1128: Graham Platner Isn't Backing Down

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He's currently in a Democratic primary race against Maine Governor Janet Mills that will be decided in June, and the winner will try to finally defeat Susan Collins in November. Graham has been on the show before. You might remember that his interview with Tommy in October is where he revealed that he got a skull and crossbones tattoo as a young Marine that he says he later learned was a Nazi symbol, and right after his PSA appearance, he got the tattoo covered up. I, of course, asked about that, but I mainly wanted to learn more about what Graham Plattner actually believes about politics, what life experiences shaped his beliefs, what his theory of change is, what kind of a person he is, and what kind of a senator he'd be. All important questions because despite the early controversies over the tattoo and his long trail of Reddit posts, Plattner didn't just decide to stay in the race. He's now the frontrunner, at least according to the polling averages and fundraising totals. At the very least, judging by the crowds he's getting and the organization he's building, he will be a formidable challenger to Mills, and this will be a very competitive and much-discussed primary in the months ahead. With that said, I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you do too. Here's Graham Plattner. grand platner good to see you thanks a lot it's good to be here welcome back it's good to have you here in person no it's an absolute pleasure man you uh you've been running for senate for six months yeah we launched the campaign on august 19th okay so yeah whatever that is around that you've gone from a completely unknown challenger to rising star to scandal-plagued candidate who face calls to drop out to fundraising leader and maybe if you believe the latest polls front runner yeah yeah it's been quite the whirlwind how is your thinking about politics and campaigns and being in public life changed uh since you started running like what have you taken away so far from this journey uh what i've taken away i mean i was already pretty cynical about money and politics and that has that that cynicism has just been supercharged i mean it is like and i like it and the problem is like you clearly need to raise money to compete for this stuff but there is just a whole apparatus that seems to exist just to suck up money yeah and and like and that has been really eye-opening i mean the political industrial complex so the campaign industrial complex whatever you want to call it and it is this kind of like it's a wild thing to actually interact with personally i mean we're lucky because our fundraising has been some so much small dollar stuff and because frankly the establishment of even my party uh wants nothing to do with me it kind of keeps all of that at arm's length like automatically so i'm not that that mad but you like just interacting with it it's like man this is there's a whole industry around this stuff is it the time suck that's really it's the time totally and and like it's i i'm not gonna say i understand why people go the kind of like corporate pack dark money route because I mean just ideologically I can never really grasp that but from a practical perspective there is an element where I can see someone who might not have the same like just sort of political foundation that I have being I mean I if somebody comes along and says hey you never have to make a phone call again and you don't have to go beg anybody for money I can see someone being like oh well that would mean that I could do more other stuff right um although I mean it's I mean That's not in any way, shape, or form remotely worth it. But it's – and then there's just the – there's just kind of interacting with the whole media landscape and political world as a pretty normal guy up until August. And so, like, that's a whole wild experience. Like, I open my phone and see my name. And I'm like, I don't – nope. No, no, no. I don't want to see that. Like, it's just this very – And it's not always good. Not mostly good. No. No, it's such a, yeah, it's a very like, it's just very surreal. Yeah. And I also very much understand why, I guess the biggest lesson I have learned is structurally it's borderline impossible for regular people to pull this off. Like if you're a regular human being with not a lot of money and having lived a pretty normal life who doesn't want to like just get your entire existence ripped to pieces, I can see why people don't want to do this. I think about that often because especially with people our age and younger, like and everyone younger, because we've and if you look, if you've never spoken about politics or posted about politics your whole life and have lived a perfect life, maybe. But you've obviously found out. Yeah. You've said quite a bit about politics. Yeah. I mean, all the time and everyone knows now. And everybody knows. I mean, like, and for me, like, it's a, when I got into this thing, I, I'm an older millennial. I've spent most of my life on the internet. I was well aware when the moment I said yes to this whole experience that somebody was going to come along with a bunch of resources and dig up every single thing I ever did on the internet and try to use it. Like I knew that was coming. And when it came, I was happy to talk about it because quite frankly, I think it's a pretty standard story of people that aren't trying to get into politics or just regular human beings in general, you go through phases in life. You believe things when you're younger, you say things, you do things, and then you learn new things and then you change and then you become a different version of yourself, which I mean, in my experience is pretty much just like what most people go through. So it was actually very kind of ironic that that whole thing blew up as if it was this huge scandal. And in reality, I think it actually really strengthened the campaign because a lot of people could like directly engage with that feeling of like, yeah, I have not, most of us have not always been who we are today. Yeah. And we also have to very much understand that if we're going to build a better future, we need to keep an opening for a lot of people to change. Cause if we're all stuck right now on some ossified political thought and nobody's capable of changing, and then what's the point of doing any of this. Yeah. No, and look, we appreciate you coming on here. I know you talked to Tommy in an interview, which became part of the story because he asked you about a lot of the old posts. He also asked you, and then you talked about the tattoo. Yeah. You've since had the tattoo covered up. Yeah, actually, I had it covered up like two days after that. I remember. I remember a few weeks after that, I had a main voter who I know say to me, I like Plattner. I'm leaning Plattner. I don't think he's a secret Nazi. but then they said, you know, my concern is I saw that a few people left his campaign. One of them said Plattner knew the tattoo was a Nazi symbol when he started running. Someone else told CNN the same thing. I'm just wondering if I can trust him. Now, if you win the primary, because I'm sure you've probably met up, been able to meet a lot of primary voters just campaigning around Maine. And general voters. Maine's not very big. Right. If you win, of course, super PACs will run millions of dollars of ads. To this effect, can we trust him? Is he telling the truth? What about all these positions? To reach voters who aren't politically engaged or aren't as politically engaged