Pine Tree State Polls are rarely as interesting as the most recent one. As the current occupant of the Blaine House is gobsmacked with the uncomfortable truth that Chuck Schumer lied to her, oysterman and political neophyte Graham Platner’s commanding lead among Democrats for the nomination to take on incumbent Senator Susan Collins next year suggests the old tricks just don’t work anymore.
Perhaps the only way left for Governor Janet Mills (D) to re-boot her campaign by projecting vigor and fresh thinking would be to – Titan Cronus style – eat Hannah Pingree whole, but that would probably not only fail to do the trick, it would also upset her affluent mother First District U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), with whom Mills is quite tight. In other words, even the most desperate measures are now off the table.
A quick recap for anyone who’s been living under a rock for the last week:
On October 14, one day after “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”, Mills – who has denied Maine’s Native Americans tribal sovereignty – announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Within 24 hours, a torrent of opposition research about old Reddit posts by Platner, who’d been in the race nearly two months by then, hit the streets.
These came to us courtesy of CNN, and included such unsavories as Platner calling himself a communist, saying unpleasant things about police officers, wondering why black people don’t tip, suggesting all rural whites are stupid and racist, and appearing to minimize blame for those who commit rape in the military. Quite a foul stew, really, surely it would knock the wise-ass kid out of the running.
But it didn’t. Unlike a Bill Clinton or an Anthony (Carlos Danger) Weiner, Platner apologized for his errant postings and said they do not reflect his evolved thinking. The UNH poll that gives him the support of 58 percent of Democrats was still in the field then, so its findings take this salvo into account.
Then came the Totenkopf-looking tattoo imbroglio, suggesting Platner might have Nazi sympathies. As he told bro-podcaster Tommy Vietor (who himself had paraded around Georgetown bars topless back when his old boss Barack Obama was king), the supposition that he could be both a communist and a fascist was kind of amusing. After a day’s Sturm und Drang, he had the skull and cross-bones morphed into some sort of warlock-inspired wolf (though some on X joked it still looked like Hitler’s German shepard, Blondi).
In other words, Platner weathered that about the same as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth survived the controversy about one of his tattoos looking Nazi-esque, even though it wasn’t.
Then our own Steve Robinson broke the story about Platner’s having trained Antifa-like leftists extremists on how to use firearms back in the COVID days. While Mills and her odd henchman and now gubernatorial candidate in his own right Dr. Nirav Shah might point out this was a potential violation of the lockdown order of the day, it did at least involve guns – and remind of the combat vet’s expertise in handling them, even if he was training some militant weirdos.
While the tattoo and the leftist militia training scandals broke only after the Pine Tree State poll was in the field, my bet is neither will move the needle much either. In fact, the same night the tattoo story broke, Platner asked a crowd of 600 in Ogunquit if they wanted Washington, DC to pick their candidates for them. And the gentle people of Ogunquit shouted they did not.
Washington, DC is tone deaf when it comes to a blaringly simple message: the American people hate them. Very, very much. That has a lot to do with why Platner is soaring right now — and why not only Mills, but also former chief-of-staff to squinting milk snake Rep. Katie Porter Jordan Wood and nice but forgettable David Costello are not.
Unless the smart folks on Chuck’s team have some video of Platner sodomizing an illegal alien, they’re fresh out of tricks. That means for the next eight months, Platner is essentially running against himself.
Mills’ own message about “standing up to bullies” didn’t totally hold up. First of all, her Pyrrhic stand against President Donald Trump about the rights of biological males to play on female school sports teams is neither wholly popular nor a closed case. And secondly, Paul LePage – whom she trounced in her 2022 re-election – now appears, for the moment anyhow, poised to win Maine’s Second Congressional District seat.
Oh yeah, third term incumbent Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) looks like he’s losing.
Washington doesn’t just look broken, it actually is. That’s bad news for everyone who draws a paycheck from The Swamp, including Collins. Her Achilles heel is not her age, her party affiliation nor the various people she’s disappointed over the years, but rather her genuine belief that Washington, and government, are capable of doing good things. There she is wrong. Everyone in Washington, DC belongs in prison, full-stop.
If she doesn’t learn how to run against Washington, whilst being one of the most powerful people in the city, she just might lose. To reverse those odds, she must start delivering what Platner can’t: scalps.
Past UNH polls showed Mills to have decent job performance ratings, but these are not the same as a ballot test that pits her against someone else. Fearful that years of state-financed media would lull Maine Democrats into falling into line behind her, I’m happily surprised by this latest poll. Maybe the folks who tell you that your porridge is cold and you’ll have to eat it anyway aren’t so popular after all.
That’s kind of refreshing, actually.
