In the Maine Senate Race, It’s More of the Same Corruption Against a Veteran Who Will Fight to Unrig the System

What the Platner v. Collins race represents

During the nearly thirty years she’s been in office, Senator Susan Collins has strained to cultivate an image as moderate. Ahead of major votes, she routinely walks down the Capitol hallway rushing, grimacing, telling reporters with consternation in her voice that she’s weighing her options. By now, most of us know it’s all a form of kabuki theater if not deliberate misdirection.

Collins pretty much always ends up in the same place: aligning herself, yet again, with her Republican colleagues and their billionaire, corporate, and extremist white nationalist donors to vote the way those donors want. This includes: Brett Kavanaugh confirmed despite assault allegations and the Republican mega-bill moved through committees despite its massive cuts to healthcare and tax breaks for billionaires. That’s why it’s been so energizing to watch Graham Platner make his case against her.

Platner, the Democratic candidate running to unseat Collins and represent Maine in the U.S. Senate, is a former U.S. Marine who was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s also an oyster farmer and an incredibly talented speaker. Since he launched his Senate campaign, packed crowds have flocked to his public appearances up and down the state to hear him open his speeches with evocations like, “We have a political system that is entirely inaccessible to the average American… It is a politics that has turned into a theater for elites… And because of that, we have a political system that has ceased [to represent] us.”

“Many of us understand that we are looking at a political system that does not care about our input. That does not care about what we want to see in our society. Many of us have understood for quite some time that what’s happening in Washington, D.C., is almost entirely separate from us and our world. And that the only people who have access are people with wealth and power.”

Platner’s success represents more than a shift toward the progressive wing of the Democratic party. As his former high school classmate, Josh Keefe, wrote: “He’s trying to start a movement to build a world without the despair and resentment that he believes allows Trump’s brand of politics to flourish.”

He calls for banning billionaires from buying elections, rebuilding the failing healthcare system, and breaking up monopolies. Platner is one of over 200 Democratic candidates across the country who’ve signed onto End Citizens United’s Unrig Washington program that includes not accepting corporate PAC money.

Platner’s vision is in many ways a repudiation of Collins’s way of doing politics. Regardless of how she tries to spin her record, Collins’s career has exemplified old-fashioned political corruption wherein the rich just buy votes from a politician that they’ve identified as a hack or an easy mark. She’s helped usher in the largest transfer of wealth from working people to the ultra-wealthy in our nation’s history. She’s also personally profited – numerous times – from helping the rich get richer. And she cast the decisive vote to prevent campaign finance reform that would’ve made politicians more accountable to voters.

End Citizens United has named Senator Collins as one of the most corrupt members of Congress. A few reasons why:

• Collins has accepted over $8.3 million from corporate PACs during her career.

• She’s received significant sums from Wall Street, and she’s repaid her donors by voting for legislation that favors private equity, corporations, and the wealthy.

• She opposes a wide variety of campaign finance reforms – and has for years. She opposes campaign finance transparency and banning congressional stock trading, while she owns the eighth most lucrative stock portfolio in Congress.

• She was the decisive vote to enact the SAVE Act, a major voter suppression bill that Trump and other Republican extremists.

The relationship between Collins’s donors and her votes is openly transactional. She votes along with what her big donors want, sometimes as soon as they cut their checks:

• A pro-Collins super PAC received $2 million from Blackstone’s CEO Steve Schwarzman, whose net worth is an estimated roughly $50 billion, and the very next day she gave initial support and voted to advance the Republican 2025 mega-bill that massive tax breaks to billionaires.

• Collins supplied the deciding vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after Professor Christine Blasey Ford gave damning, credible testimony of Kavanaugh assaulting her when they were teenagers. The dark money group the Lexington Fund (run by Leonard Leo, a Federalist Society executive and the architect of the right’s takeover of the federal judiciary) has given at least $1 million to support Collins this campaign cycle.

For me personally, Collin’s vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is the hardest one to stomach. At the time, Collins told journalists that she believed that Kavanaugh would uphold Roe and therefore uphold national access to safe, legal abortion – which is a precondition for women’s access to health, freedom, and participation in civic life. Of course, not long after, Kavanaugh voted to overturn Roe. It was always obvious that he would.

Anyone as familiar as a sitting U.S. senator is with American politics knows that the Federalist Society recommends conservative Supreme Court nominees based on their anti-abortion positions and likely willingness to overturn precedent. So, it follows that Collins was either stunningly ill-formed about a basic political reality, or she was willing to mislead the American public and forfeit millions of American women’s access to what was then a constitutional right.

With that in mind, the only thing that could arguably be considered middle of the road about Collins’s tenure in the U.S. Senate is that she fits in with other members of Congress who’ve all run their own grifts by trading stocks while having access to insider information, handing out contracts to companies that donate to their campaigns, and generally cozying up to political mega-donors, even if they’re open white supremacists and Christian nationalists. Collins isn’t moderate by any sane measure, but she and other Republican members of Congress are definitely peas in a pod.

The fact that open political corruption has become so normalized that it’s widely accepted by most members of Congress is why it’s so reassuring to watch Graham Platner’s campaign. I’ll confess that when I’m feeling cynical, hopeless, or just plain low, I’ll watch a couple minutes of his speeches. Even though they’re about unjust wars, diminished healthcare, the rigged system, I’ll still feel better after hearing his voice, because he’s telling a truth that’s plain for anyone to see, and he’s also calling for us to use this moment of crisis to organize and fight for what we need.

As we take in primary results from across the country, it’s important to remember that Platner is far from the only candidate running on the dire need to get money out of our political system. Consider those over 200 Democratic candidates running in all kinds of districts all across the country that are part of Unrig Washington. You may not have heard of all 200-plus candidates, but they’re out there, centering their campaigns on fighting corruption, refusing to take corporate PAC money, supporting congressional stock trading bans, and vowing to work to get dark money out of politics.

As Platner recently told a crowd in Augusta: “In this society, power derives from two places: Organized money or organized people. And the money organized. It always has been. And it always will be. Until we organize enough people to take it back.”