How did the Platner campaign spend their money?

In his final filing, July 15th, covering spending through June 30, Graham Platner’s campaign reported $20,876,528 in contributions over the cycle and $19,111,060 in expenditures, with $1,763,058 cash on hand.

This is not really a campaign that was broke at the end, unless they spent a ton between June 30th and dropping out. $1.8 million cash on hand isn’t awful, even if they were clearly losing money at the end there. It is a campaign that raised and spent a massive amount of money over a relatively short period.

So....what was the money spent on?

8.4 million dollars alone is media buys through LC Media LLC1. In total, LC Media had 40% of his spending. There’s some very large buying after the primary, presumably ramp up to general election advertising, around 600k. The media buys in general are *huge*. On the advertiser side, Meta reports 3 million dollars of advertising spend from Platner on their platform. Google reports 211k, heavily focused in Maine. The Meta spending is slightly skewed towards California but otherwise nation-wide. From a quick look, the Meta ads are heavily, heavily fundraising (hence the nationwide focus), and the Google ones are mostly persuasion. I can’t be precise here, but this looks like enormous media spend mostly for the purposes of fundraising.

2.7 million dollars is “digital consulting” through Helix campaigns, with another 2.2 mill for “digital advertising” through that same vendor. This puts Helix at 24% of his spend, and a huge amount of “consulting” spend. The consulting spend is particularly notable because early in the campaign it was billed as a retainer, at $100k a week in September/October, even before Platner had started raising a ton of money. 1.5 million of this was in Q4 2025, mostly in October. The entry dates (and transaction numbers) are a little strange, it kind of looks like these payments were all logged at once, and they’re followed by a single $418k payment marked Nov 14th. The filing discrepancies in October/November make it very hard to figure out if the giant payment is an anomaly or an oopsie correction to bad payment management. $418k at once is weird. I don’t know what’s going on there.

Together, these two vendors made up ~64% of Platner’s total spending.

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Both Helix and LC are linked with Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff. His consulting firm (Dark Forest LLC, I have a side note on this name below) also got about 108k directly. I believe Workers Productions LLC (video vendor) is also Moraff-linked, bringing Moraff-linked enterprises to around 70% of Platner spend.

So....ads! It went to ads. And consulting. Something like ~12% of his total spending went to digital consulting. That’s a very online campaign, or a broad definition of “digital consulting”.

Re: Dark Forest LLC, if I am identifying my type of guy correctly, this name is a reference to a theory popularized in the Dark Forest (sequel to the Three Body Problem) by Liu Cixin. The theory posits that aliens *do* exist, but that broadcasting your location is too risky, since those other civilizations would immediately try to destroy you because of game theory. Since you can’t be sure the other civilization will be benevolent, you should immediately destroy them, and since you would expect to be immediately destroyed, you should never risk making contact, etc, etc.

This is, impolitely, dumb as hell. I have not read this book (because I didn’t really like Three Body Problem, but also to be fair I read it entirely while getting a tattoo...) so I can’t comment much more, there’s a wikipedia page, you can read for yourself. The naming is really beside the point except that “guy who is really into game theory [aliens]” is a character some readers may recognize from their own lives and I think that context is useful. Also crucially, the book came out in 2008 at which point Moraff would have been around 16, classically an age where you imprint on sci fi novels, so I think this is a reasonable enough theory. Edit: nope, the english translation was only published in 2015. I still think it’s a reasonable theory.

Also sorry Dan Moraff if you just really love forests2. I suppose that is also possible.

Another quasi-side-note, the new big client for LC Media is *very odd*. They’re working with Quincy Bareebe3 to the tune of 2.7 million, on a self funded campaign that is currently getting very sued. There’s also some weirdness where the campaign has just backfilled months of FEC filings, and the top vendor (Kennedy Communications) is doing *everything*. I didn’t dig too much here, but like...hm!

As with many filings, Platner’s team does not tend to mark “fundraising” spend very cleanly. Spending with fundraising-only vendors is marked (it’s around a million dollars over the whole campaign), but flipping through the ad library you can see that a lot of the general ad spend was for fundraising as well. This makes it a bit tricky to determine what the return to that spending was.

If we handwave and assume that the LC and Helix spending was significantly for fundraising purposes, we end up with returns as high as 76% in the first quarter, and as low as 2% in Q1 2026. This low number is probably an outlier- due to the massive (pre?) payment to Helix- but the latest filing still has them spending 83 cents of every dollar on fundraising, so it isn’t impossibly far off.

With slightly different assumptions, we can choose to remove the payments to Helix for “digital consulting”, treating those as more of a general campaign consulting thing. This drops spend on fundraising a bit, but the latest few filings still look QUITE bad, with Q2 2026 having 78% of money raised spent on fundraising.

Platner was paying Helix comparably with other campaigns, such as Eileen Laubacher (in CO, running against Lauren Bobert), also paying them 100k per week. Her tagging of payments is a bit different, but that is usually a bookkeeping difference. Osborne is paying much less, more like ~30k a week, which may be explained by the overall smaller scale of his campaign (~4 million vs 20 million). LC Media doesn’t have other comparable clients. The Bareebe payments look similar-ish, but that’s kind of just what media buys look like, so it’s not much of a matter.

I started this digging before the last filing dropped, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to see in the final (ish, it doesn’t cover July) filing. I was vaguely hoping for some exciting new spending, I guess. What’s in there is mostly “ads, but more”. It is a very large amount of money to be spending on ads in the weeks after the primary election ($600k!). I’m not sure what to make of that! There’s a branch of campaign strategy (that I think is wrong) which loves early ad spending, but early usually doesn’t mean “literally the week after the primary”. Maybe it was fundraising, trying to make up the deficit of unimpressive Q2 raising?

I do think that interested parties should keep an eye out for this kind of payment structure in other viral/insurgent/outsider campaigns. Super high retainers to firms that don’t otherwise have a ton going on indicates, if you’re skeptical, a very efficient way of sucking money out of the hot new thing. Or, the charitable version, it indicates a huge operation betting the farm on some high risk outcomes.

In any case, if you want the story of how Graham Platner spent his money, it hinges on two firms: LC Media and Helix Campaigns.