Maine Democrats’ Senate Primary Gets Ugly With Governor Attacking Opponent for Past Social Media Posts

In arguably the most important U.S. Senate race of this cycle, Democrats are turning on each other with months to go until their primary. Governor Janet Mills, who was recruited to run for the seat by Senator Chuck Schumer, is now attacking her opponent for past social media posts. That opponent, Marine and Army veteran Graham Platner, has caught fire among some of his party’s most progressive leaders. Senator Bernie Sanders was quick to endorse Mr. Platner after he announced his candidacy last year. He has never held elected office. In the months since, Ms. Mills has trailed him in the polls, sometimes by double-digits. On Tuesday, in an attempt to resuscitate her campaign and make the race about who can win in November, she released a new ad featuring women who read Mr. Platner’s past posts on the discussion board site Reddit. In one post, Mr. Platner wrote that women who do not want to be raped should “not get so f–ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.” Ms. Mills’ ad then cuts to women who are reading that post. “It’s disgusting,” one woman says. The next quote from Mr. Platner features a voiceover actor who sounds like the candidate saying that women who want to avoid being raped should “act like an adult.”“Graham Platner — seriously?” a woman named Lynn says direct-to-camera after the quote is read.“We blame the victim?” another woman asks. “That’s a horrible thing to say,” a third says. “Graham Platner: the closer you look, the worse it gets,” a narrator for the ad then says, featuring a brief video of a shirtless Mr. Platner with his exposed tattoo that was identified as a Nazi symbol. He has since had the tattoo covered with a new image. “I’m Janet Mills and I approve this message,” Ms. Mills says at the end of the ad. The attack on Mr. Platner represents a turning point in a campaign that has not featured serious negative attacks from either candidate. For months, Mr. Platner and Ms. Mills have largely avoided going after each other, with the former pitching himself as a new kind of politician and the latter saying that she has the record to beat Senator Susan Collins, considering she has won two statewide elections in the last eight years.Of all the U.S. Senate races this year, the Maine contest likely represents Democrats’ best chance at flipping a seat. Ms. Collins has served in the chamber for 29 years, and is now running for an historic fifth term. In 2020, Democrats thought they could knock her off considering the overwhelming majority of polls were showing that Ms. Collins would lose that year, though she ended up winning re-election by nearly ten points. Mr. Platner has yet to attack Ms. Mills directly, but he has made clear that this is a race about generational change. His party is seeing an unusually large number of primary challengers to Democratic incumbents across the country who are running with a simple argument — that longtime Democratic lawmakers are too cautious, too out-of-touch, and too old to fight President Trump. Mr. Platner released his own ad on Tuesday, though it did not mention Ms. Mills at all. Instead, Mr. Platner’s campaign is already trying to pivot to a general election campaign by going after Ms. Collins directly. The ad features a woman from Maine who is also named Susan Collins. “That Susan Collins is a D.C. insider. This Susan Collins is voting for Graham Platner — a Democrat with backbone, a veteran with courage, an oyster farmer from Sullivan, Maine,” the second Ms. Collins says in a direct-to-camera video. “I’m Graham Platner, and I approve this message because it’s time we beat that Susan Collins,” he says at the end of the ad.

Maine Democrats’ Senate Primary Gets Ugly With Governor Attacking Opponent for Past Social Media Posts

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