Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of Maine’s Senate race, and the move quickly reshaped the contest around Graham Platner Susan Collins. What had been a proxy fight between Democratic wings in the June primary is now coalescing around Platner, the presumptive nominee, after months in which Mills tried and failed to overtake him.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had backed Mills, as did EMILY’s List, but Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand said they would work with Platner to defeat Collins. The shift landed after Platner had been drawing huge crowds since August and spending the late summer and early fall of 2025 criss-crossing Maine for town halls and other events, a pace that helped him stay ahead in the polls while Mills never caught up.
Platner’s rise also exposed the split inside the party. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego and Martin Heinrich backed him early, while the Democratic Party’s centrist wing had lined up behind Mills. With Mills out, that divide has narrowed for now, leaving Platner as the candidate Democrats are preparing to rally behind in a race that has become one of the clearest tests of where the party’s energy is centered.
The context for the withdrawal is not hard to see. Mills had been the choice of the party establishment, but her campaign stopped ad spending after attacks on Platner over his past controversies failed to gain traction. Platner faced scrutiny over a Nazi-related tattoo he got during his time in the Marines and the resurfacing of old, controversial Reddit posts, yet the criticism did not stop his momentum. Maine Democrats were already choosing between Platner and Mills in the June primary, and that contest had become more than a local nomination fight.
The race has also sat inside a wider intraparty struggle that was already visible before Mills left. In mid-April, Mills suggested she would have voted against a Senate bill restricting U.S. aid for 1,000 pound bombs and armored bulldozers, and last week she vetoed a data center moratorium bill backed by the Maine Democratic base. Those moves underscored why some Democrats saw her as their safer nominee and why others did not. For now, Schumer and Gillibrand have answered the question raised by Mills’s exit: the party is moving behind Platner, and its immediate goal is defeating Collins.