Mills Surrenders: The Boy With the Nazi Tattoo to Face Susan Collins in November

Maine Gov. Janet Mills’ effervescent popularity evaporated in the face of a younger, more energetic male candidate who continues to be dogged by his past sins against the progressive creed.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills ended her bid for the U.S. Senate on Thursday, abandoning a primary campaign that had collapsed under the weight of bad polling, a dry advertising pipeline and a restive Democratic base that never warmed to the candidate Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer personally recruited.

Mills waved the white flag in a X post Thursday morning.

Although Mills had won re-election to the Blaine House just four years ago, her popular support among Maine Democrats appeared to be a mirage, as she was never able to conjure a reliable base. Turnout at her public events resembled what you might expect for a local select-board candidate.

Her exit, six weeks before the June 9 primary, effectively hands the Democratic nomination to Graham Platner, the disabled Marine Corps veteran with an oyster hobby whose insurgent campaign has dominated polling, fundraising and the airwaves since last summer. Platner will now face Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is seeking a sixth term, in what is expected to be one of the most expensive and closely watched Senate races in the country.

Mills, 78, was the only Democrat to win a statewide race in Maine in the past two decades. She entered the contest in October with the full backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a joint fundraising committee with national party leadership, and endorsements that read like a roster of the Democratic establishment.

None of it stuck. Or perhaps it even hurt.

Platner had been leading Mills in every public poll of the race, by margins that grew rather than narrowed after the governor’s mid-March advertising blitz attacked his old Reddit posts and the Nazi tattoo that Platner has lied about multiple times.

By April, internal Democratic polling reviewed by national outlets put Platner ahead by as many as 38 points. Mills’ campaign stopped booking television advertising after April 8, according to data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, and never resumed.

For Schumer, the result is a public defeat in a primary he engineered. The Senate Democratic leader personally lobbied Mills to enter the race, and his campaign apparatus’ close coordination with her bid prompted accusations of favoritism that Platner used to rally a small-dollar donor base and a volunteer operation his campaign says now numbers more than 15,000 active members.

The general election is now joined. Maine’s June 9 primary remains on the ballot, with 2024 nominee David Costello and write-in candidate Andrea LaFlamme, a University of Maine adjunct professor, still in the field. Neither has registered measurable support in public polling.