“Enter Graham Platner.”

So declared a bright New York Times profile last Tuesday, planting on the map a shiny new challenger to Sen. Susan Collins — and planting Maine squarely in the national political consciousness ahead of what will be a very, very hotly contested midterm election next year.

This time last week, very few of us had heard of Platner, a 40-year-old community organizer, oyster farmer, veteran and competitive pistol shooter who lives in Sullivan. Within hours of his announcement, the internet was alight with enthusiasm from expected and unexpected quarters.

Platner gamely made himself available to reporters far and wide, including the Maine Trust’s Rachel Ohm. “I think the message I’m bringing, which is that establishment politics in this country do not reflect the realities of people’s lives, I think people are hungry for that message,” Platner told her.

We tend to think he’s right.

But is it that Platner really is the wunderkind America has been waiting for? Is it that Sen. Collins’ recent poor polling is that persuasive? Is it that it’s late August? Were the Times’ editors drawn in by the abundance of mythic Maine detail, or simply in the mood to publish a Greta Rybus portrait? It remains to be seen.

So far, the media circuit is certainly suiting Platner, who in a short time has proven himself to be highly articulate, confident, up on his material and well aware of what opponents will brandish as competitive shortcomings.

“It’s a working-class ideology that is built in movement politics,” Platner told the progressive podcast the Majority Report, of his politics, during a particularly friendly interview. “American history is not a history of working people asking permission to get things from those in power. Every good thing that we have gotten, quite frankly, for working people in this country, does not come from writing a strongly worded letter to someone in power. We need to build power, we need to build organizational power, both in communities and workplaces.”

Platner said that the work of the late labor organizer Jane McAlevey was at the “core” of his politics. “I firmly believe that there is no strata in our society that is made to hold power. Power exists and can be taken and utilized by those who are willing to build the mechanisms necessary to do it.”

Naturally, his bid for power wasn’t only met with delight.

Although Platner has said he isn’t at all interested in the “liberal” label, his efforts to distance himself from labels of all kinds can likely only go so far. In a label-led political arena, he may find it hard to shake off ready associations with names like Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman, Zohran Mamdani and David Hogg. He’ll also have no control over the people who choose to support him, a reality that extends to newspapers and other segments of the media. (“If the NY Times goes hoopla, it means NO NO NO,” was the response of one reader.)

A political writer for National Review was quick to make it clear he would not be taken in by the spotlight, however blinding. “A largely positive profile with a flattering photograph on page A19 of the New York Times is a tremendously big deal for a U.S. Senate candidate,” Jim Geraghty noted.

“There are candidates with much better polling positions, fundraising, experience and accomplishments who never get that in their entire careers. The New York Times giving Graham Platner a profile like that is a de facto announcement, ‘Hey, this guy you’ve never heard of is going to be a big deal.’ Maybe that will come to pass, but I’m skeptical.”

During the Majority Report interview, Platner expressed his sincere desire for the cultivation of “a much deeper structure of power through our political apparatus, in a way that we can leverage it far after campaigns come and go.”

Platner’s own campaign has come. Are we skeptical? Not at all. We’re intrigued.