Published in the Portland Press Herald on May 14, 2026
by columnist Douglas Rooks, lives in Augusta.
We need more candidates like Platner, who ignores what’s “politically possible” and focuses on what voters and citizens want and need.
When we finally get beyond the tattoo and Reddit posts — national columnists are not quite there — perhaps we can consider what Graham Platner stands for, and what he might do if elected to the U.S. Senate.
When we spoke recently, I asked him about intractable issues that have long divided the Democratic Party and left it unable to enact legislation and pursue policies that have broad support — and if resolved could revive the party’s, and the nation’s, fortunes.
The toughest is the mismatch between the labor and capital, with the billionaire class economically and politically dominant while millions of working people are unable to support a family with children, even in two-earner households. Platner is in no doubt about what needs to be done.
It starts with the PRO Act (Protecting the Right to Organize) that has languished in Congress for years, unable even to obtain united support from Democrats. Platner understands that from the high water mark of the Wagner Act in 1935 empowering unions to organize — and creating the National Labor Relations Board to encourage them — it’s been all downhill.
Successive rollbacks by Republican Congresses and an increasingly hostile NLRB have made it virtually impossible to organize a new national union, even though huge swaths of the service economy — fast food chains, hotels and resorts, even hospitals — cry out for the organizing that once created strong industrial unions.
Even bedrock wage-and-hours laws are hardly enforced. “Wage theft is the most common crime in the country,” said Platner, referring to employee misclassification. “Yet it’s almost never punished, and hardly noticed.”
A major obstacle is that national chains can present themselves as “small businesses” franchised to local owners. The unavailing efforts of a hundred individual Starbucks stores to unionize demonstrates the problem. Unless unions can organize nationally, there’s no chance of winning a fair contract. Wages will continue to languish as all economic gains flow to the top.
Platner is equally forthright about healthcare: Democrats must stop tinkering with subsidized private health insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s core that’s now unraveling. Exhibit A is Medicare, partially privatized by a Republican Congress under President George W. Bush.
The overly subsidized “Advantage” plans, with cheaper premiums than traditional Medicare, and the outrageous ability of drug companies to charge whatever they want have dramatically increased costs while decreasing reliable care for seniors.
Platner acknowledges that while “Medicare for All” is the popular slogan, the actual plan more nearly resembles the Veterans Administration, where prices are controlled and universal access guaranteed.
He concedes that the private healthcare lobby has a hammerlock on Republicans and some Democrats in Congress, but says public discontent is so strong it can be overcome. Rallying voters across the political spectrum for reliable, universal access and electing those pledged to achieve it will “put people in positions of political power who can carry it out.”
I’ve heard only one clunker from Platner’s campaign, the energy plan released last week. It relies on repealing the federal gasoline tax and attempting to replace it with a “windfall profits tax” on oil producers, with more money from a proposed “billionaires tax.”
This would be a policy disaster — eliminating the century-old mainstay for building transportation infrastructure while leaving us helpless to mitigate global warming, which looms ever larger despite Donald Trump’s irrational attempts to reverse course.
The problem with the federal gas tax is not that we have it, but that it’s inadequate to maintain existing infrastructure, let alone build climate-friendly replacements. It should be increased, not abolished.
Maine has had a gas tax since 1923, long before the sales tax (1951) or income tax (1969.) It too must increase for us to create a viable transportation system. The federal tax funnels 25% to energy-efficient transit (rail and bus) and pedestrian uses, a percentage that should be increased as we transition away from fossil fuels.
Shortly after Platner advocated eliminating the gas tax, Energy Secretary Chris Wright suggested “pausing” the tax, and then Trump said he’d do it himself, even though he can’t. Perhaps Platner now understands why a progressive Democrat shouldn’t advocate it.
The point is not that every idea a candidate comes up with will be a good one, but that we finally focus on what they will do in office, not just who they are and where they came from. Bold, iconoclastic steps will be needed to break the shackles of a moribund political system controlled by entrenched financial interests.