The Democrats' Main(e) Problem

The Democrats finally got their Tea Party candidate. Careful what you wish for

Susan Collins is one of those elected officials who just refuses to step down. First elected in 1996 on a pledge to limit herself to two terms, she is now campaigning for her fifth consecutive term as Maine’s Senator. The last time a Democrat won a Maine Senate race was in 1988. In that sense, Maine is unique: a northeastern state that has awarded most of its presidential electoral votes to Democratic nominees for decades, including in 2024, yet hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. This paradox is explained by Collins’ dominance.

For thirty years, Collins has cultivated the image of the pragmatic Republican: too principled for partisanship, too Mainer for Washington. Her record reflects that complexity: she voted against repealing the Affordable Care Act, condemned the Muslim travel ban and was one of seven Republicans to vote to convict Trump after January 6. Last week, she was one of only two Republicans to support a preemptive War Powers Resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional approval before launching military action against Cuba. The resolution failed 51-47. Trump has repeatedly lambasted her: in January, The Hill reported that he “dialed Collins with profanity-laced rant” over her vote on Venezuela war powers. He has also called for a Republican to mount a primary challenge to unseat her.

But in practice, Collins has voted with Trump 95% of the time since he returned to the White House in January 2025. She confirmed Kavanaugh and Barrett to the Supreme Court after assuring Maine voters they wouldn’t touch Roe v. Wade; they did. More recently, she endorsed the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter suppression bill backed by Trump. And that discrepancy has become starkly clear in Trump’s second term and explains her growing unpopularity.

Last summer, Graham Platner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer and first-time candidate, launched his bid for the U.S. Senate with a video that racked up 2.5 million views in its first 24 hours. Platner introduced himself as a weathered working man from Sullivan, staring down the oligarchy and the politicians who serve it. The campaign raised a million dollars in its first nine days and had amassed over 6,000 volunteers by September. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren switfly endorsed him. The Democratic establishment, spooked, recruited two-term Governor Janet Mills to run against him and clear the field. On April 30, Mills ended her bid, led by as much as 30 points by Platner. The insurgent won a major battle in the internal ideological war that has brewed in the Democratic Party since November 2024. But the establishment had reasons to seek an alternative to Platner.

On October 21, 2025, Platner posted a video of himself dancing shirtless at his brother’s wedding, hoping the video would humanize him and boost his popularity. Instead, it revealed a chest tattoo bore a striking resemblance to the Totenkopf, the skull insignia of the Nazi SS. Platner reasoned that he had gotten it drunk in Croatia, confusing it for a generic skull and crossbones, and that he had since had it covered. But an anonymous former acquaintance told CNN and Jewish Insider that Platner had been fully aware of its meaning and had previously referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

Within days, reporters surfaced a trail of Reddit posts that painted a broader and more troubling picture: in 2013, he posted a thread about anti-rape underwear where he suggested that people worried about sexual assault should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to.” And in 2014, he described a Hamas raid in which terrorists killed Israeli soldiers as “a damn fine looking and successful raid against a superior opponent,” adding that he would “give credit where credit is due, no matter who they are fighting for.”

This led his campaign’s political director to resign and call him “unelectable.” His campaign manager and finance director followed suit.

Come November, Maine Democrats face a choice between two kinds of disaster. The first is the one Genevieve McDonald saw coming when she resigned: Collins floods the airwaves with the tattoo, the Hamas comments, the rape thread and Platner loses a race that was one of the Senate Democrats’ most reliable pickups. Collins has defied the polls and the pundits before: in 2020, she was written off by virtually every analyst and won anyway. Handing her opposition research this rich is a gift. But the second scenario may be the more quietly troubling one: Platner pulls it off and heads to DC. And then what? The moderating has already begun. He has said he is “currently not for an assault weapons ban, certainly in the form that they have been put forward,” positioning himself to the right of the Democratic mainstream on the issue before he has cast a single Senate vote.

There is a prior for what happens when Democrats elect their rough-edged, anti-establishment savior and send him to Washington. John Fetterman was endorsed by Sanders, ran as a populist outsider and won Pennsylvania in 2022 on the back of enormous grassroots enthusiasm. Within two years, he called for mass deportations, opposed every War Powers resolutions, unironically spoke of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and called for Trump’s ballroom to be authorized. Platner has already shown the instinct, if not yet the full trajectory: in addition to his opposition to an assault weapons ban, he has said many of his friends voted for Trump and has faced allegations that he himself previously voted for him. None of this disqualifies him. But it is a concerning harbinger.

So here is where Maine’s Democrats find themselves in the spring of 2026: slated to nominate a tattoo-covered, Hamas-praising, sexual-assault-minimising oyster farmer to take on a five-term incumbent who has survived everything the party has thrown at her for three decades. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps Platner is exactly what Maine needs: unpolished, unvetted and unafraid, a human wrecking ball aimed at a woman who has made a career out of being too reasonable to dislodge. But the Democratic Party has a habit of telling itself that this time is different and driving into a wall. And this time, they seem inclined to sacrifice their very values to defend what they would never defend if Mr. Platner was a Republican.