or aware as maybe some of the voters who've come to your events. What will your response be and what is your strategy to push back? So this response is going to be exactly what it was, which is like I'm happy to talk about all this stuff. When that whole thing started, it like never crossed any of our minds to like run away from it. It was just kind of like, no, I mean, this is just part of my life. And in many ways, it's kind of part of my political journey. And so I'm happy to discuss it. One, what we're doing in Maine is we are truly trying to build a real on the ground, organized, broad coalition of, frankly, working class power. and in the doing of that in a state that's as small as maine is by the time we get to the general i'm going to have either directly connected with a substantial portion of the electorate or a bunch of people who are just going to tell their friends and the way maine tends to work is that people trust their friends and their neighbors more than they trust uh tv ads from political groups. And part of our strategy, quite frankly, is just to cut through all of it by engaging as many people as possible and, and personally interacting with this. I mean, I do three to six public events a day. I mean, I do not sleep much. Uh, and that's fine. You might meet everyone in Maine then. We very well might meet everyone in Maine. Um, and we go everywhere. I mean, this is not like, uh, I got, we're not doing some kind of weird math about like, oh, we've got our win number and we're only going to focus on that. Like for me, we truly need to change politics. And to do that, we have to engage with everybody, even people who we might not agree with, even people who might initially be very either resistant or hesitant or even oppositional to the message. Although we've found that when we do engage with those folks, we have a lot of common ground. Have you had conversations with people who are skeptical about um all the the the tattoo stuff or any of the old reddit posts or any of that oh yeah i mean how do those go they go great i mean because i i mean it's it's because i explain it and frankly most people are like that all sounds eminently reasonable um and it's and i think in main folks i mean it's like i don't know how to say this but when people meet me they tend to be like okay so he seems exactly like a normal human being so it's so it's helpful it's helpful um so there's that and then i mean honestly we're also just going to push back on tv um primarily like with messaging that's positive i mean i really i'm i know that when once we get through the primary that you know it the whole thing's gonna i mean there's so much money's gonna get spent on this race which which drives me insane yeah because if i had my way we would just take that money and like write everybody and made a check frankly we'd be better off every cycle when you hear how much is being spent on the biggest senate races it's just like oh what Although I will say for us, the way that we kind of fight back against that is we're like, we're building an on the ground organizing apparatus. So a lot of, we hire Mainers and we're going to, we're going to have Mainers learn how to be organizers in their communities and like have them on staff. Like we want the money that we spend to primarily be spent in Maine, not just give it to some DC consulting firm that makes it another stupid ad that we've all seen a thousand times. It just changes little things. but we all know exactly what they are. So by building that and by sticking to a very like cogent, constructive message of the kind of future we want to build, the kind of policies that are going to get us there, and a theory of power building that is also going to be necessary to get us there. I think that's how we push through all this stuff. And in my experience, like negative tv ads i don't think they actually moved the needle much in maine you know in 2020 sarah gideon race outspent the collins race almost three to one yeah they had some money left over it's money left over an immense amount of money was spent on negative ads about susan collins it didn't do anything and honestly living in the part of me and i live in which is which rural eastern Maine. A lot of the negative ads about Sarah Gideon also didn't change anything. It was really more about like a feeling on the ground. People couldn't really connect with the Democratic candidate, primarily because I think D.C. came in and ran the race like an old school D.C. race, which is not going to win against Susan Collins. And Collins was a known entity. And at that point, people could still sort of frame her as this sort of moderate. Roe had not yeah i've been overturned right which is really important to remember and i think that that to me just shows that it's that's not really about the ads or even the money spent there's there's another there's an x factor in there about connecting with people and about really being able to make people think that you are or not think but being letting people engage with you directly to show that you are like authentic yeah and which is why i i mean we hold we've held 40 town halls and we're going to hold 20 more before the primary and we're going to hold a bunch more after that like making myself accessible in a way that isn't controlled like we don't screen questions at these things people just come and i literally pick on folks who raise their hands drives the comms team insane they are terrified uh but i think that's how you make yourself accessible and we need politics to be accessible again to regular folks so you're running against janet Mills. She is a, you know, a popular governor who, you know, who's accomplished quite a bit in comparison to other governors, even other democratic governors, big healthcare expansion, free community college, more school funding. What governing decisions has Janet Mills made that you disagree with? So if, 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 going to have the vast majority of unions in Maine because they have a not great relationship with the governor. and you know to me like like we need to pass the pro act we need to expand the nlrb or or have the we need to expand labor courts and have an nlrb that actually acts as a good faith intermediary and like 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 D.C. 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 Maine tribes have to spend a bunch of money on lobbyists in Washington, D.C. because for it, 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. so it like to me that is also a pretty fundamental difference around i don't like a foundation of political philosophy like i do not see expanding tribal sovereignty in maine as a bad thing at all i think it's good and i also think it's morally the correct thing to do since we have been not good faith actors in our relationships with the tribes yeah and so like there are and then last but not least, and this rather big one, I think, is I think we have to tax the rich. And the governor has vetoed multiple bipartisan bills, some written by Republicans that were trying to raise taxes on the wealthy in Maine, creating three new tax brackets. It was completely reasonable. And the governor vetoed that. And again, that just doesn't show a commitment to going after where the money is, which I think as we move into this next phase in American history, I think that that's going to have to be like a pretty foundational element of our politics going forward. Pod Save America is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees. Did you know Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers? They have all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and houseplants, all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy. 