Democrats Worry Bruising Maine Primary Could Cost Them A Shot At Susan Collins
Dan Merica
Washington Post
March 27, 2026
Democrats are growing worried that an increasingly bitter Senate primary will cost them a chance at picking up a critical Senate seat in Maine now held by Sen. Susan Collins (R), the party’s top target this year.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills, trailing liberal upstart Graham Platner in a series of private and public polls, began running negative ads against Platner last week, targeting the 41-year-old oyster farm owner for years-old Reddit comments in which he crudely discussed sexual assault. The ad featured an actor reading the comments aloud in a gravelly voice meant to sound like Platner.
Mills released a second ad on Thursday that featured a woman, who served in the Army and was raped, excoriating Platner for writing in 2013 that women should not “get so f—ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”
Democrats who once believed this election represented the best chance to oust Collins, who has served since 1997, have grown more distressed in recent weeks, according to conversations with party members in Maine and nationwide. These Democrats are especially concerned that Mills’s campaign is casting Platner’s comments as “disqualifying,” fearing that could harden Democrats against the progressive if he emerges from the primary.
“I worry that folks on the left will dig in and not let go of their anger in time to vote in November,” said Bev Uhlenhake, the former chair of the Maine Democratic Party who is unaligned in the race between Mills and Platner. “We can’t have that.”
Collins, a 73-year-old staple of Maine politics seeking her sixth term in the Senate, is the most vulnerable Republican senator in the nation, and her seat is considered critical to Democrats’ long-shot bid to take control of the legislative body.
But she has proved herself resilient for decades and is geared up for another challenge. She is running unopposed in the Republican primary and has more than $8 million to spend in the general election. Republican outside groups have committed to spending at least $60 million.
Mills’s spokesperson, Tommy Garcia, said the governor will continue “making her case to all Maine people about why she is the only candidate who can beat Susan Collins,” which includes “making sure voters know what Graham Platner said himself.”
“The negatives on this guy are much more damaging, and that’s why I’m trying to get people to look at … the whole picture,” Mills said on MS NOW Thursday when pressed on polls showing her trailing in the primary. “The things he has said cannot be unsaid.”
The governor had previously argued Republican ads on Platner’s comments would “make mincemeat” of the liberal candidate if he were the Democrat to face Collins.
Democrats in Maine close to Mills argue that these ads are not smears because they are based wholly on Platner’s own words.
“If Graham Platner is the nominee, we are going to see this and more at a volume times 100,” said Emily Cain, a former Maine state senator who is voting for Mills but not directly involved with her campaign. “Those things are objectively true, and they are things he put on the internet. Nothing the Mills campaign is saying is untrue. It’s not nasty, it’s not even a smear. It’s factual.”
Platner’s attacks on Mills have been far less personal — focusing mostly on the need for generational change and the affordability crisis in Maine — and he has already released an ad focused on Collins. In response to the Mills attacks, Platner released a straight-to-camera spot where he said the words he wrote “are not who I am” and asked Maine voters “not to judge me for the worst thing I said on the internet on my worst day 14 years ago.”
While Democrats are watching this primary closely, Republicans in Maine — including those close to Collins — are celebrating as it devolves into a brawl. They hope that whoever emerges from the contest will be toxic to a sizable wing of the Democratic Party’s base and unable to match Republicans’ so far untapped campaign war chest.
“We welcome them to keep slugging it out,” said Jason Savage, the executive director of the Maine Republican Party. “It should be a real concern for them … They are making their path very difficult.”
Shawn Roderick, a spokesperson for the Collins campaign, said the race “will come down to results and Senator Collins has delivered time and again.”
Collins, however, doesn’t have a seamless path to reelection, either. The electorate in Maine has moved left in recent years. Collins is Maine’s only statewide elected Republican, and the last time all of Maine backed a Republican for president was in 1988. But the Republican senator has continued to win reelection because of her relationship with voters in the state, connections that have helped her overcome long odds and tens of millions of dollars spent against her. In 2020, Collins defeated Democrat Sara Gideon, a former state representative, in the most expensive Senate contest in Maine history.
“Collins has a ceiling of support in a state that has become more and more Democratic,” said a longtime Democratic operative who works in Maine, granted anonymity to speak frankly about Mills and Platner. “But a Democratic primary that has already become bruising in March of the election year, that is definitely going to help her. Is it going to save her? I am not prepared to say that. The drag from the Trump administration will be difficult for her to overcome, but we saw her do that last cycle.”
Platner’s advisers have long expected the attacks but argue that a double standard has allowed Mills to escape criticism from establishment figures within the Democratic Party.
“There is some hypocrisy from the political class here,” said Morris Katz, a top Platner adviser. “If the furthest left candidate in a critical swing race who was down 30 points was running negative ads against the likely nominee, there would be outrage that the left was going to cost Democrats the Senate, yet when the situation is reversed, those people are cheering it on.”
The negative tone has revived memories of bruising presidential primaries, with multiple operatives citing the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the 2016 race between Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Obama emerged more resilient, and that helped him win the presidency, said Tommy Vietor, a longtime Democratic operative and commentator who worked for the former president.
“I am all for tough primaries,” said Vietor. “I would rather have them fight it out now and prepare the electorate for what they are going to hear later.”
But other operatives noted that was not the story of the 2016 primary, when Clinton ultimately lost to Donald Trump after withering attacks by Sanders.
“Yes, going negative tends to hurt your opponent, but it can also hurt you,” Vietor said of the Maine contest. “That is always the big risk.”
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