Platner Plotzes

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The Guardian:

Graham Platner, the embattled Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, has been accused of trying to influence the process of picking his replacement amid a chorus of calls for him to withdraw from the race.

Platner has publicly said he is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denied, was published on Monday.

A wave of prominent Democrats, from the progressive senator Bernie Sanders to the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, urged him to stand aside.

The Maine election is seen as a key component of the party’s effort to regain control of the US Senate in November’s midterm elections. Platner remains in the race, for now.

A senior state Democrat declared on Tuesday evening that Platner’s campaign would have “no role” in selecting his replacement, claiming that his team had tried to sway the process.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic party, said: “Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the US Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like.

Hans Nichols and Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Republicans are preparing to welcome a potential Graham Platner replacement in Maine's Senate race with $8 million in negative ads, aiming to introduce a new Democratic nominee to voters on their own terms before Democrats can.

Why it matters: Republicans are doing something Democrats wish they could: Move on from Platner.

The progressive candidate, who said Monday he is taking time to "reflect" on his next steps, remains officially in the race and is looking to leverage his status as the Democratic nominee to influence who could replace him.

Republicans, meanwhile, see an opening: three weeks to prepare a campaign against a Democratic nominee who will have little time to introduce themselves to voters.

Driving the news: Pine Tree Results, the super PAC backing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, raised $10.5 million during the first half of the year — matching what it raised during the same period in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter.The group pulled its anti-Platner ads Tuesday and has $8 million in cash on hand to define a likely fresh Democratic nominee for voters during a compressed campaign.

Among the donors to the pro-Collins super PAC is Blackstone president Jon Gray, a longtime Democratic donor. He contributed $250,000 well before Politico and CNN reported sexual assault allegations against Platner.

Maine Senate Race and the Big Picture

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

In Maine, Gov. Janet Mills withdrew from the D Senate primary, leaving Graham Platner as the presumptive nominee to face Susan Collins in the fall.

Dan Merica and Matthew Choi at WP:

Mills’s decision — and the trajectory of her campaign — tells us a lot about this moment in politics. On paper, Mills was the undisputed favorite for the Democratic nominee. All Mainers knew her, many had voted for her multiple times, and she had the kind of track record that someone like Schumer, who was desperate to get her to run against Collins, thought would make her successful.

The opposite is true for Platner. He is a first-time candidate whose baggage is so significant that it would need to be checked, not carried on, when flying out of Bangor International Airport, including deleted Reddit comments that were dismissive of sexual assault and the Nazi symbol he had tattooed on his chest and later altered. Even some of his backers were skeptical of his staying power when he launched his campaign.

...

This race has taught political watchers a few things: Voters, especially Democrats who watched their party lose the 2024 presidential race against Trump, are angry with the politics of this moment and the status quo that got the nation to this point. That anger is so deep that candidates who look good on paper but hark back to the politics of yore are easily expendable for someone who, warts and all, makes them feel something.

Platner’s entire image embodies a slice of Maine that most people outside the state don’t understand. With his baggy sweatshirts, his ties to the water as the owner of an oyster farming business and even his gravelly voice, Platner clearly connected with Democrats on a deeper level. In a state that is known for judging people who are “from away,” Platner is notably not.

 Adam Wren with Dasha Burns at POLITICO quote Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM):

“I think there’s just a mood right now in the country where there’s so much economic pressure on hard-working regular folks, and you can either connect with that or not, and that’s how I’ve made decisions in these races: based on whether I think that person is going to do the best job of connecting with that frustration that regular people have right now.”

The deep unsettledness Heinrich describes is upsetting traditional Washington norms around electability, he told Playbook. “I just think who is electable is evolving, and our analysis of these races, and who’s going to be the strongest in a general, which is really what’s most important here, from a majority standpoint, needs to evolve with where the electorate is today.”

After all, that electorate is one that sided with a trail of controversial online comments from Platner regarding political violence, the military, police and more that drew months of attention and headlines.

“We’ve gotten over-analytical as a party, and sanitized and thinking about resumes,” Heinrich said. “None of these candidates are perfect, but I think there’s an expectation by voters today that if you seem perfect, you’re probably hiding something.”

 

The Electoral Fate of Senior Senators

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Since the passage of the 17th amendment it appears that 25 senators who served at least four terms were unsuccessful in seeking another term. Two Senators could join this list this year - Susan Collins (five terms) and John Cornyn (four terms). pic.twitter.com/XjBjwysfKD

— Drew Savicki (@DrewSav) February 20, 2026

Erratum:  McKellar was from Tennessee.  h/t Jim Pinkerton.

