Graham Platner, the Maine Democratic Senate hopeful, is selling himself as a down-home oysterman while his past whispers of champagne and caviar at an ultra-elite prep school.
The Daily Caller reported that Platner, campaigning to unseat Sen. Susan Collins, has built his image as a “working-class Mainer” and veteran, only to face scrutiny over attending Hotchkiss School, a Connecticut boarding academy with a jaw-dropping tuition of over $75,000 annually.
Let’s roll back the clock to 1999, when the Ellsworth American noted Platner’s enrollment at Hotchkiss, a school nestled just 60 miles from Yale and recently ranked as the top boarding academy in the nation.
This isn’t just any school—Hotchkiss boasts a 287-acre farm, an athletic complex with indoor tracks, squash courts, and an Olympic-sized rink, plus alumni like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and former CIA Director Porter Goss.
Platner gushed about the perks back then, saying, “What I like best is just the education." But one has to wonder if “education” includes rubbing elbows with the future elite while claiming to fight for Maine’s working folks.
By 2002, Platner had shifted to John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, Maine, another private institution costing around $12,000 a year in today’s money—a far cry from public school grit.
At John Bapst, Platner’s yearbook dubbed him “Most Likely to Start a Revolution,” featuring a photo of him with a paper demanding freedom for Chechnya, Kosovo, and Palestine.
Later, he penned an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News, likening post-9/11 terrorist groups to “freedom fighters” and critiquing media portrayals of terrorists as universally evil—a stance that raises eyebrows for a would-be senator.
Fast forward to his campaign launch, where Platner declared, “My name is Graham Platner and I’m running for US Senate to defeat Susan Collins and topple the oligarchy that’s destroying our country." If oligarchy is the target, why the silence on a schooling that screams privilege?
Platner’s past doesn’t stop at posh classrooms; he’s also faced questions over a tattoo resembling a Nazi emblem, a detail that clashes hard with any “everyman” narrative.
Add to that his involvement in training members of the Socialist Rifle Association in firearms, plus boasting about an “antifa supersoldier” label on his “armor,” and the working-class oyster farmer image starts to look like a costume.
Here’s the rub: while Platner’s campaign paints him as a champion of the downtrodden, these associations and symbols suggest a far more radical bent than Maine’s fishermen might expect.
When pressed for comment by the Daily Caller, Platner’s campaign didn’t bother to respond, leaving voters to piece together this puzzle of contradictions on their own.
Look, nobody’s denying a man’s right to evolve, but when you’re running on a platform of authenticity, a Hotchkiss pedigree and revolutionary yearbook quotes don’t exactly scream “one of us” to Maine’s hardworking families.
The question remains: Is Platner the salt-of-the-earth Mainer he claims to be, or a product of elite corridors playing dress-up?