BIDDEFORD, Maine—Senate candidate Graham Platner (D., Maine), the grandson of a renowned architect and a former prep school student, said the Democratic Party should be the “party of taxing the rich.”
“If the Democratic Party was run by the people in it, it would be the party of working families, it would be the party of labor unions, it would be the party of taxing the rich,” Platner said Wednesday during a town hall in the southern Maine town of Biddeford. “Everywhere I go talking to county committees, to registered Dems—every single one I talk to—that’s the party they joined.”
“That’s the reason I’ve always called myself a Democrat,” he continued. “But it’s been very hard these past few years, as I watch a lot of the leadership in D.C. be beholden to the same corporate interests, and the only way that we change this is from the ground up.”
Platner’s upbringing, however, was anything but working class. His grandfather, Warren Platner, was a world-famous architect who designed the “Platner Easy Chair,” which sells for nearly $20,000. Platner himself attended the Hotchkiss School, an elite Connecticut boarding school that costs upwards of $75,000 a year and boasts powerful alumni like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart and former CIA director Porter Goss, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Platner’s father, meanwhile, served as an assistant district attorney in Maine and chaired the board of a local nonprofit with ties to former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, former secretary of defense William Cohen, and former Maine governor Joseph Brennan.
And before becoming an oyster farmer, Platner worked as a State Department contractor in Afghanistan for Constellis Group, formerly known as Blackwater. Earlier in his campaign, Platner said billionaires should be “extinct,” and told MSNBC host and former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki he’s “never been close to money and power.”
Platner, at Wednesday’s town hall, also declared his ambition to fundamentally “remake” the Democratic Party.
“I very much think that if the Democratic Party was democratic, it would still be the party that it once was,” he told an almost jam-packed auditorium. “It would be the party that I think a lot of us want it to be, and I do firmly believe that we need to remake that party, but we’re only going to be able to do it from down here and from the inside.”
In fact, the campaign received such an overwhelming number of RSVPs that the event—originally planned for a local brewery—had to be relocated to a larger venue with a 900-person capacity.
Platner’s attacks on the Democratic establishment stand in stark contrast to his Democratic primary opponent, Maine’s 77-year-old incumbent governor, Janet Mills, who has the backing of party leadership, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Platner, meanwhile, has secured the endorsement of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.). National Democrats see the Maine seat as one of their best pickup opportunities in a state Kamala Harris carried last year.
During his stop in Biddeford, Platner also reiterated his call to stack the Supreme Court and impeach “at least two” of its sitting justices should Democrats retake the upper chamber.
Platner has repeatedly had to fend off criticism over Reddit comments he posted, calling Mainers “racist” and “stupid,” denigrating police as “bastards,” and calling himself a “communist.” In one 2013 Reddit post, he said sexual assault victims need to “take some responsibility for themselves.”
At a Saturday campaign stop, a sexual assault survivor confronted Platner, asking him to show “true remorse” and “offer me more than shallow words” for those remarks. Platner, who was nearly 30 years old when he wrote the comment, apologized and said he penned the Reddit post after coming “out of the infantry” and “had a frankly myopic worldview on this issue.”
Platner will likely need to convince Mainers to overlook the posts if he hopes to defeat the incumbent Republican, Sen. Susan Collins. A recent EMILYs List poll found Platner trails Collins by 19 points when voters read “additional information, including quotes in his own words from his online posts.”
The Platner campaign did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
The post Maine’s Platner Says Democrats Should Be ‘Party of Taxing the Rich’ appeared first on .