It’s the Governor vs. the Oysterman, and Democrats’ Pick Will Tell Us a Lot About the Party’s Future

Sign up for the Slatest^[1] to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Democrats usually select their Senate nominees in pivotal races the old-fashioned way. Party leaders recruit the best option, in their eyes, and Democratic primary voters—innately terrified of risk and trusting of their leaders’ judgment—fall in line. It doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, like North Carolina’s Cal Cunningham in 2020, the chosen ones have zipper issues^[2]. But Democrats’ establishment-driven approach, contrasted with Republicans’ less top-driven (and more mistake-prone^[3]) strategy for candidate selection, did give Democrats four years in the Senate majority from 2021 to 2025, despite their structural disadvantage^[4] in the chamber.

After the great Democratic calamity of 2024, the party’s leaders are getting less leeway. Support among Democrats for their leaders^[5] is in free fall. Aging incumbents^[6] are being^[7] shown^[8] the door^[9]. Democratic voters are more willing to accept risk, and to push their leaders to take risks, which is why^[10] the government has been shut down for a couple of weeks.

And now a marquee Senate primary will determine how much control Democratic Party leadership still has over those races too.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills announced on Tuesday that she will run for Senate, seeking to unseat Republican Susan Collins. Mills, 77 years old and in her second term as governor, was heavily recruited by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DSCC doesn’t seem concerned about hiding its preference for Mills either: On Tuesday, it formed a joint fundraising committee^[11] with her campaign.

Mills’ pitch to primary voters is that she’s “battle-tested^[12].” She possesses something that the graveyard of recent Collins opponents haven’t: She has twice been elected statewide by a majority of voters. People know her. They’ve voted for her. And, per Mills, they’ll need to do it again in the primary if they want any hope of defeating Collins. “This is an urgent, unprecedented, dangerous moment in the country’s history, and it demands more of every one of us, including me,” Mills told the New York Times in an interview^[13]. “Defeating Susan Collins will be hard—the stakes are high, and we should leave nothing to chance.”

There’s a reason why Mills even needs to make a pitch to primary voters, though—and why that pitch needs to warn against risk—whereas a Democratic recruit like her prior to 2024 could have jumped straight to the general election. The Maine field wasn’t empty before her entrance (although another candidate, brewer Dan Kleban, dropped out after Mills entered the race). One candidate in particular, however, has garnered a lot of buzz both in state and nationally.

Maine veteran and oysterman Graham Platner entered the race in August, and his profile has been^[14] on a vertical media-darling trajectory^[15] that’s beginning to resemble^[16] that of Beto O’Rourke in 2018. He checks a lot of boxes that Democrats looking for something fresh crave: He’s not a walking résumé of impeccable credentials. He speaks unlike someone whose words required hundreds of hours of focus-grouping before they were uttered. He centers economic populism in his approach. He goes viral for his responses^[17] in well-attended town halls^[18]. He doesn’t campaign as a “progressive,” though he’s already earned and welcomed the enthusiastic support^[19] of Sen. Bernie Sanders. He has said he wouldn’t vote^[20] for Schumer as Senate leader if he won. And—unlike Mills, who would be the oldest freshman senator ever and says she’ll serve only one term^[21]—he is young. Not even “young by Senate Democratic standards,” which includes anyone below age 73. He is 41 years old.

The race, in which neither candidate will appear to lack for funds^[22], is the most distinct opportunity since the 2024 election for Democrats to productively work out some of their bickering in a productive way. We’re not necessarily talking about arguments over whether the party catered too much to the left or to the center. This is about the type of candidates Democrats should nominate if they hope to regain power. Should they keep playing it safe by lining up behind those with the “right” set of traditional credentials or open themselves up to unfamiliar outsiders? At least in Maine, that choice will be on the primary ballot.

It will also be a test of Democratic congressional leaders’ control over their own party, something Republican leaders lost a long time ago.

Well, to be exact: Republican leaders lost it in 2010, when various party-establishment picks went down in primaries to tea party challengers. Some of those challengers proved they had what it took, such as the current secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who upset then–Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in the state’s Senate primary. Others, like Christine O’Donnell^[24] in Delaware or Sharron Angle^[25] in Nevada, were disasters whose nominations straightforwardly cost Republicans Senate seats. If Platner is out of his depth, Democrats had better figure that out before he’s nominated.

It’s important to emphasize, however, that this is not a seat that will easily fall into Democrats’ hands so long as they choose wisely in the primary.

Susan Collins is a political freak. Nationally, Democrats joke about her as ineffectual, as someone perpetually “concerned” about Donald Trump’s actions but unwilling to do anything about them. In Maine, all she does is win.

In 2020, over $100 million^[30]—more than enough to saturate Maine’s media markets, maybe multiple times over—was spent to defeat Collins. Collins didn’t lead her challenger, Democrat Sara Gideon, in a single nonpartisan public poll^[31] that year. On election night, Collins won by 9 points^[32], the same margin by which Joe Biden defeated Trump^[33] in the state. That’s a level of ticket splitting that just doesn’t exist anymore in federal elections, outside of Susan Collins.

Six years after that humiliation, Democratic Party leaders’ prescription is to pit the state’s best-known Democratic politician against Collins. But Democratic voters may decide, going against their past risk-averse thinking, to try something new altogether.

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.