One of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) top midterm recruits is fighting to prove she is still a viable Senate candidate in Maine as her primary challenger, oyster farmer Graham Platner, maintains a commanding lead — in both polling and fundraising — despite his political baggage.
Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME), a two-term governor with a centrist reputation, is on paper the sort of challenger national Democrats believe is necessary to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), a five-term senator and the only Republican to hold statewide office in light-blue Maine.
But two months out from a June primary, Mills is trailing in the polls by double digits against Platner, a progressive Democrat who has seemingly overcome a drip of negative headlines focused on offensive comments he posted online roughly a decade ago.
The latest Emerson survey shows Platner 27 points ahead of Mills. Platner also raised three times as much as Mills throughout 2025, $7.8 million to $2.7 million. Mills reported another $2.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, while Platner has yet to release his latest figures.
The dynamic threatens to upend a battle plan Schumer carefully devised at the outset of the campaign cycle, recruiting “tested” candidates in four GOP-held states that Democrats must flip to have a chance of retaking the Senate this fall.
Mills is not a shoo-in to defeat Collins, and polls actually show her faring worse in the general election than Platner. But Schumer actively encouraged her to run on the basis of her winning record as governor and has followed a similar pattern in contesting the other seats.
Schumer recruited former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and ex-Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska. All have won statewide races in their respective states.
In recent days, Mills has swatted away the notion that the primary is over, or that she is dropping out of the race. She released a detailed, 19-page policy platform on Tuesday and reiterated her commitment to five debates with Platner in May.
Polling in Maine, a sparsely populated state of 1.4 million people, is also notoriously imprecise. In 2020, Collins comfortably won a fifth term, despite surveys consistently showing her down as much as 12 points.
“As the only Democrat elected statewide in Maine in the past 20 years, Janet Mills knows how to win tough battles and deliver results — and that’s why she’s the best candidate to beat Susan Collins in November and is running full steam ahead to defeat her,” spokesman Tommy Garcia said in a statement to the Portland Press Herald.
Mills appears to be acknowledging that she is, at this point, an underdog, however, and has struggled to capitalize on Platner’s many controversies.
A month ago, she went negative in campaign advertising, releasing a pair of commercials that highlight Platner’s 2013 Reddit posts blaming rape victims and rehashing a since-covered tattoo of a Nazi symbol Platner had on his chest.
But the attacks have done little to dent Platner’s standing, as he has saturated the airwaves with biographical ads emphasizing his military service and time spent farming oysters in Maine.
At the same time, Platner is attempting to create an air of inevitability about his campaign, putting out a memo last week telling donors and supporters that his team feels “emboldened” by the polling lead — as large as 33 points in recent surveys — and would be focusing more on Collins in the closing weeks of the primary.
The strategy is a marked shift from the early days of his campaign, which Platner spent apologizing for the Reddit posts and blaming them on a period of disillusionment after returning from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. In terms of the skull and crossbones tattoo, he claims that he did not know about its association with Nazi paramilitary police and said he got it after a night of drinking while on leave in Croatia.
The online posts continue to resurface, including one in which he praised urinating on dead Taliban fighters as a display of “dominance,” according to the New York Post.
But his campaign is showing less sensitivity to those reports, and supporters believe that voters are willing to accept his argument that he’s a changed man.
Instead, Platner is seeking to make the contest a referendum on Washington and has presented himself as a gruff, populist outsider who would challenge leadership should he be elected.
He’s called on Schumer to step down as minority leader and has aligned himself with progressive senators who believe the party should not be putting a thumb on the scales in competitive primaries. In addition to recruiting Mills, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has helped her campaign fundraise in the Senate race.
Mills, too, has sought to tap into that anti-establishment sentiment, promising to serve for a single term if elected and swearing off corporate PAC money.
Her chief focus, however, is her perceived electability and has made her campaign about her willingness to “stand up” to President Donald Trump. Spokespeople for the Mills campaign and DSCC did not respond to a request for comment.
Maine is just one battleground where national Democrats have intervened in competitive primaries to elevate a favored candidate. The DSCC hosted an event for state Rep. Josh Turek in February, drawing the ire of progressives backing state Sen. Zach Wahls in Iowa’s Senate race. VoteVets, an outside group that has previously aligned with Democratic leadership, is also supporting Turek.
In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) is viewed as Schumer’s preferred candidate to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) in a three-way Democratic primary, though she has struggled to break away from her competition in polling.
Schumer has an uphill path to recapturing the majority – in addition to winning four GOP seats, he must keep Michigan, Georgia, and New Hampshire in the Democratic column this fall. Working in his favor, however, are Trump’s declining approval ratings due to lingering inflation and a war with Iran that voters broadly oppose.
On the GOP side, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has shown a similar willingness to get involved in primaries, most recently endorsing Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) to succeed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in Oklahoma.
In Texas, perennially discussed as a long-shot state for Democrats, Thune is backing Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who was forced into a costly runoff against Attorney General Ken Paxton last month.
Party leaders generally support their incumbents, viewing them as the strongest candidates to hold a seat, but the race has tested Thune’s alliance with Trump, who is so far declining to support either candidate.
SENATE REPUBLICANS TO BLITZ MIDTERM MAP WITH $300 MILLION IN AD SPENDING
The National Republican Senatorial Committee is planning to spend at least $42 million in Maine backing Collins, part of a more than $300 million commitment for fall advertising. And Collins herself had a larger war chest entering 2026 than both of her Democratic competitors and has previously signaled that she will relitigate Platner’s controversies, should he win the nomination.
In a statement, Collins spokesman Shawn Roderick said she “will be prepared to run a substantive, issues-oriented campaign regardless of who the opponent is.”