Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Find Out podcast. We've got a special Friday episode for you today, which I am super excited about because we're going to be talking about my home state of Maine and quite possibly the Senate race that is getting the most attention right now. And we are being joined by Graham Platner, candidate for Senate from Maine. Graham, thanks for joining us.

Thanks a lot for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah. So I want to kind of to start off, I kind of want to talk about the whole journey of this campaign so far. So how did you originally, what was the thing that got you to say, I want to take on Susan Collins, and I want to be in the United States Senate? Yeah. So this is not a thing I aspired to. It's not a thing I've spent a bunch of time in my life thinking. I mean, to be frank, it's the furthest thing from anything I've ever spent time thinking about. I've really been focused on kind of small town life for a long time being the Harbor Master community organizing. I've been on the planning board for about five years.

And that's where I thought things were going to go.

I mean, my wife and I, we've worked really hard to build a very small, simple, but incredibly fulfilling life, and we were very happy with it.

And then I was approached by some folks I knew in the labor movement, who I was connected to through kind of statewide organizing for economic justice issues.

And they essentially had this idea that Susan Collins was going to be uniquely weak, which I agreed with, that the Democratic Party was likely going to choose a very kind of establishment candidate

that was going to push pretty establishment positions and run the kind of standard old-fashioned

campaign, which has never beaten Susan Collins, and that there was a unique opening for

somebody that kind of comes from the real world to run a campaign on, frankly,

economic populism, which is very much in line with my politics. And my wife and I told them to

get the hell out of our house because it was, I mean, it was like the most insane thing. I mean,

we don't make a lot of money. We don't have a lot of free time. We work really hard. We've run an oyster farm. I mean, it was like the most insane thing. We don't make a lot of money. We don't have a lot of free time. We've run an oyster farm. I mean, it takes a lot of time. But then they kind of came back to us with more of a fleshed out idea. And I've spent a lot of time over the past few years, especially, being very, very frustrated and in many ways very angry

about the state of politics in this country.

And in a state like Maine, where I just see so many working people continuing to work as

hard as they always have, but getting less, watching our health care system effectively collapse, watching our healthcare system effectively collapse, watching

our education system effectively collapse, watching the affordability crisis hit the state

in ways that have made it effectively impossible for people my age and younger to own homes.

I mean, like, it's all of, it's happening everywhere, but here it just seems, like, it's no longer

theoretical.

Things are getting bad, and they've been deteriorating for a while, and yet I continue to

witness politics not really engage with any of this.

And so we kind of had a realization where it's not kind of goofy, but like, if we believe

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