Platner’s grandfather, Warren Platner, was a world-famous architect and furniture designer, famous for pioneering an interior design movement called “opulent modernism.” He designed the offices for the Ford Foundation Building and the original Windows on the World restaurant that sat atop the World Trade Center. Today, the name Platner is shorthand for the kind of luxury items found in the homes of rich people in Connecticut, not roughneck fishermen. 

Graham’s father, Bronson Platner, attended Dartmouth, served as an assistant district attorney in Maine, and later built a career as a real estate attorney. A major Democratic donor, he has given more than $65,000 to party candidates since 2011. Bronson donated $3,500 to Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) mere weeks after the Arizona lawmaker endorsed Graham’s Senate run. Pure coincidence, surely. 

Bronson has also supplied Graham with generous financial support over the years — including funding a recent trip to Norway for fertility treatments for his son and daughter-in-law.

Because what oyster farmer hasn’t had his father fly him to Norway for fertility treatments?

Platner’s mother Leslie Harlow is herself a successful restaurateur. She funded her son’s takeover of the oyster farm. Her restaurant would become Graham’s biggest, and apparently only, customer. She even installed a raw bar specifically to sell his oysters, with Graham shucking for diners. 

How dependent upon his mother is this supposedly self-made working man “making his living on the sea?” His shellfish licensing paperwork even listed a business of hers as his business address.

As a young man, Platner attended the Hotchkiss School, an elite, $70,000 per year prep school in Connecticut before being expelled (we don’t know why yet, but we probably will soon). He then transferred to a private Catholic school in Maine, more modestly priced at $12,500 yearly. 

Platner once explained he’d attended private schools because his hometown high school had lost accreditation — a claim recently debunked by the Maine Monitor.

These details cast Platner’s later “rebellious phase” before and after his stint in the Marines in a different light. He always had these connections and family wealth to fall back on. It’s no wonder he became a political extremist like so many other scions of elite New England. Radicalism is a luxury for the privileged, not a natural recourse for the downtrodden and dispossessed — a thrill-ride for rich kids who can burn down the institutions they’ll never need, while selling themselves as moral heroes. 

Republicans will be tempted to emphasize Platner’s seemingly endless well of personal foibles as they arise. And there is a place for that so long as it demonstrates the larger truth: that Platner is not who he says he is. 

But Platner’s real political liability isn’t his shady personal history, which is unremarkable for a New England Democrat seeking office. It’s that he’s an insider posing as an outsider, a child of privilege, insulated from economic reality, lecturing Mainers about hardships he’s only ever read about.

Platner likes to give the impression that he’s no different from the people he means to represent — that he’s just another weather-worn Mainer making a living on the sea. It’s an act he plays so convincingly that you can smell the salty brine on his ballcap through the television screen. 

Republicans need to show Maine the real Graham Platner: not the oysterman in waders, but the prep-school radical who never had to make a living at all.