A flood of billionaire money is pouring into Maine’s Senate race to stop a populist challenger.
U.S. Senate candidate from Maine Graham Platner during a campaign event with the Maine AFL-CIO in Portland on May 1, 2026.(Graeme Sloan / Getty Images)
Asuper PAC dedicated to reelecting Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine recently put nearly $2 million behind television and YouTube ads attacking likely Democratic candidate Graham Platner. The spots, which began airing more than a month before the June 9 Democratic primary, focus exclusively on decade-old personal social-media posts and a tattoo Platner got as a young man and has since covered up. There is no discussion of policy, voting records, or Platner’s platform as a Marine veteran running as a working-class populist. Instead, the ads—focused on the theme “Who Is The Real Graham Platner?”—center entirely on personal attacks, financed largely by out-of-state billionaires and Republican-aligned “dark money” groups seeking to preserve Collins’s seat and the GOP Senate majority.
With Governor Janet Mills recently withdrawing from the Democratic primary citing insufficient financial resources to compete with Platner, the November contest will present a stark contrast between the populist challenger and incumbent Senator Collins. As one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, the contest is expected to be pivotal to determining control of the upper chamber, with Democrats viewing a Platner victory as their best opportunity for flipping the Senate.
The group behind the ads is Pine Tree Results PAC, a super PAC formed in early 2025 that has raised $12.7 million through the end of March, almost entirely from wealthy individuals, corporations, and dark-money nonprofits. Federal Election Commission records show its funding comes from some of the country’s most prominent Republican donors from private equity, oil, media, and conservative dark-money networks. None of it comes from Maine voters.
The single largest donor is Stronger America, Inc., a conservative nonprofit based out of Arlington, Virginia, that is led by longtime Republican operative and former Senate counsel Paul Cooksey. The group gave $3 million to Pine Tree Results in December, and it has also given at least $400,000 this cycle to a pro–Susan Collins super PAC called Stronger Maine. As a 501c(4) social welfare group, Stronger America is not required to release information about its donors.
Pine Tree Results PAC did not respond to requests for comment about its donors, ad strategy, or the funding sources behind Stronger America, Inc.
Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder and CEO of private-equity giant Blackstone, is Pine Tree Results’ second-largest donor, with a contribution of $2 million. Schwarzman has long been one of the Republican Party’s biggest financial backers and a leading defender of the carried-interest tax loophole that lets private equity executives pay lower capital gains rates on much of their income. He also gave $2 million to a pro-Collins super PAC in 2020.
In 2017, Collins briefly proposed reining in the carried-interest loophole to help fund childcare credits, only to back down the next day before providing a key vote for the final tax bill that preserved it. Schwarzman’s latest $2 million donation was made on June 27, 2025, one day before Collins cast a key vote on a procedural motion to advance Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill containing further private-equity protections.
The Collins campaign did not respond to requests for comment about the Pine Tree Result PAC’s donors or the timing of Schwarzman’s contribution.
Lexington Fund, a nonprofit that shares an address with organizations tied to Leonard Leo, the conservative judicial activist who influenced Trump’s Supreme Court picks, donated $1 million last June. Leo owns a home in Bar Harbor, Maine, and in 2019 hosted a fundraiser for Collins after she had voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom Leo had personally lobbied for. Lexington Fund is led by Oramel H. Skimmer, a former solicitor general of Arizona and the executive director of Alliance for Consumers, a Leo-tied group that fights against consumer protection laws and class actions against corporations, including climate change lawsuits against oil companies.
Condorcet Initiative Corp, another Virginia-based nonprofit, contributed $250,000.01 to Pine Tree Results in June 2025. The group is led by Staci Goede, a longtime Republican campaign treasurer and the former chief financial officer of the Republican State Leadership Committee. Incorporation documents list Goede as owner of the home address of Ardleigh Impact Corporation, another dark-money entity that has been the subject of an FEC complaint from the Campaign Legal Center alleging that it operated as a straw donor to hide the true sources of its contributions. The complaint remains open.
Corporate contributors to Pine Tree Results include tobacco company Altria Client Services at $100,000 and NewsMax Media at $50,000.
From illegal war on Iran to an inhumane fuel blockade of Cuba, from AI weapons to crypto corruption, this is a time of staggering chaos, cruelty, and violence.
Unlike other publications that parrot the views of authoritarians, billionaires, and corporations, The Nation publishes stories that hold the powerful to account and center the communities too often denied a voice in the national media—stories like the one you’ve just read.
Each day, our journalism cuts through lies and distortions, contextualizes the developments reshaping politics around the globe, and advances progressive ideas that oxygenate our movements and instigate change in the halls of power.
This independent journalism is only possible with the support of our readers. If you want to see more urgent coverage like this, please donate to The Nation today.
Other major donors include New Balance Chairman Jim Davis, who gave $1 million; hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer of Elliott Management, a longtime leading Republican donor, who contributed $1 million total; and the Reyes brothers—M. Jude Reyes and J. Christopher Reyes of Reyes Holdings, one of the nation’s largest beer and food distribution companies—who together donated $1 million.
Additional contributions came from hedge-fund founder Louis Bacon ($500,000), Liberty Media chairman emeritus John Malone ($500,000), investor William Oberndorf ($250,000), private equity executive John Childs ($250,000), Palantir CEO Alex Karp ($100,000), and Marc Rowan of Apollo Global Management, which managed Verso Corp., the private equity–backed paper company whose bankruptcy led to the closure of Maine mills in Bucksport and Jay. The donor list also includes energy executive John B. Hess, the Manocherian real estate family, and prominent business families such as the Ryan, Buntrock, and Duchossois families.
Platner has promoted himself as an anti-oligarchy candidate who rails against billionaires, corporate power, and the types of dark-money donors that are financing Pine Tree Results PAC. His campaign has proposed a tax plan that calls for a new annual wealth tax on assets over $1 billion, taxing capital gains and qualified dividends at ordinary income rates, and making it harder for wealthy families to avoid paying taxes on the transfer of inherited assets. The plan would also scrap the Social Security payroll tax cap on high earners, quadruple the excise tax on corporate stock buybacks, and raise taxes on excessive CEO pay.
Maine voters approved a $5,000 cap on super PAC contributions in 2024, but the Pine Tree Results PAC operates under federal rules that allow unlimited money from individuals, corporations, and dark-money groups. The state cap is currently blocked: A federal judge permanently struck it down in 2025, ruling that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision prohibits such limits. Two appeals are now pending before the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—one filed by the state attorney general, and one by the ballot initiative’s sponsors, the nonprofit Equal Citizens. The lawsuit challenging the cap was brought by two conservative PACs with ties to Leonard Leo–linked entities.
Donald ShawDonald Shaw is a journalist based in rural Western Massachusetts.