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Photo: Greta Rybus/The New York Times/Redux

It’s unsurprising that the contest to find a 2026 candidate to oppose Maine’s Republican U.S. senator, Susan Collins, has aroused a lot of national interest among Democrats. She is, after all, the only GOP Senate incumbent running for reelection in a state carried by Kamala Harris last year (or so it appears; Collins is raising money but hasn’t actually announced yet). There’s also a sense among Maine Democrats that their last Collins opponent, former state-legislative leader Sara Gideon, blew a clear opportunity to oust the veteran senator in 2020.

This week, Maine’s term-limited governor, Janet Mills, announced her candidacy, setting the stage for a lively and potentially divisive 2026 Democratic Senate primary. The arguments over her bid reflect many of the disputes going on nationally among Democrats over the future of the party, particularly the contrasts many have drawn between Mills and her most prominent rival, the populist/progressive oyster farmer Graham Platner. (There are other Democratic candidates, notably former congressional staffer Jordan Wood, but Platner has the buzz, the endorsements, and growing financial support.) Here’s how Maine’s Democratic Senate primary is shaping up to be a microcosm of national-party conflicts.

The age issue

It’s no secret that a lot of Democrats believe Joe Biden’s decision to pursue, and then abandon, a reelection campaign after turning 80 opened the door to Donald Trump’s infinitely regrettable return to power. Some of these same Democrats believe Chuck Schumer’s prominent position in today’s national Democratic Party similarly reflects a clueless gerontocracy that needs to get out of the way. Unsurprisingly, the relentless effort by the 74-year-old Schumer to convince the 77-year-old Mills to join him in the Senate has raised a lot of hackles.

By contrast, Graham Platner is 40. If Mills is the Democratic nominee, Susan Collins, who has been in the Senate since 1997, can present herself as the “youth candidate.” (She’s currently 72.) Much as was the case with Biden before his withdrawal from the 2024 contest, there will be a lot of attention focused on Mills’s level of vigor and mental acuity, particularly during a primary battle with the very vigorous Platner.

The Establishment versus an outsider

From a résumé point of view, Janet Mills is the epitome of a political lifer. The daughter of a local Republican power broker, she entered public office as a prosecutor in 1976 when Gerald Ford was president. She won her first election (as district attorney) in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president. Her first bid for federal office (a run for Congress) failed in 1994, when Bill Clinton was a first-term president. Altogether, she’s spent 38 years working in state and local government.

Graham Platner has a résumé rich with public employment too, but it’s very different from that of Mills: He served eight years in the U.S. military, including four tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq; has been the harbormaster in his small Maine home town; and also chaired the planning board there too. He’s never run for public office. And Platner oozes working-class authenticity as an oysterman who sports tattoos and a gruff no-nonsense manner along with a streak of rebelliousness. He is often compared to the pre-senatorial John Fetterman, which is both a compliment and a cautionary note.

The stereotypes evoked by Mills and Platner are oversimplified, of course. For all the conventionality of her résumé, Mills was repeatedly a glass-ceiling breaker; she was the first woman to serve as a criminal prosecutor in Maine and the first female district attorney in New England. She subsequently became Maine’s first female governor. Mills was a co-founder in 1978 of the Maine Women’s Lobby. And even before that, she showed she wasn’t wedded to traditional expectations by leaving Maine for San Francisco during the Summer of Love and later backpacking through Europe, where she became fluent in French.

As for Platner, he wasn’t an entirely spontaneous farmer turned politician. He was recruited for the Senate race by several Maine unions.

The populist/progressive versus the (relative) centrist

To the Democrats who believe the national party needs to execute a sharp left turn — especially on economic issues — to recapture votes lost to Trump and to indifference, Platner is right out of central casting. His persona aside, he is a big fan of Bernie Sanders (who has in turn endorsed his Senate candidacy), and happily echoes the Sanders “people versus the oligarchs” framing of the fault lines between Democrats and Trump’s GOP. He also echoes a more subtle populist strategy of downplaying cultural issues without explicitly repudiating progressive stances, as reflected in an interview conducted by my colleague Sarah Jones:

I think you focus specifically on the things that unite pretty much all working people in the United States. Health care, housing, child care, a feeling that they have watched immense amounts of money get spent on horrific foreign wars while they’ve gotten none of the things they need. Talk about those things. People respond to the material conditions that are their lives….

You don’t have to run away from your ideals. You don’t have to sell anybody out. You don’t have to say that you believe something you don’t or that you don’t believe something that you do. What you have to do is engage people with the reality they know to be true, which is that they live in a society that is not built for them at all.

Mills actually has a fairly progressive record, though in the context of having to serve in state government in a place where bipartisan cooperation is essential. She has been especially outspoken on some of the cultural issues “populists” prefer not to emphasize, including abortion rights and, most recently, transgender rights. And her feud with Trump on that issue, along with earlier battles against her predecessor as governor (and 2022 opponent), the hyperreactionary Paul LePage, shows she’s willing to fight the GOP. For now, though, her recruitment by Schumer and other national-party leaders brands her as the presumptive “centrist” in a contest with a very left-bent challenger.

Platner has already run an ad implicitly criticizing Mills as a politician whose time has come and gone. If the Democratic primary gets too heated, Susan Collins could benefit, though she has her own problems balancing her influence in an increasingly Trump-dominated Senate Republican conference with Maine political preferences. Along with LePage’s challenge to Democratic congressman Jared Golden (probably the Trump-friendliest Democrat in Congress with the possible exception of the aforementioned Fetterman), Maine will get more than its share of attention as the midterm battle grows near.

Democratic Divisions Loom in Fight to Take on Susan Collins

Democratic Divisions Loom in Fight to Take on Susan Collins