“We do have a champion in Susan Collins" - #NeverPlatner Mills Partisans Hint at PUMA-Style Revolt
A bit of kerfuffle erupted on social media this week over a couple of news stories about the U.S. Senate primary. The Maine Morning Star quoted some prominent Democrats who say they will not support Graham Platner if he is the nominee in the U.S. Senate primary, a result that is all but guaranteed given that his main opponent Janet Mills suspended her campaign in late April. Former State Senator Lynn Bromley of South Portland, who appeared in one of Governor Mills’ anti-Platner ads, was one of them.
“I was never going to vote for Platner,” said Bromley. “My objection, initially, was sort of ‘Who do you think you are? You have no electoral experience,” Bromley said of Platner. She saw his bid as nothing new, the Morning Star reported — “the younger, inexperienced man getting the job over the experienced woman.”
After news broke that Graham downplayed sexual assault in two Reddit posts when he was in his 20s, Bromley felt vindicated. She compared Platner to Trump, despite the fact that Platner has apologized for his comments and tried to make amends, while Trump has been found liable for sexual assaulting women and has never apologized.
“What happened on top of that was this man has no integrity… and, if we want to wonder about how important that is, just look at who we’ve got for president,” she said.
Rep. Cassie Julia (D-Waterville) wrote a long rambling post comparing calls for Mills supporters to back the likely nominee to Nazi propaganda that caused the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany.
“I recognize these tactics,” Julia wrote on Facebook. “They are propaganda. They are what was used over and over to divide and splinter and cede control of the Republican Party over to MAGA.” She added that Platner’s tattoo and his work as a security guard for a defense contractor in Afghanistan will lose him support from independent voters, an assertion contradicted by polls that show him winning more independents than Mills and beating Collins in a head-to-head contest.
“And anyone who thinks a guy who had a Nazi tattoo for 20 years and a wealthy AF (as fuck) family who worked as a contractor for a Blackwater subsidiary in the Afghani war (and other things you might not care about but non-blue voters for fuck sure will) is going to get enough ‘across the aisle votes’ to beat a billionaire backed monolith like Susan Collins…,” Julia added.
Rep. Holly Eaton (D-Deer Isle) told the Maine Morning Star that she is undecided about whether she will back Platner in the primary.
“I don’t feel like there’s enough of a shelf life on those comments to forgive them,” said Eaton of Platner’s past, “and I’m a pretty forgiving person, but unless you lead with those, with that history, then I think that there’s a real problem there.”
Eaton also questioned Platner’s qualifications to serve given his lack of political experience. She told the Morning Star that fishing regulations were an important issue in her district and praised Susan Collins her work on fishing issues.
“We do have a champion in Susan Collins,” she said. “That is something that is at the crux of what’s important for some of the voters in my district.”
Responding to Eaton’s comments, Rep Sue Salisbury (D-Westbrook) said she is also undecided on whether to support Graham if and when is the nominee.
“My next step is to figure out the best way forward,” she said. “I still feel like [Mills] is the best candidate. I have not liked Platner since day one, before the tattoo and all of the incendiary statements. I think his lack of experience is impactful. We don’t have time for him to have this kind of on the job training.”
Former State Senator and Mills supporter Barbara Trafton also told the BDN that she wasn’t sure if she would support Platner if he is the nominee.
“I looked at him as a candidate and didn’t like … his lack of experience and demonstration of a kind of character that I’ve always looked for in a Maine U.S. senator,” she said. “We’ll see where we are after the primary.”
There’s also a bit of resentment from some quarters that Platner would not be forgiven so easily for those Reddit comments if he was a woman.
“I think the difference for me is that if this WERE me, there would be no way I would be excused and my career would be ended,” wrote former Democratic State Rep. Lizzie Dickerson in response to a female Platner supporter on Facebook. “Because I am not a white man, but instead a single mom in my 60s, there’s no way I would get a pass like this candidate gets. I think that’s wrong.”
Frustrated with Eaton’s comments, Rep. Valli Geiger (D-Rockland), a staunch Platner supporter, drew on her experiences as a VA nurse treating veterans with severe PTSD to defend Platner. She reminded Democratic voters about the stakes in this election given Collins’ role in backing Trump’s consolidation of power and attacks on our democracy.
