David M. Shribman
PORTLAND, Maine — An entrenched senator distrusted by both parties. A governor born just 18 months after 79-year-old Donald Trump. An oyster farmer who for years walked around with a Nazi symbol tattoo. Anti-gay remarks in a state generally regarded as welcoming to LGBTQ+ people. Pockets of deep Trump loyalty in a state that he lost three times. Traditional resistance to outsiders and the likelihood of a flood of out-of-state spending.
Maine is about to hold one of the most hard-fought, colorful, dramatic, gripping, emotional, bitter, idiosyncratic, thesaurus-busting Senate races of the age. Also, maybe, the most consequential.
Welcome to Susan Collins versus Janet Mills. Or maybe Susan Collins versus Graham Platner. Surely Susan Collins versus a cascade of campaign spending. Maybe a dash of Susan Collins versus Donald Trump. Pretty much Susan Collins against the world.
Collins, who turned 73 this week, is the only incumbent Republican senator running for reelection in a state that Trump lost in 2024. The longest-serving woman in the Senate, she is the lawmaker disdained by almost everyone. She entered the chamber in 1997, a year before Bill Clinton was impeached — the political equivalent of the Paleozoic Era.
Since then, she has disappointed conservatives (by resisting multiple Republican initiatives and entreaties by GOP presidents) and infuriated liberals (by providing part of the confirmation victories to judicial and Cabinet nominations from Brett Kavanaugh to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.).
She is challenging the gray seal — reviled by mariners as a threat to the fish harvest and to their livelihood, beloved by naturalists and sentimentalists — as the most controversial mammal in Maine.
Now enter, from stage left, both Mills and Platner.
Mills is the two-term governor who sparked praise for standing up to Trump on gender issues. Platner is the oyster farmer who wants a more vigorous attack on the president and who, unburdened by any political experience, has some explaining to do when it comes to gender issues. Mills is supported by the Democratic establishment, Platner by the sort of insurgent forces that made Zohran Mamdani mayor-elect in New York.
Of course, both Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont are involved. Of course, they back different Democrats for the nomination against Collins, who has a gift for survival — making her from one point of view the equivalent of a shark (they can survive for 400 years) and, from another viewpoint, a cockroach (they survived the asteroid attack that wiped out the dinosaurs). Neither species is beloved.
Both women are well-known in this state. Neither offers much potential for surprise. The senator raises hopes and fears she will buck Trump only to back his priorities at crucial junctures. The governor is a standard-issue establishment politician with the standard-issue reputation for competence that Maine leaders from Edmund Muskie (governor, senator, secretary of state) and George Mitchell (judge, Senate majority leader) to Bill Cohen (House member, senator, secretary of defense) and Angus King (Independent governor, college professor, senator) have possessed.
Platner is the campaign’s outsider — he’s outside the political world with positions outside the usual fare.
He’s younger (41), feistier (more prone to views just short of extreme), more unconventional (conducting an insurgency as much as a candidacy).
Connecticut may consider itself the Land of Steady Habits, but that description also applies to the Pine Tree State, the pine being able to resist climate, drought and insect infestation (though admittedly it can be regarded as a bit top-heavy).
The biggest outsiders in Maine in the past three-quarters of a century haven’t been its two Independent governors (Jim Langley and King) but conventional figures like Muskie (who had the temerity to be only the second Democrat to win the governor’s office in more than three decades) and Paul LePage (a businessman-governor who boasted of being Donald Trump before Donald Trump). As for real rebels, there was Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican who spent 33 years in the House (1940-’49) and Senate (1949-’73) and took on red-baiting Joseph McCarthy and, well, no one else.
So, along with the Nazi tattoo that he said was a youthful indiscretion and a body ornament that he didn’t even know was associated with Adolf Hitler, Platner is an entirely different strain of political aspirant. He’s taken his “Un-Shuck the System Tour” to big cities such as Portland and Brunswick, but also to Rumford (population 5,858), Madawaska (3,867) and Calais (3,079). His canvassing minions have conducted 5,820 conversations across the state.
An hour observing a volunteer-recruitment drive illuminates the character of the Platner campaign.
Leading this online effort is Able Bloodgood, a Platner field coordinator who earned his politics degree from Bard College in two years and who speaks with the authority of a wizened veteran.
He opens by telling potential volunteers that “there are a lot of interests who do not want Graham anywhere near the Senate,” and then goes on to say that that is the whole point. “Susan Collins is the wrong kind of senator for Maine,” he argues. “She talks the moderate talk but walks like a MAGA Republican. Our campaign is working and fighting for the average Mainer while she’s taking millions from unbelievably wealthy donors.”
Platner has attracted a fair bit of national attention as the Down East version of Mamdani at a time when political outsiders of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stripe are both the hope and fear of Democrats. Listen to one of those on the recruitment session:
“It seems like right now there’s a big upswell of progressive candidates all across the country. It’s a beautiful thing to see. This could be an impactful moment in our country, and I want to be part of it.” He signed up to work on a phone bank.
“There’s a huge hankering to be rid of Susan Collins,” said G. Calvin Mackenzie, an emeritus political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “Democrats may like Janet Mills just fine, but at her age it doesn’t make sense. There’s a sprawling discomfort with old political figures — we had Joe Biden, and Trump has been around for a decade — and we are feeling that here in Maine. This fellow is a fresh breeze.”
Professor Mackenzie is the author of an important book titled “The Liberal Hour.” Can a liberal hour be dawning in the place where dawn comes first in the United States?
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