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In high school, I was introduced to more critical thought, like Howard Zinn and Chomsky. You know, at that point, but I remember reading those things and like being like, yeah, some of this makes sense, but I also still was very much like a bit of a patriotic young man. So, and I always wanted to join the military. So I had this kind of like weird, like militaristic bent that I really can't explain. But since I was two, I wanted to be a soldier. It was really after my military service that I began to think much more deeply about it, primarily because, I mean, I had four tours in the infantry and I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Um, and I really came to believe that what we were doing was not what we were claiming to do. I, I, I, I could not figure out what the immense amount of violence I partook in, what that did for the town of Sullivan, Maine. and like i and to this day no one's ever been able to explain to me i do know that some people made a lot of money off the wars that i fought in and it wasn't the young men and women who did the fighting and it certainly wasn't the civilians that we inflict inflicted just wild amounts of violence upon i it's defense contractors and it's uh it's folks in political power like it really is and that that began to i so i became it became very critical of american foreign policy which as i then that kind of just sent me on a road of being well if i'm critical of foreign policy why is our foreign policy like this so i became more critical of our political structures and once you start being critical of the political structure you're like well why is our political structure like this and that takes you into like an economic critique and you start to realize that, oh, I like this whole system in many ways does seem to be built by people in power with wealth to maintain or expand their wealth and power generally to the, to the immiseration or diminishment of regular working folks. And, and I think, you know, the reason my, this campaign has sort of blown up the way it has is I think a lot of people are getting wise to this. I think a lot of folks are like, wait a second, like this stuff that we all thought for years, we are getting a totally different outcome from what we claim we're trying to do. So are we actually trying to do the thing that we claim or is all of this doing something else? And when you reframe the question of like, does all of this exist just to like screw working people and make somebody else rich? Suddenly, a lot of decisions we make begins to become a lot more clear. And so that's kind of where I've, it's been a long journey. I mean, it's definitely not been, I didn't like have a day where I'm like, oh, I figured it out. Well, and obviously, so obviously you're like shaped by your experiences in Iraq. You come home, all the, everything you just said, you know, you could have found out by just being on the internet, right? And reading about politics and reading the news. But you decided before you, long before you ran for Senate to like get involved in community organizing, which I find really interesting. What got you into that? But what did you want to change in your community specifically? And what did you find about the work? What was challenging? What was fulfilling? I forget what year this was, but I read a book called No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey. And she is a pretty storied labor organizer who sadly passed just a few years ago, which is a shame because we could use her now. In it, the book really talks about the difference between organizing and mobilizing. developing a deeper theory of power in which power really is accessible for people who are willing to organize and to take it in many ways uh in that we in our society even in like liberal circles still kind of have this vision that there is an elite who's like worthy of wielding power and the rest of us kind of have to like you know let them do it uh and her argument is like that's simply not true. That really power is, power is for everybody, but it requires organizing to bring it around. It requires trust building and relationship building. And I read that and it kind of changed my life actually, because I began to think that, like I spent a lot of time, especially coming back, my last trip to Afghanistan was in 2018. And it was just, to call it disillusioning would be an understatement. I was there for six months, hadn't been there in seven years. And I was like, okay, well, nobody has any new ideas. This is insane. And I came back and I was really kind of just at a loss of what to do. And I decided to kind of opt out. And I moved back to my hometown, became an oyster farmer, started working on the ocean and really wanted to just check out. But while I did that, I also began to connect with my community. And I mean, I live in a town of a thousand people. It's the town I was born and raised in. I wound up on the planning board. I wound up being the harbor master. And in doing all that, I began to see like really the value of building trust and relationships and just organizing on the ground. And I also began to realize that organizing is actually not that complicated. It's just really hard. And that there is no graduate version of it. It's all one-on-one stuff. And it's hard because it is difficult to get people to participate, to care, to break down barriers. And because you have to put a lot of time, unpaid labor, into it. You have to believe. And you have to go out into your community and you have to tell people what you believe, which is also hard and it requires you to kind of open yourself up to a lot of people who like where i like people who i know who you have to like kind of say like this is what i believe and sometimes people like i'm not into that you're like you're my neighbor i that bums me out um but you have to do it and we had a number of issues in uh in eastern maine uh for instance There was a school board race and out of, frankly, an out of state PAC came in with a bunch of money and backed a very anti-trans candidate. And somebody who'd been on the board for 13 years, who was well-respected in the community, who everybody liked, lost a seat. And a month later, the school district pulled back protections for LGBTQ kids that had been there for six years. for no reason just outside packaging involved in a local school board in sullivan yeah it's technically in the yeah in franklin but yeah it's like we have an rsu so regional school and it was this moment for myself and a few other people where we we watched this happen and we it only happened because it was no organizing versus a little bit of organizing they had people to knock doors and this guy had himself it's a small town school board race and there was no apparatus to support him. There was no way of like getting people to knock doors for him. He was calling around almost like frantic, uh, understanding what was happening, like with a week until the election. And there really wasn't anything that existed. And so a number of us, we'd already been, we'd already formed like kind of a small community organizing group, but we use this as kind of an example of, we understood that if we don't have people who can make signs and put them up, if we don't have people who can knock doors, who can make phone calls in their communities, talking to