Maine's Senate race is the first among equals
Democrats have almost no hope of taking the chamber back in 2026 or 2028 without winning the New England state.
There will be at least a half-dozen competitive Senate races next year, but the one getting the most attention so far is in Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins is seeking a sixth term in the upper chamber. Total spending is likely to exceed $100 million when the spending for all of the candidates, the two major parties, their allied super PACs, and other entities in the primary and general elections is totaled up.
Besides the simple fact that I have closely watched U.S. Senate races since the 1970s, this race was of particular interest to me because, after living in the Washington, D.C., area for just under 50 years, my wife and I moved to the Mid-Coast of Maine in 2021. Prior to our official move, we sequestered ourselves for over eight months in a small vacation place looking out on Casco Bay. It was from that vantage point that I watched Collins’s last Senate race, when she fended off then-state House Speaker Sara Gideon.
Gideon and her allies at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Senate Majority PAC (Senate Democrats’ super PAC), and other groups dramatically outspent Collins, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the Senate Leadership Fund. Yet Collins dismantled Gideon, winning by nearly 9 percentage points, 51 to 42 percent, a margin of 70,422 votes. Impressively, Collins ran 56,875 votes ahead of then-and-now-President Trump, who was losing the state, 53.1 to 44 percent. Gideon pulled 87,849 fewer votes in the state than President Biden.
Many were taken aback by the outcome. What they may not have known is that Maine, like many other states, has notoriously bad public polling. During 2020, every media-, college-, or university-sponsored or -conducted poll showed Gideon far stronger than she actually was; those conducted by top-tier national political polling firms working for one of the two parties generally painted a less dismal race for Collins, showing her either dead even or slightly ahead.
This time around, Democrats both in Maine and around the country have been anxious for an opponent to Collins to emerge. Even before her 2020 reelection campaign, Collins enraged progressives and other Democrats across the country with her 2018 vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as her 2019 vote to acquit Trump in his first impeachment trial. This is why Gideon’s 2020 Senate campaign was so well-funded, despite the fact that she had never won—or even run in!—a race with more than 7,000 total votes cast.
Fast forward to mid-August of this year. National, establishment-oriented Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the DSCC aggressively recruited Maine Gov. Janet Mills for the race. Mills has had a very successful two-term governorship, but was prevented by term limits from running again. She had been noncommittal about running; it’s unclear whether she genuinely had not decided or simply did not want a year-long campaign, but she had indicated that she would decide by November, creating a vacuum.
On Aug. 19, Graham Platner, a 41-year old oyster farmer and Iraq and Afghanistan veteran, started filling that vacuum as he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination with a splashy video that immediately went viral, reportedly drawing 2.5 million views in its first 24 hours. He raised an impressive $3.2 million by the end of the third quarter.
The video effectively summed up the essence of the Platner campaign, seeking to run on both generational change (he’s more than three decades younger than Collins and Mills) and populism, attacking “the oligarchy,” “the billionaires,” and the “politicians” with the goal of giving hardworking Mainers a fair shake.
The unprecedented buzz from Platner’s entry rattled the establishment. Quickly, Mills began sending unmistakable signals that she was, in fact, going to run, eventually announcing her candidacy in her own, more conventional video. The battle was on.
Democratic establishment types remain fully committed to Mills’s candidacy and the conviction that Platner cannot beat Collins. After about two tons of opposition research was dumped on Platner’s head, most campaign vets have come to the conclusion that he has crossed over into the land of the unelectable. Having watched the dismemberment of Gideon’s candidacy with far less material, I tend to agree.
Why was Platner, who had never sought any elective office, running for the Senate and not Hancock county commissioner or any of the half dozen or more offices in between? Generally speaking, someone who has run successfully in big-league campaigns—running the gauntlet of opposition researchers and investigative reporters—is more likely to win than someone who hasn’t even played in the Little League yet.
By my count there are only 10 members of the Senate who had never served in elective office before, and all but maybe one or two had achieved distinction in some other way.
But that certainly isn’t how everyone views it. Democrats around the country, particularly those in the online progressive donor community, have long demonstrated a propensity to donate to previously unknown novice candidates who have interesting, even compelling personal narratives, or perhaps are simply running against a Republican despised by the Democratic Party’s liberal online donors. There is nothing wrong with that—except for the fact that they usually lose. The inimitable and always wise Jonathan Martin wrote a terrific piece on this phenomenon in a Politico Magazine cover story last week.
Most campaign pros see the stakes as far too high for Democrats to take the risk. The reason this will be a nine-figure race is that it is nearly impossible for Democrats to recapture the majority in the upper chamber in either 2026 or 2028 without winning Maine. There are only four Republican-held seats in purple states: the seat in North Carolina opening up next year by the retirement of Sen. Thom Tillis; a pair of seats up in 2028 in North Carolina (held by Sen. Ted Budd) and Wisconsin (held by Sen. Ron Johnson); and Sen. Dave McCormick’s seat in Pennsylvania, which isn’t even up until 2030. To put it very bluntly, Democrats have no margin for error; taking a risk on a rookie candidate in a Senate equivalent of an NFL Super Bowl game is quite a risk.
This race is likely to come down to a contest between two narratives. The Collins side will argue that she has delivered for Maine, and now, as the Appropriations Committee chair, she can do so more than ever.
The Mills narrative would be that she has been a successful governor, a tested leader, and has demonstrated that she can and will stand up to Donald Trump, something that Collins hasn’t done.
Even if Platner’s baggage wouldn’t sink him, his generational and populist message would probably get lost in the larger national battle that is taking place.
Charlie Cook is widely considered one of the nation’s leading authorities on American politics and U.S. elections.
In 1984, at the age of 30, Charlie founded The Cook Political Report, an independent, nonpartisan newsletter covering elections and American politics. For 37 years, Charlie served as its editor and publisher.
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Cook has written a weekly political column for National Journal since 1998 and previously wrote for Roll Call for 12 years. Charlie co-authored the 2020, 2022, 2024, and the current 2026 edition of The Almanac of American Politics.
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