This table updates and confirms a 1983 article: Tuckel, Peter. “Length of Incumbency and the Reelection Chances of U. S. Senators.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1983): 283–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/439434 . Abstract:

This note examines the relationship between the number of terms U.S. senators had served and their reelection chances during two time periods—1920-1958 and 1960-1980. The results of the study show strikingly different patterns of winning reelection during these two time periods. During the years 1920-1958, senators who had served one or two terms were more vulnerable to defeat than were those who had served three or more terms. In the years 1960-1980, the opposite pattern holds: first- and second-term senators did considerably better at the polls than their more senior colleagues. It is hypothesized that two factors explain why the electoral position of junior senators has improved in the modern period: the greater diffusion of power within the post-1950s Senate and the entry of television into the domain of electoral politics. This second factor, coupled with the greater age of more senior senators, is also used to explain why the electoral position of senators who had served three or more terms declined during the last two decades.

Tuckel concluded the article: In the television era, age might be a greater political liability than hitherto. Because it is a visual medium and highlights the physical appearance of candidates, television may decrease the reelection chances of veteran senators."

Democratic Tea?

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Holly Otterbein and Stephen Neukam at  Axios:

Hours after former NFL star Colin Allred quit the Texas Senate race Monday, rabble-rousing Rep. Jasmine Crockett jumped in — the latest sign that Democrats are facing a Tea Party-style revolt by progressives.

Why it matters: Senate Democratic leaders this year have tried to tip the scales in favor of their favorite 2026 candidates in several states — but they've lost some power as much of the party's base has turned on them in President Trump's second term.

...

Zoom out: In Ohio and North Carolina, Schumer helped clear the 2026 Democratic primary fields for former Sen. Sherrod Brown and former Gov. Roy Cooper. But in several other states, Democratic leaders have failed to head off contested primaries — and party-approved candidates are struggling to stake out leads. It's all unfolding amid an intraparty rebellion that's drawn some comparisons to how the conservative Tea Party movement reshaped the GOP nearly two decades ago.

• In Maine, polls show oyster farmer Graham Platner, a progressive Democrat, as still competitive against Schumer-endorsed Maine Gov. Janet Mills — even after reports Platner made controversial comments online and had a Nazi-linked tattoo (which he's covered up).
• In the Michigan Senate primary, mainstream Democrats have complained that Rep. Haley Stevens, the favorite of party officials, has run a lackluster campaign against liberal state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Bernie-Sanders backed Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor.
• In Iowa, the establishment favorite, Josh Turek, faces a large primary field.

Maine and the Democrats' Age Problem

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Dan Merica at WP:

Maine Gov. Janet Mills’s campaign for U.S. Senate has reignited a contentious debate about candidates’ ages in a Democratic Party increasingly eager to inject more youth into its aging ranks.


Mills, seen as a major recruit for Senate Democratic leaders, launched her campaign on Tuesday. She is 77 and would be the oldest freshman senator ever if she wins the seat held by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Age has become a focal point for Democrats heading into the midterm elections. The party is still reeling from Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term as the oldest president in 2024, before bowing out following a disastrous debate where he appeared to lose his train of thought, heightening concerns in the party about his age and acuity. Democratic losses in 2024 have led many party activists to urge a passing of the torch to younger leaders, particularly after years of dominance by congressional leaders in their 70s and 80s.
...
Her entrance into a marquee battleground race, which has been expected for weeks, has already drawn some criticism in the party. “It just seems sort of irresponsible,” former congresswoman Susan Wild (Pennsylvania), a 68-year-old Democrat who decided not to run for Congress next year because of her age, said of Mills’s decision to run at her age. “We all talk about the importance of attracting new voters and regaining the trust of certain groups that may have fallen away from the Democratic Party, and I think when you do the same old, same old, that is the last thing you are doing.

Noting that Collins, at 72, is five years younger than the governor, Wild quipped, “So, she would be the youngster against Mills.”

Mills is not alone in being a Democratic septuagenarian Senate candidate this cycle: 79-year-old Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), 75-year-old Sen. Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) and 73-year-old Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado) are running for reelection next year. But other senators, such as 78-year-old Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) and 80-year-old Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), have cited their age in their decision not to run for reelection next year.

Trump Off the Maine Ballot

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie.  And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution. 

Zach Montellaro at Politico:

Maine’s top election official ejected former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot on Thursday, declaring him ineligible to serve as president because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

The ruling by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, is certain to inflame a roaring national debate over whether the Republican presidential frontrunner should be allowed to hold power again.

The decision makes Maine the second state in two weeks to disqualify Trump’s candidacy due to the constitutional bar on officeholders who supported or “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Last week the Colorado Supreme Court barred Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot under a similar interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

Bellows’ decision on Thursday increases the pressure on the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and ultimately decide Trump’s fate — as the Colorado GOP petitioned the justices this week to do.