their neighbors, people that they trust or people who would trust them. If we don't build that, then we're going to lose this kind of fight. And so we just started to build it. And we reached out to folks and we got a number of the other larger statewide groups. We reached out to local democratic committee. We reached out to, frankly, just a lot of individuals who we knew kind of had who are worked up about this. Cause every, Like a ton of people are angry, but again, there was no mechanism. And we kind of, we realized that especially right now after Trump's reelection, people want to do something. They want to fight. They want to get involved. The problem is in a lot of places, there is no, there's no room to go into. There's no place. And we figured we just have to build the room. And once you build the room, people come into it and they start talking to each other and they start building relationships and i mean the way we did it was pretty non-hierarchical so essentially like folks would get together and be like this is the thing i care about so he's like i care about that too or like go forth and make that a campaign and uh and it's and it worked it like we we actually wound up like winning the next school board race and like we and and we're still like kind of now we're trying to get candidates to run for county commissioners stuff like that so there is a to me that was a direct it was a moment where i realized oh man this kind of power building is very real. Yeah. It just requires people to really get out of their comfort zone and start building relationships again. And for me, it was the foundation of when the campaign started. One of the reasons I agreed to do this was purely to use it as a statewide organizing vehicle. With the visibility and the resources that we're going to get, we can take that kind of strategy those kind of tactics that kind of on the ground trust building that we do and we can supercharge it and we can get the labor unions involved and we can get all the other community organizations around the state involved and then we can bring in all these people who engage with politics via electoral campaigns and we can train them how to be organizers and activists in their community and i think that's that's how you build the apparatus to knock on enough doors, talk to enough people and build enough trust where, I mean, I'm pretty, I'm convinced we're not just going to beat Susan Collins in November. I think we're going to trounce Susan Collins. And if the worst thing happens and we have an election that is contested or called into question, well, we still have an apparatus to turn people out, to actually have people mobilize. And if we have to, you know, resist fascism in the streets with a mass movement, which is really the only way you can. And we're trying to build the apparatus to do both. And when we're done, we want it to stay. I don't want any of this to die because one single Senate seat's not going to get us universal healthcare. So we're going to need to have the power of people still on our side in order to like get the wins we're going to need down the road. I'm a nerd. So I looked up the election results in Sullivan for the last decade, quite a bellwether. Barely goes for Trump in 2016 by like less than 1%, although as you said, it's like a thousand people. Jared Golden barely wins in 18, barely flips to Biden in 20. Trump squeaks out a win in 2024. I'm sure you know most of the people there. What are their politics like? What do people believe there? It's a, I mean, everybody works really hard. Eastern Maine is economically depressed. Um, we have, it's most, it's commercial fishing. Uh, it is a lot of construction, um, mostly cause we have some pretty substantial summer communities nearby, which brings money in. And then across the Bay from us, we have Acadia National Park. So there's a lot of folks that work in industries that are related to tourism. Um, so it's a very, it's a very working class area which i frankly is i think why it is this kind of weird back and forth between like trumpism and not trumpism um because i mean trump i have a lot of friends who voted for donald trump three times and they hate billionaires they think uh corporate tech folks are like manipulating all of us they think that corporate owned agriculture and food systems are exploiting all of us and essentially poisoning us. They think that hedge funds and private equity are like destroying working people's lives. I agree with all of this. One of the reasons they voted for Trump is because Trump came along and he told them the one thing that they knew was true was true, which is that they live in a system that is not built for them and somebody somewhere is robbing them blind. And once he said that, they were willing to kind of forgive all the other stuff because that's the core thing that people understand, that we live in a political and economic system that does not have their best interests at heart. When you tell people that something they know in their bones is real, they're willing to kind of go along with a lot more, I think, afterwards. And one of the biggest problems we as Democrats have had is that we didn't have a counter to that. We told folks that we had to protect the status quo. We told folks that, no, the economic system's actually doing great. Did you guys not see that Wall Street's doing fine? GDP looks great. Unemployment is record low. Yeah, but everybody works three jobs and they hate them. So it doesn't matter if unemployment's low. Working people are working themselves to the bone. I think that that's why, and I'm utterly convinced that economic populism going after the oligarchy, that is how we kind of rebuild trust with working people. And I mean, I say this, this is not like a radical idea. I mean, honestly, it seems pretty obvious, but the democratic party, at least elements of it, certainly in DC have, have really walked away from that. And I think working people walked away from them because of it. pod save america is brought to you by stamps.com it is shocking that to this very day many small business owners are still making post office runs or stuck with expensive postage meter leases it's 2026 not 1926 that's right mail and ship when you want how you want with stamps.com with stamps.com you can send from your computer or phone 24 7 no long line no low supplies open anytime. Print postage on demand and get up to 90% off carrier rates like FedEx, UPS, and USPS. Schedule carrier pickups right from your door and get carrier compliant labels every time. No errors, no rejected mail, no wasted trips. It's perfect for your business. Send certified mail, get document tracking and confirm delivery and analytics to make sure you know exactly what you sent and spent. For almost 30 years, millions of customers have relied on Stamps.com to make mailing and shipping faster and so simple. 