Graham Platner

And until we become a party that doesn't do that, until we become the party that uses the tax code to go after the money that, in my opinion, has actually been stolen from working people in this country over the past four decades, until we use, frankly, like the anti-monopoly laws we already have on the books, we just have to stop having Robert Bork's wild reading of what a monopoly is, until we do that, I think people aren't going to trust us.

I think that it's...

When I think the landscape has changed now, I do fundamentally think that a lot of people, even who hold culturally conservative views, are realizing that they are in fact getting taken for a ride on the economic side.

I think it's more clear now that it has been.

But the Epstein files also are showing people of all political stripes that there is in fact a class of people who lives above accountability and lives above and kind of sees the rest of us as like this sort of amorphous blob to either just extract wealth out of so they can go live depraved lifestyles.

I think that's actually really helpful, one, because people are realizing that it's true.

But in my experience in Maine thus far, I have a lot of people come up to me at events and in public who identify as Republicans, identify as conservatives, tell me straight up that they do not agree with some of the things I say, but that they think the fact that I'm fighting back against the establishment and the system, that that's more important and that's why they're going to vote for me.

And it's anecdotal, but it also pans out in the polling.

I mean, we do really well with independents.

For a long time, the whole story was is that independents are this like magic moderate middle and that if you have any kind of sort of, you know, populist or progressive, as we define it, views, that you'll never appeal to those folks.

Well, it turns out when you just go out there and talk about the fact that billionaires are robbing you, a lot of folks are like, yeah, that's what I'm here for.

That's the... And so it's...

So I think the landscape has somewhat changed.

But like, you know, with Sherrod Brown, Sherrod was a victim of the larger failure of the Democratic Party.

He was not a victim of his own politics, I think.

You know, Ohio went from being a blue stronghold of unions to becoming this red stronghold of disenfranchised, angry, working class people who 30 years ago were Democrats.

Because they were all in labor unions.

And then, I mean, it's not like in the 1990s, it's not like the Clinton administration really stood up for labor.

The Democratic Party has a lot of a role to play in the diminishment of labor power, in the free trade projects like NAFTA that really did, in the end, screw a lot of working Americans.

I think that when you put it into the greater context, I think that's what's happened.