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AUGUSTA, Maine — If it were just up to registered Democrats, Gov. Janet Mills would have been leading a poll released Wednesday in her U.S. Senate primary.
But unenrolled voters broke heavily for insurgent candidate Graham Platner by a huge margin, giving the oyster farmer from Sullivan a 7-point lead on the two-term governor. The election that will determine who faces U.S. Sen. Susan Collins will be waged in June alongside two crowded primaries for governor.
It will be the first Blaine House race waged under Maine’s semi-open primary law that passed in 2022 and was first used in the presidential election cycle two years later. It allows unenrolled voters to vote in the party primary of their choice. That could have a major impact in 2026.
Before this law was implemented, Maine allowed unenrolled voters to switch into parties to vote in primaries on Election Day. So while the new law is not a radical change, it lowers one of the main barriers to voting in these elections.
This was not a major factor in 2024 in part because the primaries were sleepy. President Donald Trump’s minor primary challenge that March led unenrolled voters to disproportionately pull Republican ballots. Things were more evenly split in the June congressional and state primaries in which only 22,000 independents voted, according to state data.
Things will likely be different in Maine’s 2026 primaries. Democrats look fired up. On Tuesday in red Texas, they voted in higher numbers than Republicans. Maine’s June slate is dominated by the race between Platner and Mills. In the Pan Atlantic Research survey released this week, Platner got 56% support among independents to her 23%, making them the decider.
“We absolutely see unenrolled voters as part of the coalition to win both the primary and general,” Platner spokesperson Charlie Hills said. “That’s why Graham has gone everywhere to talk to everyone — from Maine’s bluest counties to our reddest counties.”
That race is only one example of the possible influence of these voters. Democrats have a five-way gubernatorial primary brewing, while Republicans could have up to 10 candidates on their ballot. These are ranked-choice voting races unlikely to have a majority winner, making later-round choices matter more than they do in most elections.
Independent voters may look like they reside between the parties, but more than 8 in 10 of them expressed a preference for one party or another in Pew Research Center polling from 2019. This could mean that a lot of Maine’s newly eligible primary voters are already somewhat baked into the state’s party apparatus.
