The Proving Ground

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 30, 2026

 

The governor of Maine entered her state’s Senate primary six months ago with universal name recognition, the support of the national Democratic establishment, and gold-plated electability cred.

 

She quit the race this morning, short on funds and behind—way behind—in the polls. In the end, she was no match for an upstart progressive chud roughly half her age who’s known outside Maine mostly for having once gotten a Nazi tattoo.

 

Seems significant! And depressing. And familiar.

 

It’s impossible to absorb the political demise of Gov. Janet Mills in Maine without thinking of the Tea Party circa 2010. Furious at a president they despised and convinced that the electorate was with them all the way, Republicans nominated several take-no-prisoners right-wing firebrands for Senate that year in states not known for electing Barry Goldwater types.

 

They paid for it. Sharron Angle lost a winnable race to Harry Reid in purplish Nevada. And Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell was annihilated in deep-blue Delaware after upsetting centrist Republican Rep. Mike Castle in the GOP primary.

 

More than 15 years later, O’Donnell’s victory over Castle remains an infamous cautionary tale of primary voters getting high on their own supply and choosing an unelectable candidate they love over an electable one they can tolerate. If Republican Susan Collins defeats Graham Platner, the aforementioned chud, in Maine’s general election this fall, every narrative about the outcome will accuse Democratic primary voters of having failed to learn that lesson.

 

“They let their hatred of Trump blind them to political reality,” the pundits will say. “Maine leans blue, but not so blue that an outspoken leftist ever could have beaten a trusted centrist like Collins.” The Collins-Platner race is destined to be treated as a sort of proving ground for whether a progressive can win in a purple state.

 

But is it?

 

Is Mills really more electable than Platner in a national environment like the current one? And was it actually a progressive Tea Party that foiled her or did she falter due to more mundane political problems?

 

Tea time?

 

Although it didn’t become clear until 2016, the populist conservatism that dominated the right during Barack Obama’s presidency was 95 percent populism and 5 percent conservatism.

 

Tea Party Republicans happily ditched Reaganite dogma once they encountered an authoritarian demagogue willing to stroke their political id. Donald Trump’s populism was mostly pugilism: He promised to confront the right’s cultural enemies aggressively and unapologetically, without the timid politesse practiced by the establishment stiffs who ran the party. He was offering Republican voters a fight; with a few exceptions, his policies were mostly beside the point.

 

What just happened in Maine does remind me of the Tea Party in that sense. I think Democrats’ preference for Platner over Mills can be explained almost entirely in terms of pugilistic populism, not ideology.

 

After all, few electorates in America know better than Democratic primary voters in Maine that moderation tends to win elections. They’ve lost to the centrist Collins five times, most painfully in 2020 when their candidate led comfortably in nearly every poll only to lose badly on Election Day. They need to peel away some of Collins’ supporters; a centrist nominee seems more likely to do that than an ersatz Bernie Sanders with the remnants of a Totenkopf on his chest.

 

So I seriously doubt that Democrats there preferred Platner because they believe he’s more electable. Nor do I have reason to believe they’ve moved radically further left since Collins’ last reelection bid. Platner KO’d Mills, I think, because he goosed liberals’ political id. They want to punch the Trump-era GOP in the face, and he’s a far more obvious instrument for that desire than Janet Mills is.

 

He’s offering them a fight.

 

Start with age. Mills is 78, which would have made her the oldest senator elected to a first term in American history. Platner is 41 and served in the Marines. If you’re a liberal spoiling for energetic confrontation with the right—especially after the horror of watching geriatric Joe Biden space out during a debate with Trump—who seems more likely to deliver?

 

Platner has wisely showcased his energy by barnstorming the state, holding more than 50 town hall events so far. That’s a populist tactic, meeting the people face-to-face where they are, but it has the added benefit of demonstrating the sort of determined indefatigability that Resistance Democrats crave. His political persona matches the moment too—brash, charismatic, exciting. Mills is soft-spoken by comparison and unsurprisingly drew smaller crowds.

 

Even her entry into the race was lethargic. Platner jumped in last August but not until two months later did Mills follow suit, ceding the spotlight to the upstart in the interim. He used the time to introduce himself to, and impress, Democratic voters. That mistake was deadly, per elections analyst Jacob Rubashkin: “A universe in which Mills gets in the race in June, is the only candidate against Collins for months and has all the attention and Democratic donor enthusiasm to herself by the time Platner jumps in is a Mills much more competitive than the one who trailed wire to wire.”

 

More competitive, sure—but still maybe not victorious. That’s because Mills was the establishment candidate in the race at a moment when Chuck Schumer, the de facto head of that establishment, is the least popular major politician in the country. To many Democrats, he’s become an avatar of the party’s complacency during a civic emergency. His endorsement and continued support effectively slapped a neon “business as usual” sign on Mills, a horrible stigma for a Democratic candidate to bear right now.

 

But Mills also dug her own hole. As recently as last September, weeks before she entered the race, she defended Collins when asked whether the senator had done enough to push back on lousy Trump policies like tariffs. “She’s in a tough position,” the governor said of her potential Senate opponent. “I appreciate everything she is doing.” There’s no worse answer that a Democratic candidate could have given in this environment. It telegraphed that Mills lacked the killer instinct that pugilistic populism demands.

 

And insofar as she did demonstrate that instinct, it was at Platner’s expense. She ran ads attacking him for an old Reddit comment he made about sexual assault in which he said women should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f—ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” That’s fair game for a political attack—but coupled with Mills’ cordiality toward Collins, it appeared to confirm the eternal grassroots suspicion that the elites in both parties like each other more than they do the uncouth rank-and-file on their own side.