Governor Janet Mills’ Press Secretary Ben Goodman, a supporter of the pro-Israeli lobbying group (AIPAC), has been tweeting up a storm bashing Platner and retweeting anti-Muslim influencers like Ryan James Girdusky, who was fired by CNN for making a violent, racist joke about Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan.
Although Mills suspended her campaign last month, she has not formally withdrawn from the race and is still on the ballot. This has led to some speculation that she might be waiting for some massive scandal to break that would knock Platner out of the race. That’s probably wishful thinking on the part of some of Mills’ most passionate supporters. Some of them are now backing Democrat David Costello, who is running for the Senate a second time after receiving a little less than 11 percent in his election against Sen. Angus King in 2024. Costello insists he’s still a viable candidate and is staying in the race despite polling in the single digits. Anti-Graham Democrats, especially out-of-staters on the social media platform BlueSky, have also been pushing for write-in candidate Andrea LaFlamme, whose claim to fame is writing in chalk outside Susan Collins’ house in Bangor. Most of these people are not strong Costello or LaFlamme supporters. They just dislike Platner and their support for other candidates basically amounts to a protest vote.
Meanwhile, Republicans are out for blood knowing that Platner will likely be the nominee and have been desperately throwing anything at the wall in hopes that something will stick. The latest “scandal” peddled by the right-wing is that Graham’s wealthy business partner Robert Cushman III went to an Ivy League school, drinks “foraged spring water with Redmond sea salt” and reminisced about a “liminal seafood experience” he had in Maine when he was “about four.” This has led Maine Wire Editor-in-Chief Steve Robinson - whom I have been assured is a very serious journalist - to speculate whether Platner and Cushman are gay lovers. In other words, the right has nothing to stop Platner’s momentum, at least for the moment. I find it pretty funny that right-wingers are mocking the woowoo health routines of Graham’s business partner, given that these are the same guys who pioneered testicle tanning as a method to ward off the gay woke mind virus.
CHUDs will be CHUDS, but it’s very disappointing to see Mills supporters still bashing Platner relentlessly and doing Collins’ dirty work for her, knowing full well he will likely be the nominee. Unfortunately, this primary fight is all too familiar for those of us who still have the scars from the bruising Democratic primaries of 2008 and 2016. Gender, class and generational dynamics played heavily into the fights between Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. The Maine Senate primary is very similar to the 2008 and 2016 primaries in that we once again have a centrist female candidate vying against a more (at least ostensibly) progressive male candidate (Obama appeared to be progressive, but governed like a centrist). In 2008, embittered Hillary supporters formed a group called People United Means Action, also known as “Party Unity My Ass,” to revolt against Obama’s nomination. The PUMAs backed John McCain because his running mate Sarah Palin was a card carrying female. Fortunately, their efforts to split the Democratic vote didn’t work.
Then in 2016 it was Bernie supporters who were left embittered and frustrated when their candidate lost. There were a lot of misleading conspiracies that the Democratic National Committee rigged the election. There were also some legitimate grievances that the Democratic establishment worked against Sanders, but I don’t think it made the difference in the outcome of the vote. I think most “normie” Dems believed that Bernie couldn’t beat Trump, even if they may have supported his policies.
Unfortunately, some loud and obnoxious online voices on the left came up with "#BernieOrBust,” an online campaign urging people to write in Bernie or vote for third party candidates. During that election we were constantly scolded to vote “Blue No Matter who,” and for the most part we did vote for Hillary Sure, there were some cranks like my neighbor, who was a Bernie delegate and then went on to vote for Trump. He has been a staunch Trump support ever since and had a big Trump flag out in front of his house until his wife pulled it down and hid it. I don’t think he would have voted Democrat if Bernie wasn’t running.
Economic populism attracts a broader cross section of voters, some of whom don’t have the most enlightened views on social issues. But that’s ok as long as populist candidates don’t move right on issues like abortion, racial equality, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights to attract those voters. Liberal politics without a class dimension might appeal to some of the wealthiest, most enlightened and educated among us, but it typically offers very little to materially improve the lives of working-class people. And you can’t win elections with just college educated voters.
