Graham Platner’s triumph, explained by a Maine reporter

One of the most hotly contested Democratic primaries of 2026 ended with a whimper rather than a bang Thursday, as Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her Senate campaign, making outsider oyster farmer Graham Platner the overwhelming favorite for the party’s nomination.

The seat, currently held by five-term Sen. Susan Collins (R), is one of Democrats’ top pickup opportunities. But the primary battle surfaced many fascinating tensions inside today’s Democratic Party.

What doomed Mills — anti-establishment sentiment, her age, a bad campaign, or all of the above? How did Platner survive what many expected to be a campaign-ending scandal? Were his bold left views an asset or a liability? And can we read big national trends into this outcome, or is it mainly about the particular candidates, and the quirky state, involved?

To answer these questions, I spoke with Alex Seitz-Wald, a longtime national political reporter who moved to Maine and now works as deputy editor for the Midcoast Villager, a local newspaper. Since Maine’s Senate primary captivated national attention, Seitz-Wald has been a sort of Maine politics whisperer — a Maine-splainer — to national reporters. Here’s what he had to say.

Did Janet Mills’s age — and the Biden hangover — doom her?

Janet Mills is the sitting governor and was Democratic leaders’ dream candidate to take out Susan Collins. It was believed by many that she alone could put the seat in play. Now she’s gone down to defeat by a little-known outsider candidate — what went wrong?

If I had to pick one thing that explains the Mills-Platner thing, she just ran a terrible campaign. I’ve seen dozens of Senate campaigns. I covered national politics for 15 years, and this is one of the most shockingly bad campaigns I’ve ever seen.

The question she never really put to bed, but that everyone had was: Did she really want to do this? She kind of dragged her feet on running, as Chuck Schumer and national Democrats were very publicly trying to encourage her to run. She ran this very lackluster campaign, not doing a lot of public events, not a lot of energy, a media strategy that felt very dated. And that was what she could control.

The stuff that she couldn’t control — her age was the biggest factor. She would have been 79 when she was sworn in. Last summer, when she got in was right off the whole Joe Biden fiasco, the loss of the presidency to [Donald] Trump. 

So a lot of Democrats were very concerned about that. It was so fresh in people’s minds, so raw, and people felt like they had been lied to by the White House and the Democratic powers that be — it just made them all the more suspicious.

This is the oldest state in the country, so it’s not like people are ageist. But I talked to a lot of Democrats, including a lot of older women, who said they like Janet Mills as a governor, but they wanted a fresh face with new energy and new ideas in the Senate. 

She was not a Joe Biden — like, a doddering old person who was being protected by staff. I’ve spent time with her: she is sharp, she’s physically active. But Maine Democratic voters just never really saw that, because she was just not out there, proving it to them. 

Did Graham Platner triumph because of his left views — or in spite of them?

Platner is associated with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. How important do you think ideology and views were in explaining his appeal — as opposed to the more generic vibes of “he seems tough and he fights.” Or are they intermingled?

Progressives gave Platner a good base of support, but I think they should be careful in overreading this as a victory of their ideology. Because there were a lot of other factors here.

There’s his Maine-ness, if you will. He just looks like a lot of people. If we went down to town, like a couple miles from where I am right now, we could find like a half dozen dudes who look just like Graham Platner. They’re guys who work with their hands who shower after work instead of before work. 

I think that resonates with people who are more working class — but also especially with Democratic progressive thought leaders who are more affluent, but who recognize the need for the party to reach those people more. He can do that kind of code switching because he went to GWU, because he comes from an upper-middle-class family, because he was a bartender at [the Washington, DC, bar] the Tune Inn. He can speak to the donors and thought leaders and he can also speak to the guys at the waterfront. 

Having covered a million campaigns, I’m not a huge believer in campaigns really mattering in general. I think it’s structural forces more often. But in this case, I really do think that the campaign that he ran — and the campaign that Mills did not run — were instrumental. It’s a small state, 1.3 million people. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. 

So the fact that he was just out there doing town halls that would get a couple hundred people, a thousand people, building this kind of sense of energy — no one’s ever seen anything like that here. And eventually, he reaches some kind of critical mass where he has directly met with or been in a room with a significant chunk of the Democratic voting base. That’s before you get to all the podcast interviews that he’s done, social media, digital ad campaigns, and all of that that made him omnipresent — he just connected with people personally. 

