The Democratic primary race between Gov. Janet Mills and insurgent Graham Platner looks like it’s over, the Maine native told the paper, with Platner moving up to challenge Sen. Susan Collins
Nationhood Lab director Colin Woodard, a Maine native who covered that state’s Congressional delegation and electoral politics for the Portland Press Herald, was interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor for an extensive story on Maine’s US Senate contest, upon which control of the Senate may hinge.
Oyster farmer and Marine Corps combat veteran Graham Platner appears on track for an upset victory over two-term sitting governor Janet Mills in the Democratic primary, Woodard noted, mirroring the contest for New York mayor. Polling, he told the paper, “suggests that the Democratic primary voters have made up their minds and are overwhelmingly going with the radical, doesn’t-have-a-résumé-but-that-doesn’t-matter point of view. That’s a Mamdani-scale kind of seismic shift.”
Platner has never held elected office, had a tattoo of a symbol used by the Nazi SS on his chest for nearly two decades, and has a history of toxic social media posts, including victim blaming comments about women who’d been raped and assertions that rural whites are racist and stupid. But he’s up by about 30 points and is outraising Mills, who progressives are tepid on owing to her blocking of legislation to create a “red flag” law for gun safety, to reform a troubled juvenile detention facility, and to give Maine’s tribes the same sovereignty rights every other federally recognized tribe has.
Mills’s lack of visibility on the campaign trail has also raised questions about her campaign. On Saturday, Woodard moderated a debate in Topsham, Maine before a crowd of 700 that as supposed to include all three Senate candidates. Mills declined to attend the event — planned in October — citing a scheduling conflict.
Woodard was a longtime correspondent of the Monitor, covering Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the early and mid-1990s from bases in Budapest, Zagreb and Sarajevo, serving as its D.C.-based Global Affairs Correspondent in the late 1990s, and writing from the US-Mexico border, Europe, and Atlantic Canada in the early 2000s. The paper, in based in Boston, was once a behemoth in international news coverage, but has atrophied in the 21st century, ceasing daily print publication and seeing monthly web visits fall from 22 million to 1 million between 2011 and 2023.