Transcript: Why Graham Platner Trounced Janet Mills in Maine |
Transcript: Why Graham Platner Trounced Janet Mills in Maine
Maine reporter Alex Seitz-Wald says Janet Mills ran such a bad campaign that Graham Platner was almost destined to win.
This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 30 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. We have some breaking news—this is unusual today. Our guest is Alex Seitz-Wald. He’s the deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, which is a paper in Maine, and he was already scheduled as a guest.
We were going to talk about Janet Mills versus Graham Platner. But it appears that that is no longer a race going on—Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, has decided to suspend her campaign, her primary campaign, conceding that presumably Graham Platner is leading and likely to win. So Alex wrote the story for the Midcoast Villager, and he’s here to join us now. Alex, welcome.
Alex Seitz-Wald: Hey, Perry. Thanks for having me. Yeah, the news gods must have known that we had this scheduled, and dropped it right before we got online.
Bacon: So this happened about an hour ago, around nine o’clock Eastern Time. From what I can see, Mills has made some comments—I’m not sure if it’s a statement or an interview—but she’s saying that she basically has run out of money, or doesn’t have enough money.
I’ll be blunt—does she not have enough money, or is she going to lose and ducking that? The primary is on June 9, and she’s been down in the polls.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, this is a massive, totally unexpected development. I’ve been following this race closely—I’m shocked, honestly, by this. And I think the money is real. It’s a reminder that in politics you don’t drop out because you have bad press or bad polling—unless you have extremely bad press, like Eric Swalwell. It’s when the money runs out.
I don’t know that she was totally dry, but she had been outspent two to one and outraised two to one by Graham Platner. She pulled all of her digital ads last week, which was a big tell that money was tight. She pulled TV ads a little while ago. But the writing has been on the wall for a while.
I just noticed today, when I was driving to drop my daughter off at school—I always look at the yard signs—and I saw one new Janet Mills yard sign, which brought the grand total to three that I am aware of. Meanwhile there are dozens of Graham Platner yard signs. I’ll pass 25, 30 before I see a single Mills one.
The polling has been pretty consistent, showing Platner up by various margins. And then just on Friday—
Bacon: Like 15, more like three—I’ve seen it vary. What’s your sense of it? The numbers have varied a lot.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, primary polling is super tough, super volatile, especially a race like this where everyone thought you’re going to get voters who don’t typically vote. And the way you do primary polling is you screen out people who typically vote in primaries, but a race like this is going to bring in new voters. How many new voters?
So I just kind of look at the direction or the consensus, and I can’t really say how big Platner’s lead is, but when you have nine or 10 polls in a row that show an outside-the-margin lead, that tells you something. But then there was also—
Bacon: In other words, you think he was ahead and likely to win. He was the favorite, for sure, based on the polling.
Seitz-Wald: Yes, absolutely. And he was definitely a favorite based on the polling. He was the favorite based on fundraising. He was the favorite based on the enthusiasm of who turns out—just consistently getting these massive crowds at events that he’s doing.
She’s done very few public events, but at the handful that she has, there are empty seats. The vibes, so to speak, were not great. And when you don’t have perfect data, you have to look at all these things, including yard signs.
But there was also—and I don’t know if this was the straw that broke the camel’s back—but there was a big development on Friday where Mills vetoed this important bill. There was a first-in-the-nation moratorium on data centers. Maine had really gotten out in front of the country, and Mills vetoed it for an understandable reason—I think a very defensible reason—in that there was this one project that was already underway that this town really wanted.
But still, she put herself on the opposite side of an issue that almost all the Democrats in the legislature supported, and most of the Democrats in the voting base supported, as far as we can tell. And I heard a lot of plugged-in Democrats telling me, “Did she just commit political suicide with that veto on Friday?” So that might have been an inciting incident to get her to make this decision.
Bacon: I guess one view is that maybe she was leaving the race already and just decided to do what she thinks was policy right. And the other view is—’cause she’s—Janet Mills is not a bad politician.
There’s an anti–data center movement across the country, and so in a certain sense she must have known this would not be a popular thing, right?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe she didn’t anticipate how sharp the reaction was. I moderated a forum on Saturday—excuse me—for the Democratic gubernatorial candidates, and that’s also an interesting race that’s been totally overshadowed.
First question I asked was: “If you were governor, would you have signed this moratorium? What do you think of Mills’s veto?” And four out of five of the candidates were very aggressively against Mills’s veto, in favor of the moratorium, and the fifth one kind of dodged and didn’t take a pass on it. So she was getting a ton of flak and not a lot of support for that veto.
Bacon: Let me just—we’re not doing a data center segment, but let me ask. I would assume a state like Maine—Microsoft or Apple is not moving to Maine, probably, no offense to Maine, I’m in Kentucky we are in the same situation—but in a certain sense, data centers probably do bring in some jobs to create them.
But are people in Maine more anti than pro data centers, even though data centers probably do create some jobs? What’s your sense of the sentiment on the ground there?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, it’s pretty broadly anti, and the big argument that I hear is electricity rates. We already have some of the highest electricity rates in the country. It’s cold in Maine—breaking news—and so fuel costs, heating your home, is a huge cost-of-living issue. A lot of people have heat pumps, which run on electricity.
There’s also—it’s a very environmentally conscious, conservation-minded state, and that’s both in the kind of progressive hiking-and-kayaking way and also in the more conservative hunting-and-fishing way. And it’s a very NIMBY, anti-development, keep-things-as-they-are state. So there’s a broad consensus against it.
The biggest argument in favor is more about the tax revenue that it would bring, and that’s also a big issue. And some of it is jobs—but this was going to be put in an old paper mill, and like a lot of parts of the country where industry has gone, there are huge parts of the state that are really struggling economically.
So it would bring some jobs—it would have been like a hundred jobs or so on an ongoing basis. But really what the local town council, the school board, and the local officials were really excited about was the tax revenue, to take a little bit of the burden off of residents. But that wasn’t enough for........