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It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. So I want to talk about that a little more. Like, what do you think happened? Because Hancock County, where Sullivan is, went for Obama by 17 points in 2012. And, you know, obviously, I've heard you say, and I get it, that the Democratic Party has become too tied to corporate interests. Like, where specifically has the party gone wrong in the last decade in terms of policies, decisions, positions? Are there things you can point to where you're like, that's what they're- Yeah. I mean, absolutely, too. The financial crisis. Bailing out the banks, bailing out the big industries, letting people walk away with gold, or jump away with golden parachutes while those banks still turned around and foreclosed on people's homes. While the average working person saw their, frankly, their retirement savings just disappear and then we watched the political apparatus back up the people that broke the thing in the first place i think that i think that was huge that broke a lot of trust and and then further on you know like the so i i just so i was in i was there i was in the white house we sort of knew that this was going to happen we walk into the white house um bush had already done the bailout. Yep. And we can't really undo it at that point because we can't let the banks fail because the whole system goes under. And we make sure that the banks pay all the money back with interest. Right. The fucking executives get away with the golden parachutes. And I remember like trying to, I remember talking to Larry Summers about it. And I was like, he's like, we, it's contract law. We can't claw back the bonuses. Like it's illegal. We're not, we're going to get fought. And I'm like, okay, we can talk about contract law. But there's like people with pitchforks outside the White House. Right. So like, you know, same thing with like, why didn't anyone go to jail? Well, the laws aren't there. The DOJ won't prosecute because the laws aren't there. And obviously we can't direct the DOJ to do anything anyway. Obama gives an interview where he calls these people fat cats. He gets in trouble for calling them fat cats. Right. Let alone all the policies. Yeah. I think looking back, there's plenty of criticism over our housing policy, though even then at the time I remember them being like, well, we'd love to bail out people who like lost their homes in this. but what about we don't want to bail out the people who bought second and third homes that they knew they couldn't afford because then we're rewarding people who acted irresponsibly so there was all this we passed the recovery act we passed the affordable care act we spend a whole bunch of money that then we lose the midterms over not much money and i only bring this up not to not to defend any of it because i often look back on it and think like we're gonna have another crisis and another crisis and you get republicans who are like we'll let the whole fucking thing fail and we don't care and then we'll just blame the immigrants that's right and then you get the democrats being like okay we're gonna try our best to solve the problem and it's not gonna be good enough and then everyone's gonna hate us and say that we are uh tied to corporate interests yeah you know it's like it's a hard it totally but i but i also think that that's why i'll just be entirely up front i mean i think that's why we need to kind of change the political will of the democratic party, um, to go a little bit further to, to actually go after, I mean, people should have gone to prison. I mean, Iceland put people in prison and I understand that. Yeah. I mean, but Trump administration's happy to abuse the justice department and send them after folks. They send them after like Comey cause he hurt Trump's feelings. I honestly don't think the American people would be angry if the justice department went after folks that like destroyed their retirement savings or kicked their neighbors out of their homes. It's a, and I, and that's the problem. I think even before that, like, I mean, I, I, I assume, yeah, maybe they wouldn't be upset. I assume we want to make sure the justice department only goes after people who actually broke the law. Of course. But then the question is like, yeah, but also we need to pass the fucking law. But that's the other thing. So that means that, but that's the other, like, we need people in the Senate and the house who want to pass these laws and also frankly put enforcement mechanisms in place yes i mean that's one of our biggest problems right now we've got lots of laws but then they get broken i mean the trump administration breaks the law every day and then a lot of people just stand around like well what do we do like what's the what's the mechanism to actually enforce this stuff and you know and again like i'm not i don't i don't think that the criticism is always correct but the criticism is absolutely there and it's driven like the kind of narrative for sure and that's why i honest that's why i think that the only way to regain the trust of the american people as democrats is to be radically different than what we've had to really become like there should be no such thing as a labor democrat that should just be being in the democratic party yeah there we do need to cut ties with the, I would say the larger, uh, the donor world that comes from the financial system, the donor world that comes from Silicon Valley, like that wants to use AI to either put us all out of work, or I guess maybe kill us all as of, uh, it's very insane. Um, we need to cut ties with that. And I think we need to do it in a very clear public manner until we do. I think a lot of folks are still going to see Democrats as beholden to the same corporate apparatus that the Republicans are. The problem is, is that the Republicans have the, have the weapon of just blaming marginalized communities, blaming immigrants. We need to blame the oligarchy. We need to blame the corporate power that resulted in the deregulation of the banking system. I mean, that's a big one. We used to have laws in place. There's a reason 2008 happened in 2008 and not 1994. I mean, we changed rules. And frankly, a lot of Democrats supported that stuff. 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 guess a big question I've had for much of the last decade is, like, can Democrats win over people who have more culturally conservative beliefs with economic populism alone? Because I very much want to believe that the answer is yes. I have not seen the evidence that it can. And I realize the sample size is small, but like, you know, Bernie Sanders runs in 2016. Bernie Sanders runs in 2020. Gets a hell of a lot of votes, still getting big crowds, did not win either race, obviously. Yeah. My friend Sherrod Brown. Yeah. Who is, you know, a perfect example of an economically populist Democrat who still holds, you know, liberal views on other issues, has not sort of tacked to the middle on any cultural views. You know, held out in Ohio for a while and then just lost his last race and hopefully he wins again this year as well. Oh, fingers crossed. But what do you think about that? I think that it's – one, 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. um also this can be a little 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 a 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 uh one because it's you know people are realizing that it's true yeah 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 independence for a long time. The whole story was, is that independence 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. You know, we, 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. You know, I think that when you put it into the greater context, I think that's what's happened. And in this moment, frankly, just because of the material reality that people are living in, it is becoming very clear to a lot of folks, whether they're conservative or liberal or whatever you want it or just in the middle and don't even care about politics. there's becoming a very clear awareness that they are in fact being taken for a ride by people with immense amounts of power and that those who are willing up willing to stand up to that power those are the