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graham platner
Another Senator Backs Platner, Saying 'Democratic Party Needs to Win Back Working People'
New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich said the Mainer is "building a movement around folks who work hard for their family and community."
Mar 10, 2026
US Senate hopeful Graham Platner's momentum continues to grow, with yet another senator bucking the Democratic Party establishment to endorse him in Maine's June primary.
"Graham Platner is focused on delivering for Mainers, not billionaire donors,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) on Tuesday in comments reported by Politico. “And he’s exactly the person the Democratic Party needs to win back working people.”
Polls show Platner, the progressive 41-year-old Marine-turned-oyster farmer, comfortably ahead of Maine's centrist Democratic Gov. Janet Mills for the right to challenge the state's five-term Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November.
The seat will be an essential pickup if Democrats hope to retake the chamber in 2026.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has pushed for Mills to get the nomination over Platner. This is despite polling last week from Quantus Insights, which showed Mills trailing Collins by over 1%, and Platne leading the Republican by more than 5% among likely voters.
Platner—a backer of Medicare for All and a billionaire wealth tax who has fiercely opposed aggressive US military interventions—first received the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Earlier this month, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) became the first Democratic senator to endorse Platner, in defiance of party leadership, calling him "the candidate that can win."
Heinrich, who has emphasized the necessity of making the Democratic Party a "bigger tent" and bringing in “new" and "younger" leadership, has admired Platner's candidacy from afar for months.
Responding to Platner's campaign launch video, in which he declared that "the enemy is the oligarchy," Heinrich wrote on social media in October, "We need more candidates like this."
New Mexico's three-term senator is now the third member of the chamber to endorse Platner, who said he was "honored" to have him as a "future colleague."
"He's building a movement around folks who work hard for their family and community—folks who deserve a Senator fighting in their corner," Heinrich said. "I’m proud to endorse and help send him to the Senate in November."
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'We Can All See': Platner Rips Collins for Choosing War Profits Over Children Killed by US in Iran
Senator Susan Collins, said Platner outside the Republican senator's office in Portland, Maine, is more interested in the profits of weapons contractors "than the shame that we bring upon ourselves when we kill children."
Mar 08, 2026
Graham Platner, the Democratic hopeful running for the US Senate in Maine to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins, delivered a sharp rebuke Saturday to the war of choice launched against Iran last week by President Donald Trump—the kind of messaging, say anti-war progressives, that every lawmaker or politician seeking office should be giving in the face of a military campaign that a majority of Americans, across the political spectrum, adamantly oppose.
"We can all see what is happening right now," said Platner outside Collins' offices in downtown Portland, Maine on Saturday. "At least with the war in Iraq, they had the decency to try to trick us for months. At least they made Colin Powell go sully his name in front of the UN to try to trick us into thinking WMDs were real. At least then they tried to convince us that it was necessary. This time around, they're just doing it."
And the Trump administration is doing it, he continued, "because we have a system that does not hold people accountable. We have a Congress that for decades has abdicate its constitutional role in war making. It never should have been an option that a president can just start a huge regional conflict because he's afraid we're going to find out he might be a pedophile."
In a vote in the Senate on Wednesday, Collins sided against a War Powers Resolution that would have curbed Trump's ability to wage the war that has already killed more than 1,300 civilians, a large portion of them children. While the joint US-Israeli operation has unleashed chaos across the Middle East and been denounced as a criminal war of aggression by experts, Collins argued that passing the resolution "would send the wrong message to Iran and our troops."
"At least with the war in Iraq, they had the decency to try to trick us for months... This time around, they're just doing it."
Platner, who served multiple tours of combat duty in Afghanistan and Iraq as both a Marine and Army infantry soldier, expressed outrage at how willing politicians like Collins are to send young Americans off to kill and die for wars that bring such horror and carnage abroad while costing US taxpayers billions at home.
"Susan Collins is more interested in protecting the wealthy and the powerful. She is more interested in protecting the profits of the defense industry. She's more interested in protecting the interests of her AIPAC donors," Platner told the crowd, ripping Collins for her vote against the resolution. "She is more interested in all of that, than in protecting the sacred resource that is the lives of young American men and women who are willing to put their lives on the line for this country. She is more interested in their profits than the shame that we bring upon ourselves when we kill children."
On the first day of US bombing last week, a school in the southeastern town of Minab was struck, killing an estimated 165 civilians, most of them young students.
"She [Susan Collins] is more interested in their profits [AIPAC donors and the defense industry] than the shame that we bring upon ourselves when we kill children."
Watch Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate @grahamformaine confront Republican Senator Susan Collins. pic.twitter.com/9uaKqBcKix
— Zeteo (@zeteo_news) March 7, 2026
Norman Solomon, national director of the progressive advocacy group RootsAction, said "the content and location" of Platner’s remarks made them "doubly vital" and that other lawmakers and politicians would be wise to follow his lead and that others in the US should replicate such rallies where they live.
