How a Rich Kid Politician Was Spun as a Working Class 'Oysterman'
There is the Graham Platner that the media wants you to see: Maine oysterman, veteran, a working class type who is running as a Democrat.
Then there’s the real Graham Platner, son of a prominent local attorney, grandson of a major modernist architect, whose business was funded by a nonprofit grant meant for black people. And by his mother who owns multiple businesses.
Media write-ups about the Maine Senate candidate’s oyster business typically mention that he grew up in the area leading to the impression that he came from a working-class family from some of the traditional trades, but nothing could be further from the truth about the Platners.
Graham Platner attended the prestigious John Bapst Memorial High School, a college prep school (current tuition: $12,500) and came from a wealthy and prominent local family.
Platner claims that “everyone knows we live in a system that is not built to represent working-class people.” How would he know? He was never a member of the working class.
Bronson Platner, Graham’s father, was not an ‘oysterman’, he was a lawyer who was reprimanded for professional misconduct. Platner’s father was a major donor to Democrats, including Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, donating thousands to the Vermont socialist who would later endorse his son.
Bronson Platner has donated over $50,000 to Democrats over the years. This is not the kind of money that a working class family or even a regular lawyer spends on politics as a hobby.
Graham’s grandfather, Warren Platner, was a prominent modernist architect who had worked with I.M. Pei and had designed dorms at Yale and part of Manhattan’s Lincoln Theater.
But instead the media ignores Platner’s wealthy Connecticut society roots, his time at George Washington University and portrays him as a hard-working local oysterman.
A month before Platner announced his Senate candidacy, the failing
New York Times stopped by and took a boat tour with him accompanied by photographs of him is his usual working class drag, gimme cap and t-shirt, harvesting and shucking oysters.
Those pictures were then reused for the
Times profile on his Senate campaign (a privilege most candidates don’t get) leaving readers with the impression it’s a one-man operation. Tourism at $95 a person appears to form a significant part of Platner’s business.
Graham Platner’s takeover of an existing oyster business was actually funded by a $20,000 grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, a Greek billionaire’s nonprofit, and by his mother, Leslie Harlow, a local businesswoman who owns two restaurants and a gift shop in the area.“His best customer happens to be his mom,” one description put it.
.The Niarchos Foundation grant that helped finance Graham Platner’s purchase of the oyster business was supposed to be for small businesses owned by “underserved groups” without “access to capital” like “people of color, women, and veterans as well as those in lower-income communities”. Platner bought a boat with the money.
The media narrative about Graham Platner is that he’s an outsider candidate with no interest in professional politics.
The most curious thing by far about Platner though is how much interest the media has in him, not just now, but going back as far as 2009.
Quotes by Graham Platner appear in media stories, not local ones, but in national papers like the
Washington Post going back to 2009. One or two might be coincidence, but whenever the media needed to quote an Iraq War veteran, it turned to a seemingly obscure "man from Maine".
In 2016, for example, the
Washington Post looked to Platner to condemn Trump for not really caring about veterans. “Graham Platner, a Marine who fought in the battle of Ramadi, thinks that Trump is playing the part of ‘patriotic culture warrior’ and thinks that Trump’s ‘knee-jerk patriotism’ plays directly to his base.” That’s something Platner may know a lot about.
Past the gimme cap and the oysterman costume is the shiftless son of a wealthy family who joined the military for adventure (he also worked a s mercenary for Blackwater), spent years at George Washington University on the taxpayer dime without emerging with any obvious employable profession (a
Washington Post story from 2009 describes him taking an ‘art history’ class)/
https://danielgreenfield.org/2025/09/how-rich-kid-politician-was-spun-as.html
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