To the prospective candidates and the Maine Democratic Party - an open letter

We are writing on behalf of the statewide network of volunteer leaders who organized, knocked doors, hosted events, and built the loop grassroots infrastructure behind Graham Platner's campaign — and on behalf of the more than 150,000 Maine Democratic primary voters who cast their ballot for that movement on June 9.

We want to be direct, because this moment calls for directness.

This was never a campaign built around one person. It was a movement built around a set of values: healthcare as a right, housing that isn't a Wall Street commodity, an economy that isn't rigged for billionaires and corporations, real support for workers and veterans, and a foreign policy that doesn't treat endless war as the cost of doing business. Tens of thousands of volunteers gave their time, and 150,000 voters gave their votes, because those values were on the ballot — not because of any single candidate's biography.

The Party now has the responsibility of selecting a replacement nominee through this convention process. We respect that this is the Party's legal and constitutional process to run, and we are not attempting to dictate who that nominee should be.

But we need to be equally clear about what comes next for us.

The volunteer infrastructure that this movement built — the organizers, the door-knockers, the small-dollar donors, the hosts, the people who will make phone calls and staff tables between now and November — does not transfer automatically to whoever the Party selects. That infrastructure exists because people believed in a specific platform. It will only continue to exist, and only continue to be deployed, for a nominee who publicly and explicitly adopts these core commitments as their own:

1. Healthcare as a right - Medicare for All, no cuts to Medicare or Medicaid, lower drug prices, funding for rural hospitals, codifying reproductive rights into federal law.

2. Housing affordability - ban corporate and hedge fund purchases of homes, restore federal investment in housing construction.

3. An economy that works for regular people, not billionaires - a billionaire minimum tax, campaign finance reform including but not limited to bans on donations from foreign-backed PAC groups like AIPAC, congressional term limits, SCOTUS reform, and breaking the grip corporate money has on our elections and our economy.

4. Strengthening workers and unions - strengthened labor rights and collective bargaining, support for small businesses over consolidated corporate power and enforce existing antitrust laws.

5. End forever wars, oppose complicity in atrocities - End open-ended U.S. military engagement abroad, stop treating endless war as a bipartisan default, oppose U.S. weapons and funding used to enable mass civilian death — including in Gaza — and redirect military spending toward veterans' care and domestic priorities instead of foreign intervention.

6. Human rights for all - including full sovereignty for the Wabanaki Nations, dignified immigration reform and put an end to mass-deportation enforcement

7. Energy and climate accountability - reining in fossil fuel corporate influence.

If the Party's selected nominee does not publicly adopt this platform, we want to be transparent now, before the convention, rather than silent until after: it will be near impossible to motivate this statewide volunteer network to organize, fundraise, or mobilize on that candidate's behalf. That is not a threat, it is a statement of fact about what motivates the people who make up this movement, and we think the Party is better served knowing it now than discovering it in October.

We do not say this lightly. Beating Susan Collins and winning back the Senate matters enormously to every person in this network. We want a nominee who can win. We believe the surest path to a candidate who can win in November is one who inherits not just a ballot line, but the energy, trust, and labor of the people who built this movement — and that only happens if the values and policies they organized around are carried forward, out loud, by whoever the Party selects.

We are ready to help make that happen. We are asking the Party and its delegates to make that possible.