Unlike the Colorado ruling, this one comes from an individual officeholder affiliated with the Democratic Party. And Maine, unlike Colorado, has been a presidential battleground in recent years; under an unusual state law, it cast one of its Electoral College votes for Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

Trump was quick to attack the decision, with an aide calling it “partisan election interference.” But his removal from the ballot in two states remains a stark illustration of his deep legal and political vulnerabilities.

Bellows, who made the call in Maine because state law requires the secretary to adjudicate ballot challenges to candidates’ eligibility, defended her decision in her determination.

“I am mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Bellows wrote. “I am also mindful, however, that no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

GOP and COVID

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the politics of COVID.

Margaret Talev at Axios:

Most Americans support mandating masks in schools and vaccinations to return to the workplace, and they oppose states' efforts to ban such moves, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

But, but, but: The survey finds the Republican base going against the grain so disproportionately that it helps explain the defiant postures of many red-state governors.

• It also showed regional differences, with Midwesterners the most critical of mandates.

What they're saying: “This is why we’re seeing so much conflict,” said Cliff Young, president of Ipsos U.S. Public Affairs.

• “This data shows that public policy and public health is continuously challenged by our politics today" and that "at the end of the day, it’s all-politics-is-local."

By the numbers: Overall, 69% of respondents support their local school districts requiring everyone — including teachers, students, and administrators — to wear masks in schools. 

• But that was true for just 44% of Republicans, compared with two-thirds of independents and nine in 10 Democrats.
• 64% of respondents support state and local government mandates requiring masks to be worn in all public areas.
• Just one in three Americans supports state laws prohibiting local governments from requiring masks (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued executive orders banning mask requirements in schools).
• But that number masks a big partisan gap: 57% of Republicans support those laws, compared to just 16% of Democrats.
• There's widespread opposition across party lines to states withholding funds from schools or local governments that require masks, as DeSantis threatened to do.
• 55% of Americans support companies requiring all employees to be vaccinated to return to the workplace — that's nearly eight in 10 Democrats but just three in 10 Republicans.

Zoe Richards at The Daily Beast:

A Republican legislator in Maine who lost his wife to COVID-19 last week appeared at a rally on Tuesday that featured a GOP colleague who compared the state’s Democratic governor to a Nazi doctor who performed deadly experiments on Jews during the Holocaust.

State Rep. Chris Johansen, who emerged in the early days of the pandemic as a fierce opponent of public health-related restrictions, joined a group of lawmakers at the event in Augusta. State Rep. Heidi Sampson delivered a speech to the crowd that baselessly accused Gov. Janet Mills, who has introduced a vaccine mandate for health-care workers, of operating a government campaign to test “experimental” vaccines on unknowing citizens.

Vanessa Etienne at People:

After a month-long battle, Pressley Stutts, a Republican leader in South Carolina, has died from COVID-19 at the age of 64. Earlier this month, Stutts and his wife were rushed to the hospital due to decreasing oxygen levels. Though his wife recovered and returned home a few days later, Stutts developed pneumonia and entered the ICU, as he shared in several Facebook posts at the time. He was later placed on a ventilator. Over the course of the pandemic — including his time in the hospital — Stutts made several social media posts about COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and once called face masks an "illusion." In July, he also shared dismissive comments about the delta variant in a Facebook post, which has been flagged by the platform as false information, before criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris' vaccination efforts in South Carolina.

On August 6, Mike Stunson reported at The Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

A Texas GOP official whose social media posts include anti-mask and anti-vaccine rhetoric has died from COVID-19.

H. Scott Apley, who according to the Galveston News was a member of the Galveston County Republican Party and Dickinson City council, was 45 years old.

In his last Facebook post July 30, Apley shared a Twitter post mocking COVID-19.

And of course, Trump makes things worse. Martin Pengelly at The Guardian:

Donald Trump was due to stage a rally in Alabama on Saturday night, in a city that has declared a Covid emergency and in support of a congressman who both backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the election and this week sympathised with a man who threatened to blow up the US Capitol.

The former president will speak in Cullman, Alabama, in support of Mo Brooks’ bid for a US Senate seat.

Like other southern, Republican-run states, Alabama is struggling with a surge in cases of Covid-19 fueled by the contagious Delta variant. On Thursday, the city of Cullman declared a state of emergency.

“We want to prevent as many non-Covid related things as possible, so our hospital can use its resources to focus on the pandemic and its variants,” said Luke Satterfield, an attorney for the city, according to AL.com. “We don’t want to put any extra strain on them.”p’s rally was set to take the stage at York Farms at 7pm local time. Local media reported that organisers expected about 40,000 to attend.

Dr William Smith, chief medical officer for Cullman Regional, told CBS42: “We view this as a potential ‘super-spreader’ event, just like last week’s Rock the South that was [at the same location]. We’ve seen an increase in patients since that event last weekend and we’re concerned we could see the same impact.”

