One of the most hotly contested 2026 Democratic primaries ended with a bang instead of a bang Thursday, when Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her Senate campaign, making expat oyster farmer Graham Platner the party’s biggest favorite for the nomination.
The seat, currently held by five-term Sen. Susan Collins (R), is one of the biggest opportunities for Democrats to take. But the main battle created many interesting tensions within today’s Democratic Party.
What did Mills risk – anti-establishment views, his age, a bad campaign, or all of the above? How did Platner survive what many expected to be a scandal to end the campaign? Was his bold leftist views an asset or a liability? Can we read larger national trends into these results, or is it mainly about the specific candidates, and the absurdity, involved?
To answer these questions, I spoke with Alex Seitz-Wald, a longtime political reporter who moved to Maine and now. works as deputy editor for Midcoast Villagerlocal newspaper. Ever since the Maine Senate debate drew national attention, Seitz-Wald has become a kind of whisperer of Maine politics — Maine’s mouthpiece — to the national press. This is what he said.
Did Janet Mills’ age — and Biden’s hangover — doom her?
Janet Mills is the sitting governor and was the dream candidate of Democratic leaders to unseat Susan Collins. It was believed by many that he alone could keep that seat in the game. Now he has been defeated by a lesser known candidate – what went wrong?
If I had to pick one thing that describes Mills-Platner, he just ran a bad campaign. I have seen many Senate campaigns. I covered national politics for 15 years, and this is one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever seen.
The question that he never put to bed, but that everyone had was: What? did he really want to do this? He somehow dragged his feet in the race, as Chuck Schumer and national Democrats were trying to publicly encourage him to run. He ran this very unpopular campaign, not doing a lot of public events, not a lot of energy, a media strategy that felt current. And that was all he could control.
Things he couldn’t control – his age was a major factor. He would have been 79 years old when he was sworn in. Last summer, when he entered it was just one of the events of Joe Biden, losing the presidency to (Donald) Trump.
So many democrats were very worried about that. It was fresh in people’s minds, very fresh, and people felt like they had been lied to by the White House and the Democratic administration – it made them more suspicious.
This is the oldest state in the countryso it’s not like people have an age preference. But I talked to many Democrats, including many older women, who said they liked Janet Mills as governor, but wanted a new face with new energy and new ideas in the Senate.
He wasn’t Joe Biden – like, a dodgy old man who was being protected by the staff. I have spent time with him: he is bright, he is physically active. But Maine Democratic voters never saw that, because he wasn’t out there proving it to them.
Did Graham Platner win because of his leftist views – or in spite of them?
Platner is associated with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. How important do you think ideology and opinion were in explaining his appeal – as opposed to the more common vibes of “he looks tough and combative.” Or are they mixed up?
Progressives gave Platner a solid base of support, but I think they should be careful about reading too much into a victory for their ideology. Because there were many other things here.
There’s his Maine-ness, like you. He looks like most people. If we were to go to town, about a few miles from where I am right now, we could find about half a dozen guys who just look like Graham Platner. It is the people who work with their hands who shower after work instead of before work.
I think that applies to people who are more of the working class – but also especially the leaders of Democratic thought who are more wealthy, but who recognize the need for the party to reach those people more. He can change that code because he went to GWU, because he comes from a high-class family, because he was a bartender at the (Washington, DC, bar) Tune Inn. He can talk to donors and thought leaders and he can also talk to people on the waterfront.
Having handled a million campaigns, I’m not a big believer in campaigns that are generally useful. I think it’s structural forces more often than not. But in this case, I really think that the campaign that he ran – and the campaign that Mills didn’t run – were important. It is a small state, 1.3 million people. Everyone knows someone who knows someone.
So the fact that he was out there doing town halls that would get several hundred people, a thousand people, creating this kind of energy feeling – nobody had ever seen anything like that here. And finally, he reaches some kind of critical mass where he has directly met or been in the room with a large part of the Democratic voter base. That’s before you get to all the podcast interviews he’s done, social media, digital ad campaigns, and all that made him so ubiquitous — he connected with people in person.
