Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee trying to take Susan Collins's Senate seat in Maine, has built his entire campaign around being a humble oyster farmer and Marine veteran who's just a regular blue-collar guy trying to make a living on the coast. There's just one small problem: the Washington Free Beacon went digging and found out his oyster farm sits on a private island owned by his business partner — an elite boarding school graduate named Robert Allerton Cushman III who drinks "foraged spring water with Redmond sea salt" and studied "cultural anthropology" at Dartmouth.
Nothing says "man of the people" like farming oysters on someone else's private island while your business partner sips artisanal puddle water.
Cushman attended St. Paul's School in New Hampshire — an ultra-elite boarding school that costs upwards of $80,000 a year — before heading to Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree in religion and cultural anthropology. He then picked up a master's degree in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University. In 2018, Cushman joined Platner as a partner in the Frenchman Bay Oyster Company. The Cushman family owns Ingalls Island, located about 10 minutes southwest of Platner's home in the town of Sullivan, Maine. That island is effectively the home base of Platner's entire oyster operation.
So the "working-class" oyster farm that anchors Platner's entire political identity exists because a guy named Robert Allerton Cushman the Third lets him use his family's island. You can't make this stuff up.
But it gets better. Platner himself attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut — a boarding school that runs about $75,000 a year in tuition. His father, Bronson Platner, is a Dartmouth-educated attorney. And according to the Free Beacon, property records show Platner received a $200,000 loan from his father to buy his house. Despite this, Platner has publicly claimed he "never been close to money and power" and credited VA benefits for helping him get on his feet.
Sure, Graham. A $75,000-a-year prep school, a Dartmouth-educated lawyer dad who handed you $200K for a house, and a business that operates on your Ivy League buddy's private island. Totally relatable.
The reason this matters — beyond the sheer comedy of it — is that Platner is currently leading Collins 48 percent to 41 percent in an Emerson College poll from March. Democrats are salivating at the chance to flip Collins's seat, and they're doing it by packaging a prep school kid with a trust fund safety net as some kind of salt-of-the-earth lobsterman who just happens to want to go to Washington.
We've seen this play act before. John Kerry was a "regular guy" who windsurfed off Nantucket. Elizabeth Warren was a "Cherokee" law professor from Oklahoma. Pete Buttigieg was a "small-town mayor" who went to Harvard and Oxford. The Democratic Party has turned working-class cosplay into an art form, and Platner is their latest masterpiece.
The Free Beacon has been methodically dismantling Platner's blue-collar mythology for months now, and every new layer they peel back reveals more champagne underneath the flannel. The Hotchkiss School — where Platner spent time before finishing at another Maine private school — counts former CIA Director Porter Goss, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and Clinton confidant Strobe Talbott among its alumni. That's quite the pipeline for a guy who wants you to think he's just shucking oysters to pay the mortgage.
Here's the thing: there's nothing wrong with being wealthy. There's nothing wrong with going to a fancy school or having a dad who's a lawyer. What's wrong is building your entire political brand around being something you're not — and then hoping nobody Googles your business partner.
Susan Collins has won four Senate races in Maine by being exactly who she is: a moderate Republican who doesn't pretend to be anything else. Graham Platner is running against her by pretending to be a character from a country song while his oyster farm sits on a private island owned by a guy who forages for spring water.
Maine voters are smarter than this. At least, we better hope they are.