Across the country, Solomon told Common Dreams, "members of Congress who’ve voted for more high-tech slaughter in Iran are smugly going on with routine business in their offices, insulated from the murderous effects of their political positions. They do not deserve insulation, they deserve nonviolent and militant confrontation."
Showing up at local district offices of their members of Congress, "to protest with clear moral messaging" like those in Maine over the weekend, said added Solomon, "is long overdue and should become widespread. Most of us don’t live far from such offices. Why should politicians who enable mass murder from the skies be able to run their offices every day as though nothing is amiss?"
"Antiwar speeches and picket lines with moral clarity should become standard aspects of the political environment at the decentralized congressional offices," he said, "that for far too long have been aloof from the carnage and human anguish that craven elected officials continue to inflict."
Platner has emerged as potent anti-war voice in the week since Trump launched the US assault on Iran, repeatedly invoking the trauma he suffered and the horrors of war he witnessed as a soldier as a way to condemn repeating history, especially by lawmaker like Collins who appeared to have learned no lessons from the experience of the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Talking to reporters after Saturday's rally, Platner referred to both Trump and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as "morons" with no plan to get out of the mess they've created.
"I don't think these people have any idea what they're doing," Planter said. "And the problem with that is that that incompetent leadership is going to result in dead Americans—and it already has—and it's going to result in a region thrust into chaos and bloodshed."
If lawmakers won't stand up to stop Trump's war, Platner told News Center Maine in an interview that it will ultimately be up to the American people to organize and force an end to the conflict.
"The people who are going to send their sons and daughters off to fight, the people who are going to see their friends and families maimed and killed in combat, the people who are going to have to pay for all of this instead of getting health care," said Platner, "we need to stand together and show the political class in this country that we are not going to stand another foreign war."
In a separate post on Saturday, Platner reached out to Trump voters who may be disappointed or disillusioned after the warmongering of a president who told voters he would act to end wars in his second term, not start them.
"To all of those who voted for Trump," said Platner, "hoping for an end to stupid foreign wars: We may not agree on everything, but I promise to never waste your hard-earned money on a pointless quagmire in the Middle East."
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$1 Billion Daily Cost of Trump's Iran War Could Fund Food Aid, Healthcare for Tens of Millions
"Medicare for All, or endless foreign wars?" asked Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner. "Anyone in the House or Senate giving the wrong answer should lose their seat."
Mar 06, 2026
The daily price tag of US President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran would be enough to cover the daily costs of federal nutrition assistance for more than 40 million Americans, as well as daily Medicaid costs for the roughly 16 million people expected to lose health coverage due to the Republican budget package that Trump signed into law last year.
That's according to an analysis published Thursday by the National Priorities Project (NPP), which noted that—on an annual basis—the estimated $1 billion-per-day cost of the US war on Iran is "higher than the appropriated budget of any federal agency except the Pentagon itself."
"That money could cover the things we need here at home," wrote NPP's Alliyah Lusuegro and Lindsay Koshgarian. "The tradeoff is clear: the Trump administration—backed by several members of Congress—is cutting healthcare and food assistance for millions of families while spending $1 billion a day on this emerging war."
"The question isn’t whether the money exists—it's what we choose to spend it on," they wrote.
In a social media post on Friday, Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner—a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—posed what he characterized as a "simple question" to members of Congress: "Medicare for All, or endless foreign wars?"
"Anyone in the House or Senate giving the wrong answer," Platner added, "should lose their seat."
"The cost of the war in Iraq ended up being almost $3 trillion. This could be astronomical, easily.”
The Pentagon's early estimate of the Iran war's cost was first reported by Atlantic journalist Nancy Youssef, who cited an unnamed congressional official.
In a separate analysis released earlier this week, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the cost of the first 100 hours of the Iran war at $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million per day. The Pentagon is reportedly planning to ask Congress to approve at least $50 billion in supplemental funding for the war, a historically unpopular assault that lawmakers did not authorize.
“Without support from the American people, Donald Trump led the country into a reckless war with Iran that has taken the lives of six service members and injured several others," said Kendall Witmer, rapid response director for the Democratic National Committee. "Now, the White House is scrambling to come up with a plan as the cost of Trump’s war skyrockets. Working families are already struggling with soaring prices and a hollowed-out job market—they can't afford Trump’s war of choice."
On Thursday, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) asked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to conduct a thorough analysis of the financial costs of the Iran war, including scenarios in which the assault drags on for more than five weeks and the US launches a ground invasion.
“Taxpayers deserve a nonpartisan estimate of the financial and economic impact of President Trump’s reckless war in Iran that has already led to the tragic deaths of American servicemembers," said Boyle. "American families don’t want billions of dollars wasted on an unnecessary war—they want lower costs and affordable healthcare.”
Koshgarian of NPP told CNN that the costs of war are "highly unpredictable, and so we won’t know the cost of it until it’s over."
"The cost of the war in Iraq ended up being almost $3 trillion,” Koshgarian said. “This could be astronomical, easily.”
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