Democratic Leaders Wanted to Control the Maine Senate Race. Their Pick Just Dropped Out. |
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Democratic Leaders Wanted to Control the Maine Senate Race. Their Pick Just Dropped Out.
Janet Mills dropped out of the Senate race against Graham Platner, despite the establishment’s longtime support for the Maine governor.
The Democratic Party’s pick for Maine senator suspended her candidacy on Thursday. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who entered the race as the establishment pick and assumed favorite, announced her campaign did not have the financial resources to continue.
Mills’s exit less than six weeks before the June primary clears the path for populist candidate Graham Platner, now the presumed nominee, to face off against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the November general election after the party worked to subdue Platner’s campaign. The Democratic Party’s decision to wade into the primary at all had reignited a criticism that the Democratic establishment would stop at nothing to keep progressives out of Congress.
“The Democratic establishment — and especially calcified Senate leadership — is learning in real time that they are wildly out of touch with what Democratic primary voters want,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young progressive candidates for office. “The establishment simply doesn’t have the juice (or the trust) anymore.”
By the time Mills, 78, ended her campaign on Thursday, party leaders had changed their tune on Platner. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Mills early in the race, released a statement with New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the chair of Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, saying that Collins “has never been more vulnerable” and that they would work with Platner to beat her. The DSCC had financially backed Mills’s campaign, forming a joint fundraising committee with her in October. And they stuck by Mills even as her campaign appeared to languish.
Platner, once considered a long-shot candidate marred by controversy, has surged this year in fundraising and polling. In a statement in January, Gillibrand said she was “very........