people they're going to look to and support and i think they're willing to sort of not care actually about a lot of the culture war stuff um which in my opinion and i say this often I think was all invented to keep us all from having the conversation about taxing billionaire wealth and breaking up corporate monopolies. I think that's why we have to argue about all these culture war issues that in reality, I mean, it keeps us all divided. But it doesn't reopen the hospital. and it doesn't change the fact that your rent continues to go up or that the wages that you've been earning continue to stagnate while the prices of goods and services continue to rise. All the culture war stuff, there's nothing for that. And we need to be very clear and cogent and blunt about how we're going to change it. And I think if we do that, I do think that there is an opening to do this. Do you think the Democrats have, I don't want to say taken the bait, but engaged too much in some of these culture wars? Totally. And I think they have taken the bait. And I'll be entirely honest, I think some of them, some of them don't even take the bait. Some of them rise to it on purpose because they don't want to have the other conversation. I mean, there is an element, I see this all the time, of, you know, more kind of establishment folks who are like, look, I don't want to talk about this, But they make me talk about it. And now I'm going to talk about how I don't want to talk about it for the next four hours. And I'll never talk about raising taxes on billionaires. And I think there's an element within the party that actually likes this stuff because it gives them this ability to pretend they hate this, but it sucks up all the oxygen. So then you never have to get around to the structural or systemic reforms that we have to make. Sometimes I wonder if it's because the coalition of the Democratic Party is now more college educated and upper income than it's ever been. Yeah. That like what gets people angry and what gets people like eager to participate in politics are some of these issues, which, you know, I will say like I'm sure people feel strongly. I feel strongly about a lot of. Same. Very much. And I'm. Cultural issues. And I am. I do not back away from things. Right. I think all the wins we've made for justice and equality, we take no steps back from any of this stuff. But I'm also very aware as someone who like now has money that you're like, oh, when your life is like comfortable. Right. Then you can say that like, yes, it's important that people care about raising taxes and people care about health care. But also, are you going to be as angry about it as everyone else? And I think that like I am because I am very politically engaged. But I think for a lot of people who just show up at elections, who are like more suburban, upper income, stuff like that, who have been voting Democrat for a long time. I wonder if it's like the driving force for them. It might be, but we're not winning with that. Right. I mean, there's that great Chuck Schumer line. Yeah, I know. For everyone we lose. For every working class person we lose out in the countryside, we're going to gain two voters in the suburbs. And it didn't happen. Donald Trump won. And then he won again. And we lost a lot of seats around the country. like so clearly that math did not pan out i i truly think that the only way forward for us as a party is to really become the a real party of working people again and you know when you do that it doesn't mean you're like also not i mean look when i talk about working people i literally mean anybody that just makes money from wages yeah which is everybody yeah i mean i'll just like i've had a bunch of folks be like well what about the middle class i'm like yeah man in this america The middle class is the working class. Quite frankly, somebody that started a business and has just worked their asses off every day ever since and might now have like a bunch of money but still works, they're way closer to someone working three jobs in poverty than they are to a billionaire. We're all kind of down here. And when we talk about policies, about clawing a lot of that wealth back, we're not talking about going after small business owners. We're not talking about going after big business owners. We're talking about going after the people who used their wealth and power to change policies in the political system to then consolidate more wealth and power. They cheated. And we need to use political power to claw that stuff back. So I think that by becoming the party of representing working folks, we really would be becoming the party of like really representing the vast majority of Americans. and as people begin to realize that this right-wing populism it's not making things cheaper right and it's not reopening hospitals and it's not making your health insurance company any less awful to deal with yeah that realization will kick in and you know we won't get everybody but i think we will start getting folks back but we need to be there with open arms and we need to be there with policies that are very understandable i mean i think that's a big one Pod Save America brought to you by Mint Mobile. 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It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. well i want to talk about medicare for all yeah because i know that's like central to your campaign and i now feel like i have talked about health care for most of my life in politics and went through this in the 2020 campaign obviously had been there for aca as well so i dealt with a lot of health care politics i think insurance companies are horrible i think that the for-profit system is And I think it is a no-brainer that if we were starting from scratch that we would have a single-payer system or some version of a single-payer system. I think that the figuring out how to win the political support to transition from what we have now to a single system Medicare for All or something like it is a political challenge that is made more difficult in large part by all the money that the insurance companies and everyone else has But there are also some like real trade-offs and transitions that I think average people who very much dislike their insurance companies are still concerned about. And, you know, like they tried, they put it on the ballot in Colorado in 2016 as a ballot initiative. Medicare for all fails. Oregon fails. California fails. They pass it in Vermont, the only state that's tried. And then they failed at implementation, right? Well, one is because it needs to be a national policy. Yes. I mean, like, especially small rural states, we don't have the money. Right. I mean, it's in many ways we're talking about building a national risk pool. And the more people you have in a risk pool, the more effective your insurance is, which really is what we're talking about here. I'll just use my own experience. So I essentially get universal health care. I'm a disabled combat vet. And because of that, I simply get free point of service care. It allowed me to start a small business. it allowed me to take some time to figure out what kind of life I wanted to live after my combat service. Without it, I would not have ever been able to be an oyster farmer because I would have had to work another job to have healthcare. It gave me a real material freedom that allowed me to build something that today is a successful small business that employs people in Eastern Maine. never would have existed without my healthcare. That basic element of foundational support just around