Did Platner win because Democratic voters are furious at the party establishment?

People have been using the phrase “Democratic Tea Party,” and saying this is an example of it. Among Democratic voters in Maine, have you seen a white-hot rage at the establishment generally, or was this more about the specifics of the particular candidates in this race?

I would say it’s more of a simmering resentment than rage. And I think it’s existed for a long time. 

Maine is definitely a state that has a chip on its shoulder. Every summer, we get wealthy people from New York and Boston and DC and everywhere who come in, and then they leave. That’s the background music of this kind of resentment of outsiders telling us what to do. 

People really resented the sense that Chuck Schumer, the Washington Democrats, the people from away, were forcing Janet Mills upon them. I picked up a lot of that really early on. They just kind of anointed her as the candidate and then said, shut up and get behind her. So, more than the “establishment” or policy, it was just the sense that people who know nothing about Maine are trying to tell us what to do — and fuck you for doing that. 

Could Platner have survived Peak Woke?

Then there’s Platner’s tattoo [an image of a skull and crossbones used by Nazis]. This was a gigantic story in the beginning of the campaign. Do you think he overcame this mainly because of his specific skills and appeal? Or is it because we’re in the post-woke era now and progressives are thinking differently about things like this?

We can’t check a counterfactual, but I don’t see any way that he survives at Peak Woke — or even pre-Great Awokening, when the normal rules of politics existed.

Pre-Trump.

Yeah, pre-Trump. 

Before it came out, he’d had enough time to build support and get people emotionally invested in his campaign. And because it was dropped so close to the Mills campaign launch, it just immediately came with this added valence of, oh, this is a hit planted by his opponents. 

I talked to a lot of people, didn’t hear any initial abandonment, and it just kept going. And then it actually sort of inoculated him going forward because he was seen as talking about it so much. He went on a lot of podcasts, he talked to anyone who wanted to ask him the question, he got asked at town halls. He was perceived as being very open and honest about it. And then it was taken as a sign of growth — of his realness — because he was willing to admit a mistake and not try to explain it away, like most politicians. So it ended up reinforcing this perception that he’s a regular guy.

I also think, if you look at his bio, he was voted Most Likely to Start a Revolution in high school, where he’s holding up signs with Free Palestine and Free Tibet. Through that, and through the Reddit posts, we have something like an unvarnished window into his raw political id. And the Nazi thing just doesn’t really pass the smell test to me.

Will Susan Collins be doomed by the national trend — or can she defy that trend yet again?

Susan Collins is one of the last so-called moderate Republicans, who her critics say is now no longer much of a moderate at all. She’s now facing what could be her toughest environment ever. What’s your sense of how Maine voters are viewing Collins right now? Has she managed to retain some distance from Trump and her reputation for doing what’s best for Maine?

Discount or underestimate Susan Collins at your own risk, because she has proven time and again that she’s a very effective politician at winning campaigns in tough environments. That said, I do think this is probably the toughest environment that she’s faced. It’s a midterm; Trump won’t be on the ballot. The national environment, and locally here, is very much shaping up to be anti-Trump. She’s older. She’s more established, more establishment-coded.

That said, it’s really hard to gauge her support because it’s very sub rosa. She has just been around for so long. She has these personal relationships with, like, everybody in the state and seems to just be aware of everything going on. I talk to people all the time who are like, “all right, just emailed with Susan,” or “I just got off the phone with Susan.” So she’s just making these one-on-one connections. She seems to be a step ahead of everyone, knowing everything that is going on. And I think that goes a long way. 

She’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee. In olden times, that was like a guaranteed lock on winning reelection. It is not as powerful as it used to be, but I do think it’s meaningful in a state like Maine that relies a lot on federal money — and she has just absolutely opened the spigots in the past year.

You can go on her website and you can see all the money and all the projects she’s funded, and there’s these little pins on the state of Maine, covering the entire map. When this money falls from the sky, it’s a huge boon. 

And a word of caution on the polling. In 2020, polls all had Collins down heading into election day. She had been outspent by her Democratic opponent two to one. And then she ended up winning by 9 percentage points. So it looks very anti-Collins out there — but I think behind the scenes, she has a lot more support than is obvious. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.