Susan Collins has just obtained a new Democratic challenger

A veteran of the Marines Corps and the US Army. Uu. Who was deployed in the Middle East announced his campaign for the Senate in Maine on Tuesday, seeking to expel the Republican headline Susan Collins, who is looking at his sixth mandate in Washington, DC.

Graham Platner is a 40 -year -old oyster farmer from Sullivan, Maine, who believes that the people of the working class in the state are suffering at the hands of large corporations and politicians in DC, points to Collins, 72, and what he sees as his failure to defend President Donald Trump and his legislative agenda.

“No one can tell me that Collins doesn’t know how to use power,” said the Democratic candidate in an interview with News themezone. “It is very well versed in the Senate mechanisms. He chose not to use that power to sustain the bill that was going to destroy Medicaid for so many main ones. He did not deceive me.”

Graham Platner / YouTube

Collins voted against Trump’s massive bill by reducing Medicaid and taxes on the rich, but his previous vote to advance to the extent was critical to clean his way to the passage. As president of the Senate Assignments Committee, the senator has also seen hundreds of millions of dollars of federal programs that have bipartisan support.

“I think this complicated farce has worked,” Platner added. “She pretends to be a moderate to appeal throughout the spectrum, while he often votes along with the Republicans.”

The Democrats Road to resume the majority of the Senate in the mid -period elections next year extends largely through Maine, a blue state that Kamala Harris took to seven points in the presidential elections of 2024. However, the party has fought to recruit first level candidates to challenge Collins, a formidable opponent that has a large chest of war war. Platner joins the former employee of the Jordan Wood Congress to run for the seat. Meanwhile, most Democrats hope that the 77 -year -old Governor of Maine, Janet Mills (D), enters the race despite not being commitments to the idea.

Collins could face a more difficult path towards re -election this time. She has seen her survey Plum During the first six months of Trump’s second mandate, and the Democrats will be anxious to link it with their legislative schedules to rural medical care and other popular government programs. Trump tariffs have also wreaked havoc in Maine’s economy, which depends on cross -border trade with Canada.

Even so, Collins has survived scares before. During her re -election fight of 2020, she was greatly surpassed by her opponent, the then president of the State Representatives Chamber, Sara Gideon, and the Republican senator constantly followed in the surveys. Finally, Collins came out at the top even when Trump lost the state to the Democrat Joe Biden.

For Platner, a tattooed veterinarian who made four infantry tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the decision to run for a political position was born by love for his country and the state of Maine.

“I am seeing it in many ways tearing for the collapse of the rural medical care system, the inability of people to afford housing and see immense amounts of money from taxpayers are spent on wastewater wastewater,” Platner told News themezone. “I am doing this because I love this place, I cannot wait and live a good life, while everything I feel connected falls apart around me.”

He called Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in DC and other cities a “horrible abuse” of the abilities of the US army.

“This is not the America in which we want to live, full of armed agents, uniformed and masked,” he said. “This is dystopian. It is not the America for which many people voted, even for Trump. Many are my friends. This is not something that we, as Americans, we want to see our government.”

And he criticized the “without feck” Democrats for not connecting the Americans of the working class, urging the party to be more difficult against the Republicans and eliminate the rule of the Senate’s filibuster if they recover the majority and when they recover the majority.

“You can’t win a chess match when the other side turns the board and begins to overcome it,” he said.