these town halls could actually be swayed by this. They might not see Platner's explanations.

So I think Mills can still win this thing personally, but I think whoever wins, I would say, is pretty heavily favored to beat Collins, which I think is a good thing.

Samantha Hancox-Li [01:00:13]
That can only be a good thing. So all right, yeah, Chance, thanks so much for coming on. It was a pleasure talking to you. Bye.