Graham Platner is telling donors to coalesce behind him in the Democrat U.S. primary race from Maine polls show him winning overwhelmingly.
That’s according to Axios.com, which says Platner has deemed himself to have already won against Gov. Janet Mills.
The self-described oyster farmer is telling party leaders the primary “is all but over,” reports Holly Otterbein, a senior political reporter.
“Platner’s team told donors and allies that he is pivoting to focus more on the general election and polls show him leading Mills by double digits,” according to a tweet by Politics & Poll Tracker, quoting a memo reportedly seen first by Axios.
The report comes a full two months ahead of the primary election set for June 9.
A Mills campaign spokesperson Monday insisted Republicans would prefer Platner over the retiring governor – and suggests she has no intention of quitting the race, according to Politics & Poll.
“Republicans are foaming at the mouth to run against Graham Platner,” the Mills campaign said. “Plenty of people have tried to count Janet Mills out in her career, and they’ve been wrong every time.”
Axios is calling the contest to take on Republican fice-term Sen. Susan Collins “one of the messiest primaries in the country, exposing rifts in the party over age, gender and ideology.”
The report from Axios that Platner has declared victory comes amid two difficult days for Mills.
First she faced a new airing on X of a videotaped hostile crowd of Democrats from Hancock County lambastung her on, among another things, her policies toward Native Americans, the population that originally settled much of Maine.
At one point under fire from the Hancock crowd late last month and now resurfacing Mills interrupts one voter’s question mid-sentence saying, “I’ve gotten shit done.”
The two-term-limited governor also suffered a dust up this week over whether she cancelled a planned April 11 debate appearance.
Mills insisted she’d never said she would be there while the moderator for the event claimed otherwise.
The organizer Democrats in Sagadahoc County decided to try to paper over the dispute by blaming it on “confusion,” though they never said who’s confused.
Not that Platner hasn’t suffered his own slings and arrows of late.
Just days ago Washington Free Beacon unearthed a Reddit post quoting Platner describing himself as so “crudely atheist” that he derided Jesus Christ as a “zombie” and the Virgin Mary as “a skank ”
But that’s on top of his now-infamous Nazi tattoo, saying sexual assault against women is in name only, that cops are bastards, etc.
Yet polls show as Platner suggests – he’s 30 points ahead of Mills.
So he can say or do the most offensive things and it just seems to endear him all the more to his primary key demographic – women old enough to be his mother.
Mills, a lifetime politician roughly twice Platner’s age, seemingly isn’t getting the benefit of the doubt against the bearded “oyster farmer” who older women see as an adorable, irresistible misfit simply needing a big hug.
Whether or not Mills actually pulled out of a debate or, by her own claim wasn’t scheduled to attend, is immaterial.
The fact that such a silly, minor point can get so much media attention says all there is to say about the state of who’s got the charisma to brush off controversy.
In the old days it was known as the Teflon factor.
Voters will actually sink that low?
Does he expect all his supporters to get Nazi tattoos, too, or do they already have them?