100 billionaires & Their Spouses Donate $10 million to Susan Collins Network

A new investigation by the Maine Monitor finds that nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses have donated nearly $10 million collectively to Sen. Susan Collins’ campaign network since the beginning of last year. By comparison, her opponent Graham Platner has received $9.6 million from 265,000 small-dollar donations. He received just $24,000 from five billionaires, a fraction of 1 percent of his total haul.

The Maine Monitor found that billionaires and their spouses gave $529,000 to the Collins campaign directly; $370,000 to the Collins Victory Committee, a joint fundraising committee that has disbursed funds to the other committees; $100,000 to Dirigo PAC, the leadership committee Collins uses to raise money for other candidates; and $24,000 to Susan Collins for Maine, a joint fundraising committee. Most of the pro-Collins billionaire donations, $9 million, were to Pine Tree Results PAC, a super PAC dedicated to electing Collins that has been running anti-Platner ads for several weeks. Pine Tree Results, which has booked $46 million in ads so far, is largely funded by private equity vultures and can take an unlimited amount of contributions thanks to the Supreme Court’s contention that money is “free speech.”

Pine Tree Results has received at least $1 million in donations from right-wing legal activist and part-time resident Leonard Leo, and $2.5 million from Florida hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. Leo and billionaire Tom Klingenstein also fund the pro-Collins, anti-labor Maine Wire.The bulk of the funding for Pine Tree Results comes from twelve billionaires.

One of the Super PAC’s donors is private equity firm Apollo Global Management’s billionaire CEO and founder Marc Rowan who ran two of Maine’s largest paper mills into the ground, bankrupting them both and eliminating more than 1,000 jobs in Bucksport and Jay. Another of the Super PAC contributors is Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, a private equity billionaire who donated $2 million to Pine Tree Results the day before Senator Collins cast the deciding vote to advance the One Big Beautiful Bill out of committee last summer. The legislation cuts $1 trillion out of Medicaid, defunds our rural hospitals and kicks 10 million people off health insurance to give Schwarzman a massive tax cut.

Schwarzman and other private equity money men strongly backed the Trump tax cut package because it made permanent the pass-through business deduction that allows individual investors in private equity, partnerships, and S-corps to deduct up to 20 percent of qualified business income. This is a totally indefensible tax loophole that allows Wall Street fund managers to pay lower taxes than the average worker. It amounts to a $13 billion subsidy for some of the richest people in America.

Also contributing to the Collins Super PAC are Palantir co-founder Alex Karp; Melinda French-Gates, ex-wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; and Elizabeth Uihlein, husband of Richard Uihlein, who financed the effort behind a trans sports referendum in Maine. The Maine Monitor also reported that Winning for Women Action Fund, a super PAC boosting Republican women, has booked $16 million in pro-Collins ads. Her campaign has also received more than $538,000 from at least 315 individual donors bundled through AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group.

Spending in Maine Senate Election Projected to Hit $384M

Total ad spending in Maine this election cycle could hit nearly $500 million, with $384 million spent in the Collins-Platner race alone, according to the advertising and market intelligence company AdImpact. That would make the Platner-Collins race the fourth-most expensive Senate race in the country behind Texas, Michigan and Georgia, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing corporations and wealthy donors to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign ads. The firm reported various PACs have booked more than $150 million in ads through the election, $100 million of it by Collins-aligned groups.

“Their plan: Spend $300 million to buy Susan Collins a sixth term,” said Platner in a Facebook post. “My plan: Defeat them, then ban billionaires from buying elections.”