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Todd Richards of Bristol is a graduate of the University of Maine who runs an art gallery in Damariscotta.
I am crushed.
Not because of the allegations against Graham Platner. I believe Jenny Racicot. Her claim fits easily into Graham’s own narrative during that part of his life: toxic masculinity, deep rooted anger, and heavy drinking.
I’m crushed because it could be the death of a movement in Maine that was never about Graham, it was about the people finally finding somebody willing to speak their thoughts into a microphone, voice their desires across every political party, and more importantly scream their complaints up the economic ladder.
It resonated so well that over 15,000 volunteers (like myself) joined in eight months, something a Maine campaign has never seen.
In June, Graham received more votes in a primary than any Democratic candidate in our state’s history, and he did it in a race without a viable opponent, because, I believe, most people wanted their vote noted even though it wasn’t needed.
Why? Because he did the normal thing: He reached them. He had 90 town hall meetings in 11 months. Susan Collins hasn’t had a town-hall style event in over 25 years.
I saw hoards of people arrive at them, many turned away because of a building’s capacity. He once went to a restaurant near Bangor that held 90 people and 400 showed up.
I saw people wipe tears of joy because he spoke of their reality in this great state and how it has steadily, for decades, been diminishing in quality due to pure economic stress.
I saw men in MAGA hats nod and then applaud. I saw teenagers and the elderly listen intently to his common-sense policies that made so much logic that nobody — not even Republicans — seemed to dare to argue against them. Instead they talked about the tattoo, or the porta-potty because that was apparently the only thing they could use against Graham, and no surprise, the man who carried a machine gun through four combat tours wasn’t phased at all.
He fielded unscreened questions — some of them very difficult — and he answered them so honestly that I saw him well-up when talking about the VA and how it shouldn’t require being blown-up in a foreign country to receive free medical care in America.
Last week, he went to a woman’s house in Cumberland Center. Why? Because she asked him to, then 300 of her neighbors came and stood in her backyard under the blazing sun to hear him, and ask questions. He commented on how we live in a political world that is so broken that an event like this was considered abnormal, when it should be considered very normal and occur regularly.
“The system is not broken, it is working exactly how it has been designed: hoarding the wealth to a few while we all struggle for scraps,” I heard him say at that event. “I alone cannot end that, but we, collectively, can. Women didn’t get the right to vote because men suddenly decided to give it to them, they got it because they got organized. That is what we have to do. Nobody is coming to save us, but we absolutely can do it ourselves.”
I believe Graham’s campaign was never for him, it was for us, all of us, every single Mainer. Not the big donors or the people already established in politics, but rather for the hard-working Mainers who continue to struggle just to keep their kids fed and pay their bills.
And he had ideas on how to fix that: taxes based on net worth instead of just annual income, eliminating the cap for paying into Social Security, making it illegal for members of the U.S. House and Senate to trade stocks, and eliminating the tax loopholes that are used by corporations and using that money to stop the collapse of health centers across our state.
Now it appears to be gone, maybe forever. For that, I am absolutely crushed.