In June 2024, Graham Platner made a modest purchase with outsize significance. The owner of a half-acre plot of land next to his Sullivan, Maine home had passed away a few years prior. County records show Platner bought it from her estate; real estate listings put the price at $6,000.

For most politicians, an undeveloped parcel—assessed at about $30,000 by the county—would barely register on a balance sheet. That’s certainly true for Susan Collins, the five-term Republican senator Platner is hoping to unseat in November, who declares at least $4.2 million in assets on her financial disclosures.

But for Platner, a veteran and oyster farmer married to a former teacher and running a tear-down-the-oligarchy campaign amid a flood of controversies and scandal, that small patch of Maine woods represents about 10% of his estimated net worth today.

Forbes reviewed real estate records, interviews and Platner’s financial disclosures to estimate that the 41-year-old is worth about $300,000. More than half of that is equity in his home, which has grown alongside the Covid-era surge in coastal Maine real estate prices. The rest is largely that additional plot of land, his wife’s pension and oyster farming equipment he values at between $50,000 and $100,000.

Platner presents a working-class, salt-of-the-earth image. “We don’t have money left over,” he told The New York Times in a recent interview, in which he claimed his annual household income is around $60,000. “We’re not saving for retirement.”

The flood of profiles on his upstart campaign has complicated that story: His grandfather is a famous architect. His father is a lawyer who loaned him almost all the money used to buy his home; His mother is an entrepreneur and restaurant owner who buys his oysters. His parents sent him to a private high school and helped pay for infertility treatment in Norway for him and his wife—Amy Gertner, a former teacher—when the Department of Veterans Affairs wouldn’t cover it in the U.S.

What’s clear from Platner’s disclosures is that he and Gertner are not sitting on, or hauling........

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