The Maine Senate Race

Susan Estrich on May 2, 2026

It was the 78 year-old two-term Governor against a 41-year-old oyster farmer who has never held office. Chuck Schumer convinced the Governor, Janet Mills, that she had the best chance of defeating Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Maybe so, but she will never get that chance. Her campaign never took off. The oyster farmer, Jordan Platner, with the support of Bernie Sanders and the hard left, raised twice as much money as she did and was leading in the polls.

This week, she bowed out of the race, leaving Democratic hopes to regain the Senate in the hands of a candidate who, as longtime Democratic strategist Jack Corrigan points out, "has been minimally vetted. He has left minimal footprints besides his problematic social media posts, stupid tattoos and a sketchy employment history."

I became a Janet Mills fan when she took on President Donald Trump at the White House on the subject of transgender girls in sports. She was reportedly getting bored listening to him give a campaign speech to the nation's governors and was even thinking of walking out when Trump interrupted his diatribe to ask her point-blank whether she intended to comply with his recent executive order banning transgender female athletes from participating on girls' and women's sports teams.

"I'm complying with state and federal law," she responded. "We are the federal law," King Don replied. "You better comply because otherwise you're not getting any federal funding." And when she replied, "see you in court," he told her that her days in elective office were limited. "Enjoy your life after governor, because I don't think you'll be in elected politics," the angry president told Mills.

She did see him in court. When the Trump administration moved to cut off school breakfasts and lunches from 172,000 Maine school children, Maine sued. And won. "We stood up to Trump and stopped him from cutting the school lunch program for Maine kids," Mills said in the video that launched her campaign. The video included the clips from her confrontation with Trump. "I've never backed down from a bully and I never will."

If you wanted someone with the guts and experience to take on Trump, Maine had it in Janet Mills. So why wasn't that enough?

Age? The Democratic left did not buy into Schumer's logic. They do not buy into Schumer. They are, in the words of historian Heather Cox Richardson, looking for "bomb throwers," which Platner is and Mills isn't.

Timing? By the time Mills got in the race, Platner had developed a real following among the ideologues on the left. In his launch video, he positioned himself as "deeply angry" about economic conditions in Maine and blamed "billionaires and corrupt politicians" for crushing the middle class. "I'm not afraid to name an enemy and the enemy is the oligarchy." To date, at least, he has not suffered politically from news reports about his deleted Reddit posts insulting rural Mainers and a chest tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol, which he has reportedly covered up.

To some extent, what is going on in the Democratic Party mirrors the ideological struggles in the Republican Party, as the Tea Party and then the Trumpers took over the party, relegating old-fashioned conservatives from the Reagan-Bush-McCain Republican Party to the ranks of dinosaurs. Are the Schumers and Millses of the Democratic Party in that same box? And will general election voters be as entranced by the anti-establishment message that Platner is selling as Democratic primary voters seem to be?

The arithmetic is not complicated. The road to a Democratic majority in the Senate runs through Maine. There is no other route. Now, it's all up to Platner. But Janet Mills is still my hero.

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