Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.
The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.
Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.
Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’s endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’s establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.
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