The two-term governor and Schumer’s hand-picked recruit ran out of money trying to fight a working-class insurgent. Voters had already chosen.
Maine Governor Janet Mills dropped out of the Senate race Thursday morning, ending a bid that national Democratic leaders had spent months propping up against the wishes of their own primary voters.
Her exit clears the way for Graham Platner — a 41-year-old oyster farmer, Marine and Army veteran, and political newcomer who has spent the last eight months building one of the most talked-about populist campaigns in the country.
Mills did not endorse Platner in her statement. She did not even mention him by name.
“While I have the drive and passion, commitment and experience, and above all else — the fight — to continue on, I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources,” Mills said. “That is why today I have made the incredibly difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the United States Senate.”
Translation: the money dried up because Democratic voters in Maine had already made their choice, and it wasn’t her.
A Rebuke of the Party Establishment
This is the part of the story that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would prefer to skip past. Mills did not lose because of a scandal.
She did not lose because of a gaffe. She lost because Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee personally recruited her — over a candidate their base was already energized about — and then watched the math fall apart in real time.
Polls had Platner leading by 33 points heading into the June 9 primary. By the end of March, his campaign reported $2.7 million in the bank to Mills’s roughly $1 million. She stopped running television ads on April 10.
Her allies in Washington declined to bankroll outside spending on her behalf. A planned fundraiser in D.C. on April 21 was quietly canceled and never rescheduled. The wall closed in.
Asked Thursday by CNN whether he had misread the Maine electorate, Schumer dodged the question entirely and said Democrats would take back the Senate. He did not say he was wrong. He almost never does.
Who is Graham Platner?
Platner enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school in 2003 and served three combat tours in Iraq, then a fourth tour in Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. He came home with PTSD and physical injuries from heavy infantry combat, used VA resources to get treatment, and eventually settled in his hometown of Sullivan, Maine.
He runs Waukeag Neck Oyster Co. with his wife and a business partner. He chairs the Sullivan planning board. He serves as the town’s harbormaster.
He is also unapologetically anti-establishment. He has called for Schumer’s removal as Senate Democratic leader. He has said the Iran war is “magnificently stupid.” He has named the oligarchy as the enemy. His platform calls for Medicare for All, breaking up monopolies, strengthening unions, a wealth tax on billionaires, and ending what he calls “pointless wars.”
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed him. Mills had the DSCC, Schumer, and the institutional weight of the national party. The institutional weight lost.
The Smear Campaign That Didn’t Land
Mills and her allies tried, repeatedly, to take Platner down. They hammered him over old Reddit posts containing crude comments and over a tattoo he got while on leave in Croatia in 2007 that resembles Nazi iconography — something Platner says he did not know the meaning of at the time and has since had covered up. Mills called the tattoo “abhorrent.”
National Republicans, sensing where this was heading, picked up the same lines of attack. After Mills suspended her campaign, RNC spokesperson Kristen Cianci called Platner “a Nazi sympathizing self-proclaimed communist.” NRSC chair Tim Scott called him “a phony who is too extreme for Maine.”
The voters in front of Platner at more than 60 town halls across the state had already heard these attacks and weighed them. Platner addressed the Reddit posts head-on, repeatedly, without ducking: “I will continue to very publicly take accountability for the fact that I used to believe some really stupid stuff.”
“I came out of the infantry. I lived in a world of essentially intense masculinity with some real strange value sets.” Maine Democrats responded by giving him a double-digit lead.
The lesson the establishment refuses to absorb: voters can tell the difference between someone who has made mistakes and grown, and the same recycled smear playbook every cycle.
What This Means for Susan Collins
Susan Collins has held this seat since 1997. She has survived every cycle Democrats have thrown at her, and she has done it in a state Donald Trump has now lost three times — by seven points in 2024 alone. She is the only Republican senator representing a state Trump lost.
She is also, by most accounts, more vulnerable than she has been in decades. The midterm political environment is brutal for Republicans. Collins voted for the Trump administration’s brutal budget priorities, sits at the head of the Appropriations Committee while rural hospitals close, and has spent years cultivating a moderate brand that Maine voters increasingly see as a fig leaf for enabling the worst of her party.
Issuing a brief and gracious statement on Mills’s withdrawal, Collins thanked her for her service. She did not mention Platner.
He has spent months making clear what he intends to do if elected: subpoena the Trump White House repeatedly, refuse to confirm any Trump nominee, and use Senate oversight as a tool to “shut down the White House for the next two years.”
Mainers have a clear choice ahead of them. Platner has to formally clear David Costello in the June 9 primary, which polling suggests will not be close. Then he goes to general election against an incumbent senator who has run out of plausible explanations for why she keeps voting with a president her state keeps rejecting.
The Bigger Picture
Mills’s exit is being framed in some corners as a personal failure. It is not. It is the logical end of a strategy in which national Democratic leaders kept telling working-class voters across the country that their preferences were unrealistic and their candidates were unelectable, and then watched those same voters choose differently anyway.
Maine voters were told a 77-year-old governor backed by Schumer was their best shot at beating Susan Collins. Maine voters disagreed. They picked the oyster farmer who shows up to veterans halls and packs school gymnasiums and names billionaires as the problem.
That is not a defeat for the Democratic Party. It is a defeat for one specific way of running it. Whether the people who lost on Thursday morning understand that yet remains to be seen.
