Maine Governor Janet Mills Suspends Senate Run, Opening Path for Graham Platner

(SeaPRwire) –   On Thursday, Governor Janet Mills halted her U.S. Senate campaign, effectively guaranteeing that progressive oyster farmer Graham Platner will face off against Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins in the November general election.

The announcement marks a surprising conclusion for the two-term governor, who previously served as the state’s attorney general and district attorney. National Democrats recruited Mills to enter the race, and she had the support of top Senate leadership including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. For months, Mills had argued to voters that she was the more viable candidate to beat Collins, who has held the Senate seat since 1997 and has previously overcome steep political headwinds. But Mills recently canceled her television ad purchases, and polling for the race showed her trailing Platner by as much as 30 points ahead of the June 9 primary election.

Mills did not reference Platner or the general election contest in her campaign suspension announcement, attributing her exit to insufficient financial resources needed to keep her campaign running. Since joining the race, Platner has outspent Mills $4.8 million to $1.5 million, per data from ad-tracking group AdImpact.

The governor promised to spend the remaining eight months of her term fighting “nonstop for the people of Maine.” “I step away from this campaign with endless love, respect, and hope for the people of Maine—people whose hearts are full of warmth, and whose honesty and humility are outmatched only by their kindness, willingness to give, and empathy,” she shared in the statement.

Even with an impressive, long-standing political track record, Mills’ age emerged as a key liability after she launched her campaign. At 78, she would have been the oldest first-term senator in U.S. history, and she was seeking voter support at a time when many Democrats say the party needs generational leadership change. The contrast with 41-year-old Platner made those concerns even more pronounced.

Now greater focus than ever is on Platner, as observers wait to see if the Democratic Party’s bet on a political newcomer pays off. He has faced intense scrutiny over a set of now-deleted, provocative Reddit posts published between roughly 2013 and 2021, after he completed four military deployments: three in Iraq with the Marines, and a fourth in Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly had to explain both those statements and a tattoo he got while serving in the Marines in 2007 during leave in Croatia, which has been identified as a Nazi symbol. Platner has stated he did not know the meaning of the design when he got it inked on his chest while intoxicated with fellow infantry members. He had the tattoo covered up in October, but still faces questions about it while campaigning.

Mills and her supporters have warned that Platner’s past controversies could cost Democrats the race against Collins. “If you are going into a tough general election, you need to connect with voters who don’t know you and who you can persuade not to vote for the candidate they have known for decades,” said Emily Cain, a former Maine state representative and Mills backer. “How much of your limited time do you want to spend apologizing?”

Platner’s polling lead only grew as Mills ran attack ads against him highlighting some of his old social media posts. As he travels across the state campaigning, he has centered his messaging on economic issues and advocated for greater working-class representation in Congress. Two leading figures of the progressive movement, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, have both endorsed his campaign. Platner has also directly addressed his controversial Reddit posts on his own accord at more than 50 town hall events.

“I will keep taking public responsibility for the fact that I used to hold a lot of really dumb beliefs,” he said of the Reddit posts at an early April town hall in Orono. “I came up in the infantry. I was immersed in a hyper-masculine environment with some really messed-up value systems. I spent 10 years living in that world, after all. It becomes part of who you are.”

Maine is a swing state where voters have a long history of splitting their tickets to support candidates from both parties on the same ballot. Collins has consistently earned more votes than the top of the Republican ticket in the state, winning reelection in 2020 even as Maine backed Joe Biden for president. She is widely seen as prioritizing constituent services in her office, as well as her role as chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which allows her to secure federal funding for projects in Maine.

Platner had already begun shifting his focus to the general election, adjusting his stump speech to target Collins more heavily, while a super PAC supporting Collins has spent $2 million on attack ads against him.

When asked earlier this month about the possibility of Mills suspending her campaign, Platner told TIME, “This is a campaign to beat Susan Collins. It is also a campaign to completely transform how people in Maine engage with politics, and that project, quite frankly, stays the same no matter who we are running against.”