I work with a lot of conservative working-class guys in my day job and I have witnessed first-hand how they can be won over on economic issues. I have seen how life-long Republican union members have changed their positions simply by being engaged in the political process and seeing which side the Republicans are when it comes to workers’ rights and economic justice. Unfortunately, a lot of elite Democrats have a deep suspicion of economic populism because they worry they won’t be able to control the unwashed masses if they take control of the party. They associate Trump with populism and not the 19th century movement of farmers and industrial workers who fought for economic liberation and sought to bring African Americans into the movement at a very racist, reactionary time in American history.
Elite liberal academics like Richard Hofstadter were very critical of the Populists, writing in the 1950s that they were driven by nostalgia, bigotry, provincialism, anti-intellectualism and a “paranoid style” of conspiratorial thinking. The author Thomas Frank has tried to redeem the populists and separate them from commonly held notions that populism is innately right-wing. Frank has pointed out that if the Democrats don’t embrace some form of economic populism, the right will.
“Reduced to its essentials, populism is America’s way of expressing class antagonism,” Frank wrote in the Guardian. “It is a tradition of rhetorical protest that extends from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders and on to the guy who just cooked your hamburger or filled your gas tank. It is powerful stuff. But protest isn’t the property of any particular party. Anyone can be the voice of those who work, and when one party renounces its claim the other can easily pick it up.”
Graham Platner comes from that same tradition and a hell of lot of Maine voters believe these desperate times call for it. I was somewhat encouraged to read that Peggy Schaffer, a former Maine Democratic Party Vice Chair and one of the women featured in the Mills’ anti-Platner ad, told the BDN that “she’ll vote for Platner if he’s the nominee, but she’ll be holding her nose ‘like eating peas.’”
“He’s better than Susan Collins, I hope,” she said, adding that many Democrats “are still marinating on it.”
On social media, she called out “white men” for “tell[ing] us how to vote.”
Speaking of white people, for all accusations by white Mills’ supporters that Platner and his supporters are racist, he has a much more diverse coalition than Mills. A number of them are prominent Black women who have endured endless attacks from the online right for the crime of existing and making their voices heard. Somali-American leaders like Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-So. Portland) and former Lewiston City Councilor Safiya Khalid have been outspoken Platner supporters, appearing and speaking at his rallies.
Khalid took to Facebook on Monday to plead with Mills supporters to support the likely nominee.
Last week, a Black female Platner supporter was inundated with hundreds of hostile comments from racist Trump supporters and a couple of white liberals for expressing her support for Platner in a video on her private Facebook page. After I called out one of the most racist commenters and urged people not to patronize his business, he called the cops on me and said he planned to sue me for defamation. I still have yet to hear from the Westbrook Police or his lawyer as he promised. The good news is Senator Joe Baldacci offered to represent me in court in the unlikely event that the man drops several thousand dollars on a defamation suit.
Writer and anti-racist educator Shay Stewart Bouley has repeatedly called out white liberals who claim to support people of color, but can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum to support the most marginalized members of our society. She is currently working on an essay to respond to this #NeverPlatner business.
In the end, I don’t think it will matter if a few Democratic legislators and Mills supporters sit out the general election or vote for Collins. A recent national Republican poll found Platner down by 11 points in the more conservative Second Congressional District. That’s only 1 point better than how Trump did there in 2024 when he lost the state by 7 percent. Collins won CD2 by 24 points in 2020, so a 13 point swing to the left in the district is really bad news for her.
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So establishment democrats would rather have collins re-elected than support the democratic nominee. Susan-when I’m talking I’m lying-Collins is a national disgrace and these people would rather see her re-elected. That’s all I have to know about them. No thanks.
For over 50 years I’ve watched the niceness contingent of women like Bromley, Julia and Trafton gut what was once a Democratic Party—which is why I and so many abandoned this MIA/DOA organization to be “independent.” Maybe these dear ladies would like to resurrect Mike Michaud or Shanna Bellows or other ostriches (head in the sand) of niceness so the nasties behind Collins win yet again. Wake up and smell the mud wrestling, you dainty idiots. Oddballs like Graham are capturing the imagination of voters because he’s learned from his experiences, and you haven’t come up with a viable candidate since George Mitchell resigned. You should be thanking him for covering your stupidity which has already cost us dearly.