Ana Marie Cox’s New Republic profile of the Maine oyster farmer and former Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner begins with an encounter on the shore with a salt in rubber boots. Learning that she’s looking for Platner, the guy says: “Good man.”

In the 2025 article, Cox is charmed by Platner, who’s as voluble as this guy is terse. She’s impressed by the oyster, calling it a metaphor for “how labor, science, and regulation can still stitch together a community and economy.”.

She is unvexed by one of Platner’s biggest contradictions – his protest of the war in Iraq, followed by his enlistment to fight in it, his three voluntary tours of duty with the reputedly badass marines, plus one with the army in Afghanistan. “I might have read too much Hemingway,” explains Platner, who returned from the wars in 2008 with numerous physical injuries and a case of PTSD.

Writes Cox: “It reminds me of some boys I grew up with. Young men for whom joining the military and radical protests were both ways of proving you could take more than most people could handle.”

Muck-smeared, disheveled, battle-scarred yet a little bookish, Platner was the very model of the working-class political hero. “If Bernie is what righteous anger sounds like,” says Cox, “Platner is what it sounds like when that anger represents longing for connection.”

For more than a year, his allies strained to keep connecting. Progressives agreed to overlook the Nazi-adjacent tattoo, whose meaning Platner claimed not to have understood. When it was revealed that he’d used the “R” word on social media, they accepted his apology: “I am endeavoring to improve, every........

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