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Gov. Janet Mills had no plans to run against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins until her February exchange with President Donald Trump at the White House, she said in an interview.
The Democrat announced her 2026 campaign Tuesday, landing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York one of his top recruits. Before a heavyweight battle with Collins, the 77-year-old faces a primary with candidates that include the upstart Graham Platner, who has gained momentum while making her more centrist ideology an issue.
Mills began to publicly bat around the idea of running for Senate in late 2024. It was looking like a remote possibility until the Republican president threatened Maine’s federal funding over its policies on transgender students. Her “see you in court” retort made her a Democratic symbol of resistance to Trump’s policies.
Around that time, sources told the Bangor Daily News that the idea of running went from an idle thought among those close to the governor to a real possibility. Mills told the BDN on Monday that she wasn’t thinking about running ahead of the Trump clash.
She told Semafor that she met with Schumer once in the spring. In the BDN interview, she noted talks with two other top Democratic recruits, former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, who launched in July, and former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who officially got going in August.
“I talked to him, and I encouraged him to run for the U.S. Senate. And then he said, ‘Well, what about you?’” Mills said of Cooper. “And I encouraged Sherrod Brown to run too. And he turned around and said, ‘OK, what about you?’”
Mills has always looked more likely to run harder against Trump than Collins, but she is previewing her lines of attack on the senator with whom she has long had a friendly relationship. In her video, she puts the senator among a group of Republicans who “bend the knee” to the president.
Collins’ perch on the Senate Appropriations Committee helped Maine win back some of the federal funding it lost under Trump. The senator’s calibrated votes and a long record of service in the state helped her beat back similar arguments during a massive 2020 campaign, and Republicans noted that Mills has spoken kindly of the senator over their tenures.
“The only thing Mills has gotten right in her career is praising [Collins’] effective and proven leadership,” Alex Latcham, the executive director of the Senate Leadership Fund, a leadership-connected super PAC, said in a statement.
Mills noted that the senator has not faced a Democrat with statewide elections under their belt since she got elected, and her closest allies see urgency among the electorate for someone who will stand up for Trump and chip away at the Republican majority.
“She’s got a team waiting for her; it isn’t just the family either,” said Peter Mills, the governor’s brother and a former Republican lawmaker. “I’ve never seen the nation quite so concerned about a president.”
