Can the Graham Platner whirlwind sweep Susan Collins out of one of Maine’s Senate seats? Scandalous Reddit posts, tattoos, sexting, rapid-fire accusations, and denials didn’t make it any easier for Gov. Janet Mills to mount a serious challenge against the harbormaster of a small Maine town north of Acadia National Park.

Platner soundly defeated the two-term governor who steered the state safely out of the COVID-19 pandemic and stood up to President Trump. Mills’s name was still on the ballot after she pulled out of the Senate primary race on the last day of April. Yet she didn’t get even a sympathy bump from voters in what turned out to be a contest of Platner against Platner: the champion of the aggrieved working class vs. the man who lived online too much.

More from Gabrielle Gurley

On election night, after throttling Mills 72 percent to 19 percent, Platner unleashed a rhetorical barrage so crisp, clean, and brutal against Collins that there’s no doubt that she’ll have a tough slog ahead to keep her Senate seat. Platner may have more than his share of personal baggage, but he’s undeniably a political talent. Collins and the rest of the Republican machine will have their work cut out for them in their attempt to knock him off his game, in a campaign destined to focus like a laser on affordability and corruption.

Platner is bound to relentlessly link Collins to President Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and to what he called “the Epstein class” of sycophants surrounding the president. “Collins is as spineless and corrupt as the establishment she now serves,” he said. He defined his campaign as a testament to a “movement” of disaffected Mainers, people who have been set up for failure by “the billionaires and the oligarchs” who clog the halls of power.

The next day, President Trump promptly labeled him a “thug.” “I’ve never seen a person like that run for office,” he said without a hint of irony.

“I don’t think there’s any question that if Susan Collins were not running that the Republicans wouldn’t have a prayer this year of holding that seat,” says Alan Caron, an independent candidate for governor in 2018, who later threw his support to Mills.

IN HIS REMARKS, PLATNER TICKED OFF the problems facing one of the poorest states in the country. There are the homes that residents can no longer afford; the young people leaving Maine for cheaper places to live and work; the closures of hospital maternity wards, including the Blue Hill facility where he was born; and the neighbors disappeared by ICE. He laid the demise of Roe v. Wade squarely on Collins’s doorstep after she voted to elevate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. “She lied to us,” he said.

He owes his out-of-nowhere success to voters fed up with a status quo and platitudes about solutions that never materialize. These voters want a disrupter, not an empty vessel crafting programs that may or may not fill the yawning gaps in the state. They certainly don’t want to entertain any more softball questions about the differences between a 41-year-old and a 73-year-old running for her sixth term in the Senate. Platner has batted those away by pointing to more fundamental differences. “It’s not about age, it’s about our thinking,” he’s said.

Disaffected voters and young people who typically don’t vote in midterm elections have been drawn to Platner, according to Robert Glover, a University of Maine associate professor of political science. “These are a lot of my students,” he says. “Even in a political science department, I’m shocked at how cynically some of them view voting and the democratic process; now they’re excited and energized.” Caron explains that blue-collar Democrats who were energized by Barack Obama, but later lost faith in the party and drifted to the GOP, are coming back. These “Obama drifters” view Platner as an outsider and change agent.

The Prospect in your inbox

Subscribe for analysis that goes beyond the noise.

Platner leans into his rural Maine-ness. He talked about picking blueberries as a kid and digging for clams. Details like these serve to counteract assaults on his authenticity. Maine has its own homegrown purity tests, ones that former Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, Collins’s last Democratic opponent in 2020, failed. Born in Rhode Island, she was “from away,” as Mainers say, having lived in the state for more than a decade (at that time) but not long enough. If you think that doesn’t matter—or shouldn’t—well, there’s a reason that the Platner supporters standing behind the candidate on election night held signs saying, “They Don’t Know Maine.”

For someone who isn’t religious by his own admission, Platner credited his political success to a distinct religiosity—Maine voters’ willingness to grant him measures of redemption and grace for his prodigious flaws that have been on display for months. With Trump in the White House, voters’ tolerance for scandal, especially ones that have a whiff of a smear campaign around them, has shifted for both Republican and Democratic candidates. “The bar for what is a disqualifying scandal is just a lot higher than it used to be,” says Glover.

YET FOR ALL THESE ADVANTAGES, the harbormaster of Sullivan, Maine, is still up against a five-time senator with formidable financial resources served up by eager donors and suspect super PACs. She has a track record of knocking out poll-leading Democrats like Sara Gideon in a state that’s becoming even more reliably blue—southern Maine is sometimes facetiously referred to as Northern Massachusetts.

Like Mills, Collins’s value-added proposition is her reputation as a steady, effective leader. She’s steered more than a billion dollars to Maine in the 2020s, and finally reached the pinnacle of chairing the Senate Appropriations Committee last year. Her rhetoric signals moderation, but her actions signal otherwise: She expresses concern on issues like abortion, but at the eleventh hour she almost always votes in a way that advances Republican interests—like voting for Supreme Court justices who take away abortion rights—and preserves her leverage in the party. Under a second Trump administration, that bait-and-switch routine partly benefits Maine by operating as a sort of perverse protection plan when dealing with a transactional president. If Platner wins, that protection plan will expire, leaving Maine exposed to whatever fits of retribution might follow a Collins defeat.

Even so, those calculations could disrupt Collins’s hold on power. “If that’s not only your strategy—and the strategy that has worked—but [it’s also] part of your political identity, you can be blindsided by these anti-establishment, anti-systemic undercurrents that exist but have always existed,” says Glover, noting that Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary victory in the state is a prime example of the phenomenon.

“There’s always been that frustration with a political and economic system that doesn’t seem to serve the ordinary Mainer,” he adds. “[Platner] has just tapped into it in a way that’s been more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen here.”

Collins shares another trait with Mills. She’s a reticent campaigner who’ll need to step into the spotlight—a grueling chore for someone who hasn’t held a town hall in decades. Mainers have blasted her inattention to this sacrosanct feature of New England political culture, and some voters have resorted to cornering her at ribbon cuttings. Platner, by contrast, has been crisscrossing the state doing retail politics, holding 83 town halls and innumerable smaller events.

Short of a scandal surpassing the Epstein debacle, or a dark disclosure about his military service, or his tenure with Blackwater/Constellis, the private military contractor—which can’t be ruled out—Platner is holding his own so far, leading in recent polls. At the very least, he is at the top of Maine’s Democratic ticket, a place few expected him to be in the run-up to November.

Before you go.

I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work. 

The Prospect doesn't answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us. 

Independent, reader-supported journalism is critical at a time when the free press is under assault. 

If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you'll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.

David Dayen
Executive Editor