Did Platner win because Democratic voters are angry with the party establishment?
People have been using the phrase “Democratic Party,” and saying this is an example of it. Among Democratic voters in Maine, have you seen a strong anger at the establishment in general, or was this more about the specifics of specific candidates in this race?
I would say it’s more of simmering hatred than anger. And I think it has been around for a long time.
Maine is definitely a state that has a chip on its shoulder. Every summer, we get rich people from New York and Boston and DC and everywhere that come in, and then leave. That is the background music of this kind of hatred of outsiders telling us what to do.
People were very upset with the feeling that Chuck Schumer, the Washington Democrats, people from far away, were forcing Janet Mills on them. I took too much too soon. Somehow they anointed him as a candidate and then said, shut up and go after him. So, more than “establishment” or policy, it was a feeling that people who know nothing about Maine are trying to tell us what to do – and shock you into doing so.
Would Platner survive Peak Woke?
Then there is Platner’s tattoo (a picture of a skull and crossbones used by the Nazis). This was the big story at the beginning of the campaign. Do you think he won this mainly because of his special skills and appeal? Or is it because we are in a post-awakening age now and progressives think differently about such things?
We can’t check the lie, but I don’t see any way he can live in Peak Woke – or even before the Great Awakeningwhen the normal principles of politics existed.
Before it came out, he had enough time to build support and get people emotionally invested in his campaign. And because it was thrown so close to the launch of Mills’ campaign, it immediately came with this valence of, oh, this is a hit planted by his opponents.
I talked to a lot of people, I didn’t hear any initial abandonment, and it just continued. And then he actually kind of covered it going forward because he seemed like he was talking about it a lot. He went on many podcasts, he talked to anyone who wanted to ask him a question, he was asked at town halls. He seemed very open and honest about it. And then it was taken as a sign of growth – of his truth – because he was ready to accept the mistake and not try to explain it away, like many politicians. So it ended up reinforcing this perception that he is a normal person.
I think also, if you look at his profile, he it was voted on Most Likely to Start a Revolution in high school, where he holds banners with Free Palestine and Free Tibet. Through it, and through Reddit postswe have something like an uncovered window into his raw political identity. And the Nazi thing doesn’t pass the smell test for me.
Will Susan Collins be judged by the national trend – or can she defy the trend again?
Susan Collins is one of the so-called last moderate Republicans, who her critics say is now not moderate at all. Now he faces what may be the most difficult environment ever. What do you think about how Maine voters view Collins right now? Has he been able to maintain some distance from Trump and his reputation for doing what’s best for Maine?
Minimize or underestimate Susan Collins at your own peril, because she has proven time and time again that she is a very good politician at winning campaigns in difficult circumstances. That said, I think this is the toughest environment he has faced. It’s the middle of the semester; Trump will not participate in the vote. The national climate, and here in the country, is clearly anti-Trump. He is old. He is more stable, more establishment-coded.
That said, it’s really hard to gauge his support because he’s so sub rosa. He’s only been around for so long. He has these personal relationships with, like, everyone in the state and seems to know everything that’s going on. I talk to people all the time who are like, “well, I just emailed Susan,” or “I just got off the phone with Susan.” So he just makes these direct connections. He seems to be a step ahead of everyone, knowing everything that is going on. And I think that goes a long way.
He is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. In ancient times, that was like a guaranteed lock on re-election. It’s not as powerful as it used to be, but I think it makes sense in a state like Maine that’s so dependent on federal money — and he’s opened the spigots completely in the last year.
You can continue its website and you can see all the money and all the projects that he’s funded, and there are these little pins in the state of Maine, covering the whole map. When this money falls from the sky, it is a great blessing.
And a word of caution about voting. In 2020, all polls had Collins down heading into election day. He was outnumbered by his Democratic opponent two to one. And then he ended up winning by 9 percent. So it looks like it’s against Collins out there – but I think behind the scenes, he’s got a lot more support than meets the eye.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
