Graham Platner is adopting elements of President Trump’s populist approach in the Maine Senate race, tapping into voter frustration with a system they believe is stacked against them and casting the criticism he faces as evidence that powerful interests are trying to block him and his supporters from reclaiming power.
It’s a strategy that was tested almost immediately after he secured the Democratic nomination.
President Trump, speaking in the Oval Office the day after Mr. Platner clinched the nomination, spent more than three minutes attacking him — calling him a “thug,” “fake,” “phony” and “a pig.”
Mr. Platner responded by leaning in.
“Wow, gotta say, being called a thug and the worst person to ever run for office by Donald Trump might be the highest compliment I’ve ever received,” he said. “For Donald Trump to come after me personally — that might be the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about me.”
The exchange echoed a dynamic central to Mr. Trump’s own rise. During the 2024 campaign, he repeatedly framed attacks from political leaders, prosecutors and the media as evidence that he threatened entrenched interests.
“They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you,” he told crowds. “I just happen to be standing in the way.”
Mr. Platner, who, like Mr. Trump in 2016, is a political newcomer, is now running the same play from the other side of the aisle, insisting everyone from Mr. Trump to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and the media is out to get him.
He entered the general election carrying considerable baggage: past inflammatory social media posts, a tattoo he had covered up that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol, and sexually explicit texts he sent to women after getting married. Mr. Trump and Republicans argue he is cosplaying as a working-class hero — pointing to his private-school education, a $200,000 loan from his father to help purchase his home and questions about the scale of his oyster-farming operation.
Mr. Platner’s answer has been to go on offense.
“The reason he’s doing it is that he’s scared,” Mr. Platner said of Mr. Trump. “He knows that when we win this election, when we take this kind of politics down to Washington, when we retake this seat for working-class Mainers — he knows that’s coming, and it’s got him shaking in his boots.”
The parallels extend beyond rhetoric.
Nicolas Jacobs, a political science professor at Colby College in Maine, said both men have relied on a populist structure that casts the candidate as the vessel for a broader movement — and treats every new controversy as evidence that the system is out to stop it.
“The way that the defense of Platner has gone is almost Trump’s defense to a T,” Mr. Jacobs said. “This is the political class digging up dirt on me. Chuck Schumer’s trying to ruin my life. That sounds exactly like something Donald Trump said in 2016.”
Mr. Jacobs said the dynamic is a feature of populism, not a bug.
“Trump saw himself as a leader of a movement. Platner is always talking about how he’s leading the movement,” Mr. Jacobs said. “And if there’s a movement bigger than themselves, you have to overlook individual failings — and in fact every time a scandal comes up it seems to vindicate their message.”
Where Mr. Trump cast himself as the billionaire-turned-populist standing between the “forgotten man” and a corrupt ruling class, Mr. Platner casts himself as the combat veteran and oyster farmer standing between working-class Mainers and what he calls the “Epstein class” — a formulation that turns one of Mr. Trump’s favorite attacks back on him.
“It seems the only thing the party establishments can agree on is a love of Jeffrey Epstein — and a hatred of me,” Mr. Platner said in his first general election ad, referring to the late sex offender Epstein.
Mr. Jacobs noted one major distinction between the two politicians: authenticity.
Mr. Trump never pretended to be something he wasn’t — telling working-class voters he was for them, not because he was one of them, but because he knew how rigged the system was from the inside. Mr. Platner’s working-class image, Mr. Jacobs suggested, may be harder to sustain.
“Trump never puts on a Carhartt,” Mr. Jacobs said. “He doesn’t go to the bowling alley and take shots. He never pretends to be something he’s not. What he tells people is, ’I’m for you, not because I’m one of you, but because I know how damn rigged the system is — because I’ve been part of it.’”
Sen. Bernard Sanders sees it differently. The Vermont independent, one of Mr. Platner’s most prominent backers, pointed to the $99 million in Republican super PAC money lined up against Mr. Platner as proof that the working-class message is landing where it counts. “What they are worried about is that he is going to be a strong voice against oligarchy,” Mr. Sanders recently told the National Press Club. “To my mind right now, we need allies who have the guts to take on the big money that is dominating this country.”
Whether the Trump formula holds for Mr. Platner through November is the central unanswered question of the race.
For now, Mr. Platner has tried to broaden the frame. “This story — the story of this campaign — is not about how the political establishment counted me out,” he told supporters in his primary victory speech. “It’s about how for far too long the political establishment has counted out the voices of every single person without the money to buy influence.”
“Now the national pundits, the political establishment — they keep looking for that one story, that one headline, that one moment in my life that they can define the campaign by,” he added. “But in trying so hard to understand me, they failed to understand that this is not about me at all. This movement is about us.”
