Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Democrat Graham Platner are showcasing their divergent paths in Maine’s battleground Senate race in the aftermath of Gov. Janet Mills’s (D-ME) abrupt departure.
Collins and Platner are dishing out their first ads of the general election campaign, which could determine control of the Senate for the last two years of President Donald Trump’s term. The 60-second spots couldn’t be more different.
Collins, a centrist Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, presents her nearly three-decade, five-term Senate career as results-driven. In her new ad, Collins features the federal tax dollars she’s brought back to Maine with the rebuilding of a collapsed pier vital to an East Coast town’s waterfront economy. The one-minute spot makes no reference or mention of Collins until nearly the 30-second mark.
The spot “speaks directly to one of the most pressing issues facing Maine families today: affordability,” the Collins campaign says.
Platner, the combat veteran and oyster farmer, chooses the resistance route. His one-minute ad resembles the style of a populist conservative vowing to run the GOP establishment out of Washington but with the rhetoric of a progressive insurgent taking on Collins’s “performative politics.” He vows that “Susan Collins’s charade is over.”
The Platner campaign says the ad “fixes the campaign’s messaging squarely on the senator he is running to defeat.” And, hitting at longtime criticism from Democrats that Collins often expresses concern about President Donald Trump or fellow Republicans before ultimately siding with them on policy, the campaign referenced “Collins’s signature furrowed-brow concern — the votes that come down the wrong way, the statements that change nothing.”
“This could not lay out more of a contrast, which I think plays in Graham Platner’s favor,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who now chairs Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. “He’s tapping into anger. She is tapping into what is, or remains of, her strength, which is, ‘I’ve served this community for a long time. I’ve brought back resources.’”
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National Democrats have extended a reluctant embrace of Platner in the wake of Mills clearing the way for him to scoop up the nomination next month. The establishment-aligned governor was among Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) blue-chip recruits that he envisioned leading the party back to the majority in November. But now, Schumer and the party’s campaign arm are prepared to “work with” Platner to defeat Collins in pursuit of their “North Star,” which is “winning a Democratic Senate majority.”
Collins makes no reference to Platner in her ad. Instead, her campaign says her efforts to help rebuild the Eastport Breakwater pier, the deepest natural seaport in the continental U.S., after its 2014 collapse is part of her mantra to run “on a strong record of delivering real results.”