healthcare is what allowed me to become a successful small business owner. Not only do I think that providing that is going to unleash a lot of productivity in the real world, because this is important. We have a system and we have a lot of metrics that we use to judge our productivity that frankly mostly seems to be fantastical in the financialized system. But in the real world where people actually build things and exchange them with each other for money, that in that world, I honestly do think that giving people just this simple foundational support is going to unleash a lot more productivity. People have the freedom to start small businesses or to engage in art, to engage in things that I think actually elevate all of us as a society. also we would take health care off the plate of small business owners which it's a nightmare you know if you're like a lot of small business medium-sized business owners they want to provide health care to their employees but i mean i've spoken to folks in man who like if you have a company 50 employees and up one of those employees job is to just deal with the health insurance stuff paying the premiums dealing with the companies it's a frig you take that off their plates Well, now they can just focus on what their business is, not also having to be this intermediary around health care. I know that we can do it because the VA does it. Right. That program exists. The VA only has problems when Republicans cut its budget. When we fund it and we resource it, it does a spectacular job. In Maine, the VA is awesome. And it's awesome because we have a small population and the resources and employees, the ratio for the population that's serving, it's a good ratio. So it works. I've lived in other parts of the country where the VA system is really hard to deal with because they don't get the funding and therefore the outcome. It's almost as though you get what you pay for, whoever would have guessed. when i think about moments in american history where we had to address systemic problems big ones there are always going to be times of experimentation and frankly growing pains and the only way it ever works is when you have people in positions of power who have the political will to try to drive it forward. I mean, this is what the new deal was. The new deal was FDR having built a broad coalition, having political power, and then really just ramming things through, making them happen. Some of them failed. And then they changed. They allowed to be, they were imaginative. They experimented. Things worked. Things didn't work. I mean, the NRA worked for a little while and then it kind of didn't. And so they got rid of it. And And there is a – when we electrified all of rural America, it was done with an array of options, whether it was public ownership or public-private partnerships and sometimes just straight-up private companies. But we used to use our imaginations to fix problems. And I think our biggest problem recently has been we have a political class that has sort of forgotten how to dream big. Everything's a tax credit. Everything's a block grant. Everything's like something weird. And when you try to explain it to people, like you lose them in like five seconds because everyone's like, I don't even, what is this weird wonky language you're using? Yeah. Which, I mean, it's one of my biggest, biggest criticisms of the Biden administration where they did a lot of amazing things and then just never told anybody about them. Yeah. And then we all stood around being like, they were like, why did nobody like that we did this? I'm like, dude, nobody knew. And when you did explain it, it was always in this kind of very complicated legal language. Yeah. But then nobody engages with that. When it comes to health care, I mean, I'll be honest. I think we have to do a lot of big things. We're going to need federal money to reopen hospitals. I think we need to start thinking about mental health care as being as much a part of health care as everything else and incorporating that into a larger system. I mean, in rural Maine, health care is collapsing now. Not next year. Not down the road. it's already happened. I know. I was going to say, one of the big problems or one of the big challenges with Medicare for All is that hospitals are open right now because they get reimbursed through. And if you suddenly have every hospital go to the Medicare reimbursement rate, suddenly hospitals are closing all over the place. I mean, I think this is why Bernie and his plan has a transition period. It's a four-year transition period. Four-year transition period. And also, I mean, to be fair, I've read Bernie's full bill, and it's essentially universal healthcare with the name medicare for all right like as you really kind of get through i mean it covers dental it covers vision medicare doesn't cover those things like it's a there it's an expanded program that really is just a single-payer universal healthcare system that is based around basic things like you can still get insurance for like for higher level procedures that it doesn't cover but it does cover all the stuff like if you get sick or if you get injured and you just don't have to like think about it and i gotta say having traveled a lot and been to a lot of other countries i just have this element of me where i'm like dude everybody else does it differently they all figured it out and yeah of course it's never perfect these systems will always help i mean we're talking about large bureaucratic systems. They're going to have some problems. They have a lot more problems when you get neoliberal policies in place that start taking money away from them. But everybody else has a better version of this and it's cheaper. And the care in many ways is better for most people. You know, a lot of folks are always, well, in America, you know, like the rich come here to get great procedures. I'm like, that does no good for somebody with no money. Like, or who can't afford who can't even afford ACA coverage now because premiums have gone up by like triple fold yep and and i mean these are people i know these are my neighbors i mean my a relative of mine had to drop her health insurance because her premium doubled because of the loss of the ACA extensions and even that it's like we're just even if we keep expanding the subsidies and the credits for the ACA. And what it keeps going in. You're just like, they're raising prices and we're all just subsidizing the higher and higher. Like at some point you have to figure out how to contain the cost of the healthcare system. Yeah. And I'll just be entirely up front. As long as there is a substantial profit motive with a substantial middleman, we're just going to like, unless we address that part of the problem, subsidies won't be enough because somebody's going to figure out how to pull more money out of the thing. Costs will go up. So I think it's, I do not pretend that it will not be a transition period. I mean, it would be one of the largest projects we've really ever undertaken as a nation to transition from the healthcare system we have to a single payer universal healthcare system. But we also have to do it because what we're doing now is insanely expensive and it's terrible. And in many places in rural America, it's totally unsustainable. It's absolutely falling apart. I want to ask you about this because it's in the news. And by the time people hear this, Trump could have already launched a war with Iran. I did want to get your response to what a White House source told Politico about selling the war. Quote, there's thinking in