A Marine Corps and U.S. Army veteran who was deployed in the Middle East announced his campaign for Senate in Maine on Tuesday, seeking to oust longtime Republican incumbent Susan Collins, who is eyeing her sixth term in Washington, D.C.

Graham Platner is a 40-year-old oyster farmer from Sullivan, Maine, who believes working-class people in the state are suffering at the hands of big corporations and politicians in D.C. He points his finger at 72-year-old Collins and what he sees as her failure to stand up to President Donald Trump and his legislative agenda.

“Nobody can tell me Collins doesn’t know how to use power,” the Democratic candidate said in an interview with HuffPost. “She’s very well-versed in the mechanisms of the Senate. She chose not to use that power to hold up the bill that was going to destroy Medicaid for so many Mainers. I’m not fooled by that.”

Collins voted against Trump’s massive bill cutting Medicaid and taxes on the wealthy — but her earlier vote to advance the measure was critical in clearing its path to passage. As chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the senator has also watched Trump’s White House withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from federal programs that have bipartisan support.

“I think she has worked this complicated charade,” Platner added. “She pretends to be a moderate to appeal across the spectrum, while very often voting along with Republicans.”

Democrats’ road to retaking the Senate majority in next year’s midterm elections runs in large part through Maine, a blue state that Kamala Harris carried by seven points in the 2024 presidential election. Yet the party has struggled to recruit top-tier candidates to challenge Collins, a formidable opponent who has a large campaign war chest. Platner joins former congressional staffer Jordan Wood in running for the seat. Meanwhile, most Democrats are holding out hope that 77-year-old Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) enters the race despite being noncommittal about the idea.

Collins could face a tougher path to reelection this time around. She has seen her polling plummet during the first six months of Trump’s second term, and Democrats will be eager to tie her to his legislative agenda of cuts to rural health care and other popular government programs. Trump’s tariffs have also wreaked havoc on Maine’s economy, which is reliant on cross-border trade with Canada.

Still, Collins has survived scares before. During her 2020 reelection fight, she was vastly outraised by her opponent, then-Maine state House Speaker Sara Gideon, and the GOP senator consistently trailed in the polls. Ultimately, Collins came out on top even as Trump lost the state to Democrat Joe Biden.

For Platner, a tattooed vet who did four infantry tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the decision to run for political office was borne out of love for his country and the state of Maine.

“I’m watching it in many ways get ripped apart by the collapse of the rural health care system, the inability of people to afford housing and watching immense amounts of taxpayer money get expended on wasteful foreign wars,” Platner told HuffPost. “I’m doing this because I love this place, I cannot stand by and live a good life while everything I feel connected to falls apart around me.”

He called Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in D.C. and other cities a “horrific abuse” of the capabilities of the U.S. military.

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

And he criticized “feckless” Democrats for failing to connect working class Americans, urging the party to get tougher against Republicans and eliminate the Senate filibuster rule if and when they regain the majority.

“You can’t win a chess match when the other side turns the board over and starts to beat you with it,” he said.