Before Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s Senate campaign imploded due to credible sexual assault allegations, he had carefully cultivated an image as a working-class hero. The rugged, bearded 41-year-old was a combat veteran and an oyster farmer.“The Platner thing isn’t hard to understand,” the journalist Noah Smith posted on X before the community notes poured in. “He was a real working class white guy who was willing to declare himself part of the leftist team. That’s basically a unicorn. They’ve been dreaming of winning over the white working class forever.”As late as when Platner decided to end his campaign on July 8, he presented himself as a tribune of the working class. “The sole goal from the beginning of this thing has been defeating Susan Collins and building a working-class movement, and we have done all of that together,” the defenestrated candidate told his campaign staff shortly before making his exit public.
It was all a lie. “Starting with their launch video last August, Platner and his team billed him as an oyster farmer — a title most of the media… repeated without scrutiny,” Axios reported on the eve of his withdrawal from the Senate race. “But as early as August, he told ideologically friendly outlets that he makes little money from selling oysters and it’s not how he makes a living.”Platner’s father was a lawyer who attended Dartmouth and served as an assistant district attorney in Maine. His grandfather was an architect. He grew up in relative privilege, attending a private boarding school (from which he was expelled). His father loaned him the money to buy his home and helped pay for his wife’s international fertility treatments. His mother’s restaurant is his main oyster-farming customer. Platner has an elite New England background.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) , Graham Platner, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate; New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani; Darializa Avila Chevalier. (Robert F. Bukaty/AP; Andres Kudacki/AP; Seth Wenig/AP)