The Senate Is Up for Grabs

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.  Our next book will explain 2020. As of early May, the signs are negative for the GOP

E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post:

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock (D) says that when he first announced he would run for the U.S. Senate, he “didn’t know what Montana and the country was going to look like in the short period thereafter.” With the covid-19 crisis, all his time has been taken up by being a governor, not a candidate. So far, that has only helped him in his campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Steve Daines.

In Maine, House Speaker Sara Gideon, a Democrat seeking to end the long career of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, says the pandemic has “laid bare the inequities that already existed” and underscored the need for a “vision of what it means to work together and for each other instead of trying to sow divisiveness.” This brings home Gideon’s case against Collins’s willingness to ally with President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), two of the most divisive figures in American politics.

Colorado’s former governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat with a good chance of ousting incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, expresses a sense of gravity about this campaign that he never felt in his races for mayor of Denver or governor.

“I will never forgive myself if I lose it,” Hickenlooper told me, “and I will do everything in my power, I will work as hard as humanly possible, to make sure that I win this, just because I feel in my bones that our democracy has been so weakened by this relentless partisanship, the constant division.”

And Democrat Cal Cunningham, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who is facing incumbent Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), says that many North Carolinians today feel “an urgency that did not exist prior to March of this year” about “health coverage . . . about jobs, the economy.”

Issues that were once “percolating for many” are now “personal for everyone.”

If Bullock, Gideon, Hickenlooper and Cunningham all win, Democrats will likely take over the U.S. Senate and end McConnell’s days as majority leader.

The GOP's Off-Off-Year Wipeout

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's impact down the ballot.

At WP, James Hohmann sums up the GOP wipeout in the off-off-year elections:

Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor of Virginia Tuesday by an unexpectedly large margin of nine percentage points. He won more votes than any previous candidate for Virginia governor.

Republican Ed Gillespie could not escape Trump’s unpopularity, despite his best efforts to thread the needle. Four in 10 Virginia voters yesterday approved of the job that the president is doing, according to preliminary exit polls. Gillespie received over 9 in 10 votes from Trump approvers, but among the larger group of Trump disapprovers, Northam had nearly as large an advantage: 87 percent.

Trump’s impact on the race was also clear from other questions in the exit polling: 34 percent of voters said expressing opposition to Trump was a reason for their vote, with almost all of this group favoring Northam, per our in-house pollster Scott Clement. Half as many (17 percent) sought to express support for the president, while 47 percent said Trump was not a factor in their choice.

The GOP also suffered big losses in the VA House of Delegates.  But wait, there's more:

• Maine, where Trump won an electoral vote last year, became the first state to expand Medicaid via ballot initiative. Despite active opposition from the Republican governor and an influx of outside money, the measure passed by a nearly 20-point margin. This will mean health-care coverage for an estimated 70,000 low-income residents.
• Democrat Phil Murphy, a former banker and first-time candidate, won the New Jersey governor’s race by 13 points over Chris Christie’s lieutenant governor. That’s on par with Clinton’s margin a year ago, but it’s a remarkable turnabout from four years ago — when Christie got reelected with a 22-point margin of victory. It means that Democrats will have unified control of the Garden State’s government.
• By winning a special election, Democrats took control of the Senate in Washington State.This gives the party full control of all three states on the West Coast: a blue wall of sorts.

-- Democrats didn’t just run up the score on blue turf, though:

• In Georgia, Democrats picked up three seats in the state legislature — replacing Republicans who stepped down to lead the state forestry commission, become a judge and run for governor.
• In New Hampshire’s largest city, Manchester, the incumbent Republican mayor went down. Joyce Craig is the first Democrat elected mayor there in 14 years.
• In the beating heart of Florida’s crucial Interstate 4 corridor, the former Republican mayor of St. Petersburg unexpectedly failed in a comeback bid after his Democratic opponent tied him to Trump and defined him as a denier of climate change.
• In North Carolina, the Republican mayor of Fayetteville lost his bid for a third term. In Charlotte, despite being heavily outspent, Democrat Vi Lyles will become the city’s first African American female mayor.

Crossroads GPS, Final-Week Hits

Crossroads GPS is running ads in Senate races.

Against Tim Kaine in Virginia, -- linking him to Obama:



Another against Kaine -- highlighting his support for cap and trade:



 Against Heitkamp in North Dakota -- depicting her as a roadblock to a Romney agenda:



Against Berkley in Nevada -- hitting her ethics very hard:



Against Sherrod Brown in Ohio -- linking him to economic decline:



Against Angus King in Maine -- attacking his ethics and support for Obamacare:

Crossroads GPS Up in Maine and Other States

Crossroads GPS takes a hit against Angus King in Maine:


Against Kaine in Virginia:


Against Donnelly in Indiana:


Against Heitkamp in North Dakota:


Against Tester in Montana: