Graham Platner, the oyster farmer and small-town harbormaster running for U.S. Senate in Maine, has run one of the best insurgent campaigns in recent memory and built a compelling case for his electability.
He has led his Democratic opponent, Governor Janet Mills, the incumbent two-term governor, in nearly every primary poll, more than once by a whopping double-digit margin. More importantly, in every nonpartisan general election poll conducted this year, he is ahead of the incumbent five-term Republican Senator, Susan Collins. Mills, despite her deeper resume and experience winning statewide elections, cannot say the same.
Platner has seized frontrunner status after weathering months of difficult press coverage over his past misogynistic and bigoted social media posts and a belatedly covered chest tattoo with Nazi origins, after outhustling Mills in both the air war and the ground war. His fundraising remained steady, with his 2026 first-quarter fundraising total outpacing hers, $4.1 million to $2.6 million, leaving him with a $2.7 million to $1 million cash-on-hand advantage. He has spent $5 million more than Mills on ads and hosted at least 50 town halls. Mills held her first campaign town hall just this past Tuesday. His rise bolsters arguments that voters have accepted his apologies and explanations, that his rough-hewn populist style meets the midterm moment better than Mills’ cautious moderation, and that he has the political skills and stamina to oust Collins, who was first elected to the seat in 1996.
And yet Democrats have reason to worry that Platner has learned the wrong lesson from surviving his political near-death experience.
Late last week, The Maine Monitor published a thorough report on the primary and Platner’s strengthening position, written by Josh Keefe, a high school classmate of Platner’s, which includes interviews with both Democratic candidates conducted in the winter. Here’s what happened when Keefe revisited the tattoo controversy with Platner:
Platner said he didn’t know what it was until it became an issue during this campaign. Even when someone working with his campaign told him there was a rumor going around that he had a white supremacist tattoo, he said he didn’t connect it to the skull and crossbones on his chest. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s the fucking most retarded shit I’ve ever heard in my life,’” he told me. “‘No, I don’t have a white supremacist tattoo,’ and I never thought about it again. And then it came up later on, and I was like, ‘God fucking damn it.’”
Keefe didn’t otherwise dwell on Platner’s utterance of the R-word, but Mother Jones’ Julia Métraux covered it two days later. And on Tuesday, the Bangor Daily News and Portland Press-Herald reported on criticism of Platner from Maine disability rights advocates.
Two aspects of this episode should concern Democrats. One, despite his apologies for some past rhetorical transgressions, Platner is still speaking loosely. (Another example from January involves Platner saying he was a “longtime fan” of the Valhalla VFT podcast hosted by a peddler of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the murder of Charlie Kirk.)
Two, his reflex is to ignore media inquiries about these newer controversies. No one from his campaign responded to queries from Mother Jones and the Press-Herald about his use of the R-word. (He wasn’t quoted in the Bangor Daily News article, so it’s not clear if the campaign was contacted.) It wasn’t until late Wednesday, following the drubbing from disability advocates, that Platner issued a public apology. His campaign also snubbed a Jewish Insider reporter in February, seeking comment about his Valhalla VFT appearance, and hasn’t been pressured on that flap since. (A Jewish Insider story published Wednesday, about comments Platner made on Reddit in 2014 praising the tactical skills of a Hamas raid in Israel, doesn’t mention any attempt to contact the campaign.)
Both impulses—say whatever, ignore media questions—betray a certain cockiness, as did a campaign strategy memo distributed in early April suggesting that Platner had the primary in hand, allowing him to spend more time on the general election. Granted, the approach is working to date. Saying whatever creates an aura of authenticity. Ignoring the media can be better than giving unflattering stories more oxygen by commenting further. Moreover, the Mills campaign has proven feeble at exploiting Platner’s comments. Last month, she spent roughly $500,000 on ads attacking Platner for social media comments that blamed women for being raped, then quickly dropped the spots when poll numbers didn’t instantly budge. She has also opted, so far, to stay silent about Platner’s R-word use, although her campaign on Wednesday published a press release with passages and quotes from the news articles.
But what works two months before a primary election is not necessarily the same as what will work in the thick of a general election campaign.
Mock all you want about Collins’ pathetic, oft-lampooned expressions of being “concerned” when Trump or Republicans commit acts she knows will play poorly in her Democratic state. Still, when it comes to winning elections, she is absolutely ruthless. The half-million Mills just spent is nothing compared to the 2020 campaign, when outside GOP groups dropped $42 million in negative ads savaging Collins’ opponent, Speaker of the Maine House Sara Gideon. Ads misleadingly insinuated she didn’t pay her taxes (her husband’s business years ago had been late on tax payments but had long settled up) and falsely accused her of protecting a fellow Democratic lawmaker who was a sexual predator, when in fact she demanded he resign as soon as the facts of the case were known.
In that race, 2020, Collins had the gaslighting gall to run ads featuring a famous local TV personality claiming she was being smeared by “out-of-staters,” successfully appealing to Maine’s homestate pride (and, perhaps, fiendishly winking at Gideon’s Indian heritage and Rhode Island roots.) But the late ad blitz worked, as Collins vastly outperformed the polls, winning by nearly 9 percentage points.
So far, Platner has been able to neutralize concerns about what he has said in the past. But what about anything he might say in the future? Or things he might be falsely accused of saying or doing, but track with things said or done in the past?
To some extent, these are unfair questions to ask because they require clairvoyance to answer. Further, questions about Platner’s viability need not be asked in isolation; they should be set against the alternative: Mills has done herself no favors by running a listless campaign to date.
Why Mills let herself get outraised, outspent, and outstumped, I can’t precisely say, but here’s my best assessment. When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was recruiting Mills in the months before her October announcement, the logic was sound. Mills’ job approval in polls was generally above water, hitting 55 percent in a June poll by the University of New Hampshire (UNH), and Platner was an unknown. She’s the only Democrat to have won statewide elective office in the last 20 years.
But when Platner announced in August, he excited some Democrats, especially on the populist left, eager for new faces. Immediately after the 78-year-old Mills announced her Senate bid, her job approval numbers tanked, down to 43 percent in UNH’s mid-October poll. The biggest declines were among self-described “socialists” and “progressives.” As Keefe concluded in his dispatch for The Maine Monitor:
…I asked people for their thoughts on the race, I repeatedly heard a version of the same thing: I like Mills; I appreciate what she’s done as governor; but it’s time for someone younger … the concerns were not about her physical or mental capacities. Rather, it seems that her age has become a proxy in voters’ minds for her lack of new ideas, her languid campaigning, her politician biography. Platner wants to overturn the system that preceded and led to Trump. Mills is, in effect, campaigning as its defender.
Considering her light fundraising and campaigning out of the gate, I presume the Mills campaign didn’t detect these concerns and believed Platner would fade. Also, according to NOTUS, “the Mills campaign was waiting for an outside group—either the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC or another group—to start running ads” taking down Platner. But those groups were waiting for the Mills campaign to show some “momentum” before cutting checks, and she didn’t.
Even if Mills can win the primary—not a ludicrous scenario with a series of debates on the May calendar and Platner’s tendency to offend—the Democratic socialist-progressive-centrist coalition will have taken a pounding. Platner’s most devout supporters are already skeptical of the Democratic Party establishment, so reunification for the general would be far from a sure thing.
Democrats need to net four Senate seats in the November midterm to gain control. Maine is the only possible pickup opportunity for Democrats in a state that Donald Trump lost, so most have assumed it was necessary. The map, however, continues to expand. Independent polls show Democrats are up in North Carolina and Alaska. Recent Democratic- and progressive-affiliated polls have Democrats winning in Texas and Ohio. Democrats are also polling competitively in Iowa. And the Cook Political Report is giving the progressive independent Dan Osborn an outside shot in Nebraska. If November produces a really big Blue Wave, maybe Democrats could afford to blow it in Maine yet again. However, Democrats would rather produce a reliable Maine nominee and not take that gamble.
Mills started the race overconfident and paid the political price. Despite her weakened standing, she is still grasping at an electability argument. “They will tear him apart if he’s the nominee,” she told The New York Times two weeks ago. That’s a completely fair concern; I’ve just argued the same. But that’s not enough of an argument for Mills to make when she polls worse than Platner in general-election trial heats with Collins. She needs to stump harder, get in front of more voters, and show Mainers the kind of candidate she would be in the fall.
Now it’s Platner showing overconfidence. The 41-year-old has used town halls and podcasts effectively to build support, but those are friendly audiences. If Mills remains weak, that, combined with a well-financed ad campaign, may be enough to coast through the primary. But it would be dangerous to assume Platner has proven all voters don’t care about the controversies to date before November ballots are cast. To toughen up for a general election, he should put himself in less comfortable settings and take pointed questions from the media instead of ducking when controversies arise.
And of course, what would be ideal for Democrats is for Platner to avoid any further controversies.
