By
Sarah Jones,
senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor
U.S. Senate candidate from Maine Graham Platner speaks during a campaign event with the Maine AFL-CIO.
Last spring, my mother and I looked for her childhood home on Zillow. She grew up on the Mid-Coast of Maine in a two-bedroom house without a view of the water. My grandparents could just about afford it on blue-collar wages in 1959. Now Zillow said the same house could sell for almost half a million dollars. We stared at my laptop screen, in silence, until my mother ventured the obvious: None of us could buy the place now. When Graham Platner launched his Senate campaign a few months later, I thought about the house and the stories my mother has always told me. What it was like to walk to work and school in a Maine winter because my grandparents were too poor to afford a car for a while. How they would sometimes eat popcorn for dinner because they’d run out of groceries. All the relatives who worked in the mills and on the water; who cleaned the summer homes of the out-of-state rich; who barely managed to stay in a place they all loved.