 

Mills “ran into every single post-Biden backlash possible—age, Dem leadership, civility, process moderation, etc,” Vox’s Benjy Sarlin wrote this morning. Absent those backlashes, and without her late start on the campaign, would Platner’s comparative progressivism still have carried him to victory in a primary? I’m skeptical.

 

Electability?

 

I’m also skeptical of the claim that Platner is unelectable, or even meaningfully less electable than Mills would have been.

 

I didn’t used to be. Six months ago, I thought she had the advantage on that count—and why wouldn’t I? With few exceptions, progressives have fallen short in marquee statewide races in recent years. Stacey Abrams, a darling of the left, ran for governor twice in Georgia and lost both times. Beto O’Rourke electrified progressives in 2018 as a Senate candidate in Texas but couldn’t ride the national blue wave that year to victory over Ted Cruz. Four years later he ran for governor and got blown out.

 

The great exception was John Fetterman, who trounced a more moderate opponent in Pennsylvania’s 2022 Democratic Senate primary before winning the general election. But Fetterman lucked out by drawing TV quack Dr. Mehmet Oz, a man with no political experience and questionable ties to the state, as his Republican opponent. And Fetterman “coded” as right-wing culturally despite his left-wing politics due to his shaved head, burly frame, and taste for hoodies. Swing voters who might otherwise find progressives fringe, weird, and/or effete could relate to him.

 

That’s one reason I’ve come to think Platner might be underestimated. Like Fetterman, he “codes” redder than the typical leftist such that the average joe is likely to find him less culturally foreign. He’s an oysterman, a veteran, and given to political incorrectness that would make a wokester blanch. An undecided voter might look at him and plausibly conclude that Platner can’t be that progressive at heart—even though, in all the worst ways, he is.

 

It’s not just his common touch as a candidate that makes me think I underrated his chances of beating Collins, though. Three things have happened since I last wrote about him that arguably make pugilistic populism more electable than Mills-style moderation.

 

One is that the affordability crisis has deepened, which plays into progressives’ hands. Despite the notoriety he’s received for his cultural transgressions, Platner hasn’t campaigned as a “there are 18 genders” culture warrior. He’s running on economic populism with single-payer health care as the centerpiece of his platform. That’s a timely message at a moment when gas prices have gone haywire and our ballroom-obsessed leader is scoring the lowest job approval on handling inflation in modern American history. Yes, worse than even Jimmy Carter.

 

The economic shocks of the Iran war are eating Trump’s presidency alive, earning him 22-69 splits when voters are asked how he’s doing on reducing the cost of living and handing Democrats their first polling lead on managing the economy since 2010. It’s not hard to believe that the young, relatable blue-collar-seeming guy will be a more effective messenger on affordability than the elderly professional politician Janet Mills would have been.

 

The second thing that’s happened is it has become clearer how many Americans really dislike Democrats.

 

The party does lead Republicans on the generic ballot, as you’d expect in a midterm cycle. But apart from the occasional outlier poll, the margin isn’t nearly as gaudy as we might imagine with Trump’s approval dropping into the mid- or low 30s in some surveys. “Democrats should actually be doing a lot better,” data analyst Lakshya Jain worried on Wednesday, noting that the party’s generic ballot lead hasn’t grown at all in two months despite the president’s approval falling by 7 net points over the same period.

 

A YouGov survey released on Tuesday backed Jain up. Republicans in Congress are viewed unfavorably by an abysmal 28 net points but trail by just 5 on the generic ballot because congressional Democrats are nearly as unpopular. The Democratic generic-ballot advantage has actually shrunk by a point in the same poll since early February, before the Iran war began. And that’s a comparatively good poll for the left: Some data shows that the GOP, despite having to tote Trump’s immense baggage, remains the more popular of the two parties.

 

Under those circumstances, it may well be that a first-time candidate whom the national Democratic leadership dislikes is more electable than a tired establishmentarian like Janet Mills. Graham Platner, the proverbial “outsider,” will face Collins with less donkey-stink on him than the governor would have.

 

The last thing that’s happened—I think—is that Democratic voters have begun to care less about civic norms.

 

I say “I think” because there’s no way to quantify it. But look around. In the last month alone, Democrats in Virginia approved a measure to redistrict their state along ruthlessly partisan lines while mainstream liberal media outlets have stopped other-izing Hamas-slobberer Hasan Piker. A poll released two days ago found that nearly half of the current Democratic coalition believes the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump was staged, and conspiracy theories about last Saturday’s attack are growing like mold on social media.

 

So-called “dark woke” is ascending.

 

I worried about that when I wrote about Platner last year, wondering whether liberal anger at the president’s heedless norm-busting would whet their appetite for norm-busters of their own. If so, I thought, the populist oysterman’s most boorish and antisemitic episodes would damage him less with voters than we would hope: “Once the public decides that ‘authenticity’ is more important than propriety, any impropriety that might be justified as a form of authenticity becomes defensible and non-disqualifying.”

 

Republicans embraced that logic in 2016. Ten years later, a salt-of-the-earth leftist whom Hasan Piker recently praised for being “pro-Hamas” will become the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, all but immune—so far—to the many justifiable criticisms of his character.

 

And he’s not the only Piker-approved progressive who’s leading in a swing-state Senate primary, do note.

 

If you want to believe that “dark woke” can’t beat Susan Collins, feel free. But that’s not what the polls say right now, and it’s not what the logic of this political era points to. “How scummy should left-wing nominees be allowed to be in a party that’s desperate to broaden its appeal to an increasingly scummy America?” I asked last October in assessing Platner’s chances. We have our answer.