Last night, Graham Platner won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine.
With 76 percent of the vote counted as of the end of last night, Graham Platner has won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine, defeating Governor Janet Mills — who had technically already suspended her campaign a month ago — by a thumping 72–20 margin. But it’s not as if Mills would have fared much better had she stayed in the race: Platner was leading her 76–10 in the last University of New Hampshire poll taken before she suspended her campaign.
And it is notable that those are pretty much the numbers that Platner got in his primary. Were you perhaps looking for signs that Maine Democrats would be put off by the serial revelations surrounding Platner’s near-completely falsified persona and backstory, or his recent sexting scandal, or his mistreatment of a series of women throughout his life? Look elsewhere. You hear all sorts of apologias from Graham Platner’s defenders — the “that’s in the past, he’s changed” line apparently applies as an excuse up through August of 2025 — but what matters for electoral analysis is that Democratic partisans in Maine have made their peace with Platner. Bet on his name remaining on the ballot all the way to November.
The implications one can draw from all this on a political level are quietly immense — many Democrats aren’t even denying their willingness to abandon their moral pretense for a shot at power — but since Jim Geraghty wrote with such eloquent scorn about that exact topic on Monday, I don’t feel the need to rewrite his piece.
I will only emphasize that these choices are being made by the party’s most committed national members, not Mainers: Platner is a creation of young Ivy League socialists living in Washington, D.C., not an organic expression of his state’s sensibilities. He is the Democratic elite’s condescending idea of what a working-class hero ought to be; when everyone noticed around the time of his campaign’s launch that he seemed like he’d come out of central casting, it’s because he quite literally was cast in this role.
What does that mean for Susan Collins? Nobody can know for sure yet. Among other things, we’re probably not even done learning more about Graham Platner. Ask me what I think after 5 p.m. on July 13.