Susan Collins

Platner’s hit against Collins on her stock portfolio is a safe play among the mainstream Democratic Party, which has been slamming Collins for her stock trading habits over the past year but has also had a hot-and-cold relationship with the controversy-laden progressive Platner campaign.

The populist oyster farmer was embraced by progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the campaign, but Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) initially picked and backed Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) before she dropped out of the primary. The extramarital texts are the latest controversy to hit Platner’s campaign to unseat Collins in Maine, following contention over a now-covered-up tattoo resembling Nazi imagery and deleted explicit social media posts. The controversies have caused mainstream Democrats such as Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) to voice concern over Platner’s campaign.

Platner, turning away from the focus on these scandals, is painting himself as an everyday Mainer who “doesn’t have a stock portfolio” and “doesn’t take money from Super PACs or the oligarchs exploiting working Mainers” in the letter shared Monday.

“What he does have is a small business, family and friends, and a local community where he goes to the grocery store, gets gas, and lives with the same rising costs and pressures that Maine families are facing every day. As for Susan Collins, she made more in passive investment income last year than most Maine households earn from a full year of work,” Platner’s campaign wrote.

Collins’s campaign told Politico that Platner’s attempt to pin her as disconnected from everyday Maine residents is “as laughable as it is hypocritical.”

Directly juxtaposing his own income to Collins’s, Platner listed his oyster farm as his greatest asset, while pinning Collins’s greatest asset as her stock portfolio. He also listed his own net worth at $100,000, while listing Collins’s as “up to $9.6 million.”

HOW DEMOCRATS COULD REPLACE PLATNER ON THE MAINE SENATE TICKET AFTER HE WINS THE PRIMARY

Collins’s husband, Thomas Daffron, owns stock in several defense contracting companies while Collins chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, a nugget that Democrats have long targeted Collins on. Daffron holds tens of thousands of dollars in corporate securities stock in War Department contractors Boeing and RTX Corporation, according to an Al Jazeera report.

Platner and Collins, each without a primary challenge, are all but assured to face each other in the November general election.