Politics
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Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner is outspending Gov. Janet Mills heavily on TV ads in an effort to parry her new attacks on old Reddit posts looming over the race.
Following the Tuesday ad from the governor, Platner held a news conference at an Augusta union hall, where he acknowledged the post and brushed past reporters to make a quick exit. He was pictured Wednesday doing an interview with CNN in a Washington office building, while Mills’ campaign held a media call with supporters to continue prosecuting the issue.
Platner is mounting a large defense on TV. He has reserved more than $430,000 in TV and digital advertising this week to only $104,000 for Mills, according to AdImpact. He has nearly doubled his weekly spending since the Mills ad began running, rolling out two ads that directly respond to it while flexing his polling and fundraising advantages over the governor.
“These words are not who I am,” he says in the latest one. “So Maine, I’m asking you not to judge me for the worst thing I said on the internet on my worst day 14 years ago, but who I am today, and the kind of senator I promise to be.”
Mills and her allies have long argued behind the scenes that Platner’s string of controversies — from Reddit posts on sexual assault and other issues unearthed in October to the tattoo of a skull-and-crossbones symbol linked to Nazis that the progressive oyster farmer covered shortly afterward — would doom him in a campaign against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins.
Yet his position in the primary has only improved since then. He trailed Mills by 10 percentage points in a Pan Atlantic Research poll in December but led her by 7 points last month. He outraised both Mills and Collins toward the end of the year and has been ahead of Collins in early polling of their prospective matchup.
He has a large array of ads on the air now in Maine. The other one addressing the posts uses a woman to say Platner “said things he regrets.” Another one is a positive endorsement from another Mainer named Susan Collins, while another targets “Big Pharma.”
Mills is putting money behind her theory. But she is relying on news coverage to carry the message for her right now with no outside help. EMILY’s List injected hundreds of thousands of dollars late in Mills’ 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary to help finish off runner-up Adam Cote. That group has endorsed her this time but has not run ads on her behalf.
Both Mills and Platner have put female surrogates on display over the past few days. Platner’s news conference featured mostly women around his podium, while U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, endorsed Platner on Thursday. That was his fourth endorsement from the caucus led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who backs Mills.
“These remarks reveal something about what he thinks about women that we have been fighting against for centuries. Janet has taken up that charge since she has been in public life,” former Maine Democratic Party Vice Chair Peggy Schaffer said in a Wednesday statement from the Mills campaign.
