Failing to Read the Room in Maine

As Gov. Janet Mills recovers from her anemic Senate bid, she’ll have to decide how to handle Graham Platner, the all-but-voter-anointed Democratic nominee.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/06/failing-to-read-the-room-maine-mills-platner-senate/


Maine Gov. Janet Mills, left, and Graham Platner, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Credit: Matt Rourke, Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo

Gov. Janet Mills sailed into Augusta after eight disastrous years of former Gov. Paul “Trump before Trump” LePage. That Maine had been deflated and disillusioned by her Republican predecessor—now running for Congress as a reformed man in Maine’s Second Congressional District—would be a colossal understatement. LePage force-fed Mainers a daily diet of heinous smears, vetoed more bills than every previous governor in state history put together, and capsized the state’s public health care system, right along with multiple other state institutions. For most people, but particularly the poorest, every day was a quest to survive LePage until term limits took over in 2018.

Mills easily won that year’s governor’s race and made quick work of LePage’s legacy. She implemented Medicaid expansion by executive order, which voters had passed and LePage had ignored, on the first day of her first term. It was an almost prophetic decision in the last year of the Before Times—then COVID-19 hit. And that in turn was a good time to have a competent chief executive in the chair. The adults were back. Sure enough, Mills beat LePage in a 2022 rematch and personally tangled with President Trump in the White House. When he attempted to ban trans people from Maine sports, she retorted that she’d “see you in court” and won, one of the high-water marks of her second term.



Which makes Mills’s recent withdrawal from the primary election for the Maine Senate seat currently occupied by Susan Collins a bit mysterious. Saving Maine and America by finally ousting Collins, the Republican senator who is preternaturally concerned about various Trump misdeeds and nominees, only to vote for them anyway, was nothing short of a mission from God—if not Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader searching obsessively for candidates who could win statewide in key races. It proved irresistible. Surely Mainers would rally around her to deliver them from Collins.

But Maine Democratic voters had already been looking over Janet Mills’s shoulder to see who else was out there. The prospect of two women in their late seventies—Mills would have been 79 when she took office, making her the oldest freshman senator in American history—battling it out thrilled exactly no one, including older voters. There voters saw Graham Platner. The oysterman and Marine Corps veteran stamped out his Reddit-posting negatives and his suspect tattoos with pure Maine appeal. By the time Schumer shunted an unenthusiastic Mills into the spotlight, other possible candidates anticipating her entry had already hustled over to the governor’s contest or had moved on. So much for a seasoned politician with statewide victories in her pocket.

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