the administration that the politics are a lot better if the Israelis go first and alone and the Iranians retaliate against us and give us more reason to take action. Thoughts? I hate everything so much. I mean, one, I think it's disgusting that we've got people in the White House who are literally sitting around thinking about how do we sell a war? I mean, we went through the run-up to the war in Iraq. At least then, the Bush administration had the decency to really try to trick us. Yeah. At least they really went out of their way. They made Colin Powell sully his entire reputation at the UN. They like really, they put the work in. And it's so, I mean, it's insulting to have these folks who are just like, oh, we're going to figure out a war in a week. Like we're just, oh, man, this Epstein stuff's getting out of control. Iran. We're going to invade Iran now. The Venezuela thing, like we did that. We're still screwing around down there. We need to start another one. Let's just go to war with Iran. And I mean, that's what they're doing. All this is, is posturing. And as somebody who fought a war, too, it's disgusting. And it also is, I think for me, I mean, one of the reasons I want to go to the Senate specifically is we need a Senate who's really going to take their power back when it comes to war making. i mean the constitution is pretty clear yeah i saw that the war that they're the democrats think that the war powers resolution will now get a vote in the house yep um i don't know if it'll pass because i think there's a few democrats who i mean this this dude this is i mean this is and by the way you want to talk about like one of those reasons why working people or regular people don't it's also because of this stuff because there is this connection like we just should be the anti-war party i mean the fact that there is an element of the right that this kind of isolation version of it that actually gets to almost take on the mantle of being that only works when we have elements of the democratic party that are like willing to go along with this stuff we shouldn't be fighting wars i'm sorry we should not be sending young american men and women off to kill a bunch of people in foreign countries i mean for essentially any reason i like i'm it is hard for me to see any intervention post-world war ii that in the long run really worked out well korea maybe you can make the argument everything else though and it is a like i'm not i'm not a pacifist but at this point i've become essentially anti-war when it when it comes to like the nation writ large and how we use our power internationally because every time we do this when you when you go back and look at it in hindsight it's pretty much always a bad idea but more importantly for me like there's a human cost to this stuff that you've seen yeah that you felt like i know what i know what it looks like when american-made high explosive interacts with children like i've touched it it it's a it's a horrifying thing You know, I know what it feels like to have friends die and to have a lot of other friends of mine and myself included have to deal with the trauma of that for years afterwards. We need more people in positions of power, frankly, who either understand it because they've experienced it or who are just kind of ideologically opposed and don't want us to do this kind of stuff. And it's not just about like the moral component. It's about the fact that like this stuff, it doesn't make us safer. It doesn't make the world safer. It tends to, to quote a famous Marine who came long before me, war is a racket. And there are people that make an immense amount of money off of it. And when you go look at a lot of the wars we fought, frankly, certainly in my lifetime, at the end of the day, that's usually what happens. And I do not see a war with Iran falling into a different category. In fact, it seems to be almost like, I mean, I said this about Venezuela as well. It's like Iraq, but dumber. But we need people in places of political power who are really willing to call it exactly for what it is and to stand up against it. I mean, this can't happen. Yeah. Last question, hopefully a lighter note. You recently took a campaign hiatus to travel to Norway with your wife. Yes. To try IVF. Speaking of healthcare. Yeah, exactly. In the hopes of having your first child. Can you talk to me about that decision and why Norway? Yeah. So we've been, Amy and I have been dealing with infertility for about two and a half years now. And went through all the previous steps. Eventually got to the point where like, all right, IVF is the last thing. and uh because of i mean the va doesn't cover it if it's not like clearly my problem and amy's not a vet so it doesn't cover her it's kind of weird which needs to be changed by the way because to have children you do need both people but whatever it's a whole other thing um i'm gonna work on that when i get to the senate uh we uh her insurance didn't cover it um the va stuff didn't cover it And so we started to look into doing it in the United States. And the cost is astronomical. And in New England, there's only one clinic. So we, and their only clinic is in Portland, Maine, which is three hours away from where we live. So we'd have to be traveling anyways. We started to look into it. We saw how expensive it was, but we really weren't sure what else to do. And then a friend of Amy's had either a relative or someone who had gone to Norway. They're like, you know, in Norway, it's really cheap and everybody's really nice. And it's a wonderful personal experience. And so Amy reached out to a clinic in Norway, like on a Monday. And we had like an hour long intake exam with the surgeon on Thursday. And the moment I knew we were going to go is at the end of an hour long intake exam. I was like, okay, how much do we owe you guys? And they were like, why would you give us money? Like nothing has happened. And I'm like, yeah, we're definitely going to Norway. I mean, this is... That's amazing. It was amazing. And it was amazing. It was a... And in the end, even with the travel, staying in an Airbnb for two weeks, the plane tickets, it was one quarter the cost of just the baseline of doing it here in the United States. It's insane. And you get treated like a human being. Like the clinic is small. Everybody's really nice to you. They don't look at you as like just something to pull more money out of. They like treat you like a human being, which is you're going through infertility. Helpful. Very helpful because it's an emotional experience. And, you know, we developed like a really nice relationship with those folks. And so, yeah, it was a very, I mean, we're still in it. We're still kind of going through the process. But it's been, we actually, I mean, I talk about this. We joke about it that even if it cost the same, we still would have done the Norwegian version. because it's so much more perfect. It's pleasant. And you go to Norwegian hospitals where literally no one is sitting there worried about how much this costs. They've really figured it out in those Nordic countries. We shouldn't invade Denmark. They're pretty nice. We should not invade Denmark. No war with Greenland. Yes, that's good. On top of all the other ones. I feel like that one might be the most. I think we can get that done. We should definitely not do that one. Well, good luck on your journey there and also good luck on the campaign and thank you for coming by. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Churlin is our executive editor. 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