Graham Platner, the Democratic Party’s newly nominated candidate for the U.S. Senate in Maine, brands himself as an anti-billionaire candidate. However, FEC filings show donations from billionaires including George Soros, Pat Stryker, Jon Stryker, Jennifer Pritzker powered him to victory in Maine’s Democratic Party Senate Primary last night. Platner has raised $16.3M with nearly half coming from bigwig Leftists.
Maine Democrat Graham Platner has built his populist Senate campaign around a fierce opposition to what he calls the “billionaire class.” However, that hasn’t stopped some of the ultra-wealthy from donating to his campaign, wrote Joedy McCreary in a report for OpenSecrets.org.
Platner – whose endorsers include prominent progressives Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) – received contributions in May from several billionaires, blatant hypocrisy in view of the fact that Platner has repeatedly criticized the influence of wealthy donors in politics.
In a May 19 X post, he claimed that 300 billionaires spent $3 billion “to buy the 2024 elections,” accused Congress of giving the ultra-rich a tax cut a year later and ended the post with: “Ban billionaires buying elections.”
campaign received $7,000 from Soros on May 11; $7,000 from Pat Stryker on May 1; $5,000 from her brother Jon Stryker on May 7; and $1,503 from Pritzker on May 17, filings show.
Federal law caps those direct donations at $3,500 per election. But the ultra-wealthy may wield even more influence by routing contributions to super PACs, which can accept unlimited sums and spend independently of the campaigns they support and oppose.
Platner’s fundraising profile has also begun to shift in ways that reflect that growing nationalization. His share of small-dollar contributions, which stood at 64% through March, dropped to 59% overall through May 20. Contributions from political action committees more than doubled, rising from just under $78,000 through March 31 to nearly $175,000 through mid-May. PACs tied to organized labor made up much of that increase, including $10,000 from an electrical workers union PAC and multiple $5,000 contributions from other labor union PACs.
Platner’s many controversies – which would disqualify any other candidate – do not seem to have slowed or dissuaded his fundraising from the billionaire class he allegedly despises. The Wall Street Journal reported May 30 that Platner exchanged sexually explicit text messages with several women.
Platner has been facing backlash for exchanging sexually explicit messages with multiple women early in his marriage on the platform Kik. Following those reports, Platner was found to still have an active profile on Kik, an anonymous messaging app that has faced criticism from child-safety groups and law enforcement officials. The profile reportedly featured a shirtless mirror selfie of Platner with a towel around his waist, FOX News reported.
The New York Times then reported June 4 that several former girlfriends accused him of behavior described as “toxic” and “violent.” Platner, who said he and his wife worked through the texting scandal and has met privately with Senate Democrats in the wake of the controversies, denied “anything alleging physicality” with his ex-girlfriends in an interview with MSNOW.
Platner has also been forced to apologize after his old Reddit posts resurfaced in which he made a series of inflammatory comments about rape, race, political violence, police, rural Americans and military veterans.
why would a bunch of billionaires give money to a toxic candidate who built his campaign on the theme of “There is no metric of hard work that justifies a billionaire when people in Eastern Maine work three jobs just to put food on the table”?
And in his last-minute pre-Election Day blitz Platner threatened to throw billionaires in jail, "We need to get money out of politics. We need to get rid of Citizens United. And, if I had my way, elections would last two months, they will be publicly funded and if a billionaire looked at a TV ad the wrong way, we'd put 'em in jail," Platner told a crowd of constituents Sunday night in Maine, earning applause. The comments came as Platner was laying out his far-left agenda and railing against conservatives, reported Fox News.
As online All-Star Donnie Cope (@dcopechatter) pointed out in a post to X, Graham Platner is not just arguing that government should help working families. He is arguing that success itself is illegitimate once it reaches a level Democrats decide is too much.
And in what sounds like one of the more dystopian chapters of Ayan Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged, the penalty for being “too successful” is jail.
Last night the race was called by the Associated Press at 9:23 pm ET, with Platner hovering around 75 percent of the vote. Around 18 percent of Democrats chose Governor Janet Mills, after she remained on the ballot despite suspending her campaign on April 30.
we ask again, why would billionaires support a candidate who espouses such views and articulates such plans?
Maybe it is because they are in on the joke that his “working class” persona is a complete fabrication, with his attendance at an $80,000-a-year boarding school, lawyer father, or major architect grandfather being hidden in the miasma of his scandals.
And he’s been well-coached how to present himself, molded to present a specific image and, in a sense, manufactured. The truth is he was discovered and coached by a pair of Ivy League-educated radical Democratic Socialists, replicating a playbook they’ve used in Nebraska and Iowa. That revelation could be more damaging than the tattoo, sexting women other than his wife, blasting fellow veterans and admitting to masturbating in a port-a-potty, as it strikes at the heart of Platner’s alleged authenticity.
That under-the-radar team are a decidedly non-working class couple, Yale Law School grad Daniel Moraff and his fiancé, Leanne Fan, an academic with stints at Harvard and the proudly radical University of California-Berkeley.
Graham Platner is no “working class hero” but a carefully crafted creation of the Far-Left Democratic Socialist ecosystem that only thrives because billionaires support it, and him.
