Graham Platner, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Maine, delivered a preview of his general election pitch to voters on Thursday hours after his top primary rival, Maine Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her campaign.

Speaking to supporters in Augusta, Platner characterized his Senate bid as part of a broader effort to restore power to working-class Americans who for decades have been beaten down by big money interests.

“The race has never really been about me or any one person,” said Platner. “It’s about a movement of working Mainers who are fed up with being robbed by billionaires and the politicians who own them. We are now taking back our power.”

Platner vowed to defeat incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), but he said the ultimate goal is to “start tearing down the system that, for too long, has forgotten and written off the people who make Maine and this country what it is.”

Platner was joined by several Maine Democrats who were on hand to endorse his Senate bid.

Maine state Sen. Mike Tipping (D-08) said Platner must be elected to the US Senate because Collins “betrayed the people she was elected to serve.”

Tipping warned that defeating Collins won’t be easy because “we’re about to see an ungodly amount of money spent in Maine, hundreds of millions of dollars more than ever before, and we’re going to be flooded with ads.”

Rather than being intimidated by the flood of corporate cash in the race, Tipping said that “we should get angrier every time we see, during the nightly news, or during a baseball game, or in the middle of a YouTube video, one of those ads, because we should remember that they were paid for by selling out Maine people.”

Maine state Rep. Nina Milliken (D-16) said that Platner is “the type of leader that we don’t see often enough,” in part because “he understands that the path forward isn’t about dropping to our knees for powerful people.”

“At a moment when our democracy is under considerable strain,” continued Milliken, “we need leaders who are willing to be clear about what’s at stake. The answer to rising authoritarianism is not moderate half-measures or Band-Aids on severed limbs. It’s building a movement that actually delivers for the people, one that’s grounded in fairness, dignity, and economic justice.”

While powerful national Democrats had backed Mills’ candidacy in the primary, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) endorsed Platner shortly after the Maine governor suspended her campaign.

“After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable,” they said, “and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.