Meanwhile, Back In The Maine Senate Race

No anchovies, please

Graham Platner continues to build a lead against sitting Maine Gov. Janet Mills in the upcoming Democratic Senate primary. Last week’s Pan Atlantic Research poll had Platner with a seven-point lead over Mills. That is a 17 percent swing toward Platner since PAR’s last poll in December, when Mills was up by 10 percent.

Obviously, a lot has happened since December — months are like decades during a Trump presidency. However, Platner has not only weathered scandals such as “accidental” Nazi tattoos and “accidental” boosting of neo-Nazi social media accounts, but he’s actually thrived. (His ActBlue donations did decrease slightly.)

Platner sat for a lengthy online interview in January with Nate Cornacchia, a retired Green Beret who’s promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories. (He’s suggested that Israel was somehow involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination.) Former Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen — not the interesting one — vented on social media:

If Platner did an interview with someone who spouted racist or misogynistic conspiracy theories Democrats would be falling over themselves calling on him to get out of the race … but because it’s Jews and anti-Semitism he gets a pass

Oppression Olympics are tedious, and Cohen frequently goes for the gold. He willfully ignores that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has platformed racists and misogynists on his own podcast in the name of bipartisan bridge building, and he’s still a likely frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. No one is giving Platner a “pass.” The Democratic Party establishment openly supports Mills.

Chasing The Maine, Texas Senate White Whale

Cohen was especially annoyed that Sen. Ruben Gallego from Arizona endorsed Platner. “Is there any chance Gallego would endorse a candidate who had a history of making racist statements about Hispanics? No chance,” he wrote, answering his own Socratic social media dialogue. “But once again, what we see from Gallego is what we've seen from far too many liberal Democrats: indifference to anti-Semitism.”

The obvious issue with Cohen’s argument is that Platner doesn’t have a history of making antisemitic statements. A more relevant hypothetical is whether Gallego would endorse a candidate who sat for an interview with someone who promoted anti-Latino conspiracy theories. Gallego has endorsed Democrats who have appeared on Bill Maher’s show, and Maher has been accused of making anti-Latino statements. Gallego himself has been on Real Time with Bill Maher, where he stated that liberals should stop saying “Latinx.” (Watch below.)

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Still Too Soon To Tell If Susan Collins Will Face Sitting Maine Governor Or Human Nazi Art Museum

During an interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, Gallego explained why he’d endorsed Platner (and no, it’s not because he’s indifferent to antisemitism).

“I’m picking people that I know can actually win the general election,” Gallego told Miller. “It’s very simple. Janet Mills can’t win the general election. How are you going to send an 80-year-old — we just had a whole referendum on this — an 80-year-old candidate to run and say we need to have that person run against the establishment and this is a change election. It’s that simple.” (Watch below.)

Chuck Schumer, super genius, has repeatedly stated that Mills, who he begged to run, is the best candidate to defeat Susan Collins, a perpetual Senate-election winning machine, because Mills has won statewide office multiple times and is thus more “electable.” The one flaw in Schumer’s brilliant stratagem is that Mills isn’t that popular.

The Pan Atlantic Research poll has Mills with net negative favorability ratings (minus 6) compared to Platner’s plus 12. Collins is at minus 14 so she’d seem ripe for unseating. However, the larger problem is that Maine voters fundamentally aren’t pleased with conditions on the ground — 51 percent of total voters say the state is on the “wrong track.” Only 52 percent of Democrats and just 25 percent of independents think the state is moving in the right direction. Cost of living, high taxes, and healthcare access/affordability are the top issues for Maine voters. Questionable tattoos did not apparently make the list of major concerns.

Mills has served as governor since 2019. She has universal name recognition in the state. These are terrible numbers for her, and it’s unclear how she improves them. Platner is packing town halls through the state, while Mills has been mostly laying low. Maybe she’s biding her time and “toying” with Platner, allowing him to build an insurmountable lead until she feels like springing her trap.

I’m also worried that the majority of Maine voters who think the state is on the “wrong track” are more likely to blame Mills, the sitting governor, rather than Collins, the incumbent senator, who is like the Road Runner of politics.

Democrats who support Mills have every reason to oppose Platner on moral grounds. He’s kind of a mess. However, their argument weakens when they try to frame that opposition as concerns about electability. A repeated warning is that Collins and the GOP are just waiting for Platner to win the nomination and then they’ll hammer him about the Nazi tattoos and all the other weird stuff. That raises the question, though, of why Mills isn’t already doing this. The primary election is in three months. It’s not as if she needs to worry about alienating pro-Nazi tattoo voters in the primary.

Of course, trying to disqualify Platner on personal grounds might seem as if Mills is ignoring what currently matters most to Maine voters. She could focus on his lack of political experience, which obviously limits his ability to deliver for Mainers, but that often isn’t sufficient when voters are in a “vote the bums out” mood.

More than a few Democrats have stated that they couldn’t vote for Platner in the general election, and they’d even go so far as to vote for Collins instead. This is concerning from the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” folks. (If they lived in Maine, I’d be even more concerned.) Platner might have Nazi tattoos but Collins is an actual Nazi enabler, who voted to confirm Kristi Noem and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Collins just voted against the War Powers Act.

I do think Mills would prove a more reliable Democratic senator — depending on whether she can actually beat Collins. We don’t know that much about Platner beyond tattoos and oysters. Mills supporters argue that Platner could get elected and become another John Fetterman, but as annoying as Fetterman is, he’s not as consistently bad as Collins and still caucuses with Democrats (at least as of this writing). So, while I don’t have a vote, I believe Platner is far preferable to Senator Road Runner, despite the soft spot I have for people from Maine named Collins.