Graham Platner

They are terrified.

But I think that's how you make yourself accessible.

And we need politics to be accessible again to regular folks.

So if anything, I'm very much a labor candidate.

I believe in the need to strengthen unions.

I believe in the power of organized labor within our society to advocate not just for like their union members, but kind of for the working class in general.

The governor has effectively vetoed every single pro-labor bit of legislation that's come across her desk.

She's been an opponent of labor.

I mean, right now I have, forget how many, but a bunch of union endorsements.

By the time it gets to the primary, we're probably gonna have the vast majority of unions in Maine.

because they have a not great relationship with the governor.

And to me, we need to pass the PRO Act.

We need to expand the NLRB or have the NLRB, we need to expand the labor courts and have an NLRB that actually acts as a good faith intermediary in unfair labor practice disputes, which right now, I mean, it doesn't even have a quorum right now, so it's all not functioning.

And like someone who's vetoed pro-labor legislation over and over and over again, to me is not someone that's like gonna go to the mattresses to fight for it in DC.

I also think that Maine has a very fraught relationship with the Wabanaki nations.

We have a specific law from 1980, which does not extend to the Maine tribes.

the same protections that all other 570 nationally, federally recognized tribes get.

So it means that the main tribes have to spend a bunch of money on lobbyists in Washington, DC, because for legislation to impact them, they need to be named specifically.

So they have to have people in Washington to make sure that Maliseet, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, that that gets added as words into bills.

There have been multiple attempts to fix this, and the governor has opposed all of them, both as attorney general and as governor.