Two-term Maine Democrat Governor Janet Mills, 77, formally announced her 2026 Senate bid to unseat the incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) on Tuesday, drawing favorable headlines from media outlets, despite a rocky start that could presage future dysfunction in the campaign.
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“I’ve never backed down from a bully and I never will. Donald Trump is ripping away health care from millions, driving up costs, and giving corporate CEOs massive tax cuts. And Susan Collins is helping him. My life’s work has prepared me for this fight—and I’m ready to win,” said Gov. Mills in a Tuesday morning post announcing her candidacy.
“I’m running for Senate to defeat Susan Collins and give Maine people someone who will stand up for them in Washington,” she added.
Tuesday’s announcement video was not the first released by her campaign; after staffers apparently accidentally posted and then deleted a fundraising video on Friday, which confirmed her run with a clip of Mills herself asking for donations.
“Folks, do you want Democrats to take back the senate? Well, I’m Governor Janet Mills, and I’m running to flip Maine’s senate seat blue. Susan Collins has sold out Maine and bowed down to special interests and to Donald Trump, but that ends now,” she said in the now-deleted video.
The governor’s announcement came after Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) encouraged her to run and followed months of speculation that she was preparing her announcement.
Before Mills faces off against Sen. Collins, who has historically run and won elections on a moderate platform, she will compete against members of her own party, including Graham Platner, who has drawn significant media attention and endorsements as a radical young left-wing activist.
[RELATED: Maine’s Far Left Senate Candidate Accuses Susan Collins of Killing His Friends…]
Following Mills’ announcement, multiple Maine outlets published consistently positive reports on the governor’s Senate bid.
“Thinking about her political future, Gov. Janet Mills saw two choices. Retire quietly from a long career of public service that included decades as a prosecutor and attorney general before twice being elected governor. Or stay in the fight,” said the Portland Press Herald in an article.
In response to her Senate bid, the Bangor Daily News published an article emphasizing Mills’ attempts to portray herself as a strong opponent of President Donald Trump. The governor’s communications director is a former BDN staffer, and her administration has paid a company aligned with the newspaper over $2 million during her time in office.
As an apparent headline feature to her candidacy, Mills has repeatedly called attention to her contentious February interaction with the president when she said she would see him in court after she refused to remove trans-identifying males from girls’ sports in schools across the state.
Both the Bangor and Portland papers, along with national outlets such as ABC, failed to address the extremely rocky start to her campaign.
The deleted fundraiser video also came along with a posted, then deleted, page for her campaign on ActBlue, a left-wing platform for small political donations.
That wasn’t the only error Mills’ campaign made in the lead-up to the announcement.
Just days after the initial mistake and one day before the announcement, The Maine Wire received leaked campaign materials confirming that she would announce her run on Tuesday.
Along with the significant challenges she faces in going up against much younger and more vivacious Democratic primary opponents, as well as the five-term incumbent Collins, who has a long history of defeating Democrats, Mills also apparently needs to contend with the bumbling presumptuousness of her own campaign staff, some political observers in the state have noted.
