The two leading contenders for a U.S. Senate seat from Maine suddenly changed their travel plans to exploit their anti-ICE political bases.
Janet Mills, the term-limited governor, and Graham Platner, the scrappy oyster farmer, were both out of the state last week when immigration police arrived to begin arresting 1,400 illegals in the Pine Tree State.
Mills had flown to California on Tuesday for several secret campaign fund-raisers but was forced to cancel one of them to get back home so she could ratchet up the anti-ICE fever in Portland.
Platner, who’s been hanging out in the country of Norway with his wife while they get infertility treatment, flew home Friday to call out what he called the “masked secret police.”
Mills also decried the ICE presence as unnecessary, but that’s after she was blindsided by the agency’s arrival because she was in California.
The governor actually had been trying to keep the wraps on the cross-country fundraising trip, her office telling the press only that Janet was out of state for “a previously scheduled event.”
But that cover story didn’t age well once a national political reporter at Axios got a tip what the “previously scheduled event” really was.
Platner’s been out of pocket with his wife for what the two of them turned into a now-infamous campaign commercial – infertility treatment across the pond – to take advantage of what Mrs. Platner earlier this month called her husband’s “great sperm.”
But once the sperm king realized he had a golden opportunity to exploit ICE’s presence back home in Maine, he quickly put his great seeds on, uh, ice, and hopped aboard a Portland-bound jet.
Susan Collins, the five-term Republican senator whose seat Mills and Platner are vying for, played the ICE controversy safely down the middle, saying in a statement Wednesday that “people who are in this country legally should not be targets of ICE” while also touting that “people who entered illegally are subject to arrest.”
