It wasn’t necessarily anything that Graham Platner did that made Debbie Johnson stick with the oysterman over Janet Mills.
Instead, it was something the governor did to Platner — running negative ads that targeted Platner for old social media comments he made about sexual assault victims.
Johnson, a 75-year-old retired public school teacher and administrator who lives in Portland, said she wrote to Mills to give her a cold update.
“Your really negative, nasty ads against him turned me against (you),” Johnson told Mills, whom she had previously voted for in gubernatorial races. Platner has repeatedly said those comments, and others he posted, no longer reflect who he is today.
Johnson was among about a thousand people who filled a Holiday Inn Portland By the Bay ballroom Saturday evening for the “Senators Money Can’t Buy” rally featuring Platner and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who finished behind another Platner backer — Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — and former President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential primary.
Attendees said they feel like the 41-year-old progressive and military veteran is now rightfully focusing more on unseating Sen. Susan Collins, the 73-year-old Republican from Caribou seeking a sixth term in November, than on his Democratic primary opponent: Mills, the 78-year-old governor and former attorney general from Farmington who is termed out of the Blaine House this year.
Polling and fundraising and rally crowd sizes have all backed up the idea that Platner is the frontrunner in the primary against Mills (and Brunswick Democrat David Costello).
And Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, hammered home that focus on November and beyond while kicking off Saturday’s event.
“In 199 days, my husband is going to defeat Susan Collins …” Gertner said to a standing ovation and sustained cheers. “… and in 260 days, Graham will be sworn in to serve alongside Elizabeth Warren.”
The Maine race has drawn sizable national attention and served as a prime example of the generational, establishment-versus-outsider debates, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer supporting Mills while a handful of other senators have come out in favor of Platner.
Mills has drawn far smaller crowds for her “candid conversations” or roundtables with business leaders, health care providers, students and other Mainers. She and her supporters aren’t giving up, though her advertising activity has slowed to a trickle.
The governor and her allies feel her electoral experience and her history of standing up to President Donald Trump make her a better pick than Platner, who served his tiny Down East town as harbor master and planning board chair before his campaign and meteoric rise began last summer. Mills has also said Republicans and their significant amount of spending in the race will make “mincemeat” of Platner and his past controversies.
In a somewhat awkward moment of levity, an 80-year-old woman sitting in the front row approached Platner mid-speech, attempting to hand him cash. The woman said more would be coming; she plans to donate the $300 affordability check that the governor included in her supplemental budget to Platner’s campaign.
Warren and Platner’s supporters in the room Saturday alluded to the governor with a moderate record on some issues and Collins as the Republican senior senator who has styled herself a moderate while voting with Trump most of the time.
Warren, 76, told the crowd there are two types in Washington right now — those who “moderate” and “go along to get along,” and those who “realize when the system is this broken, it’s no longer time to make changes at the margins.”
“I am so damn tired of hearing what we can’t do,” Warren exclaimed.
Platner will fight for universal child care and strengthening Social Security, Warren said. She came to Maine this weekend because she “can’t wait to wade into that fight” with Platner, while current members of Congress “bend the knee” to billionaires.
As Platner took the microphone at the end of the night, many of his lines had become familiar to supporters by now — He railed against an economic system that “isn’t natural,” and he bashed policymakers for not enforcing anti-monopoly laws while deregulating “speculative markets that are taking us closer and closer to the brink of economic collapse every single day.”
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who you voted for if the hospital closed,” Platner said, adding the only group that people should point fingers at is not each other, not at immigrants, not at transgender kids, but at billionaires.
Sitting near the front of the room before the speeches began, Barry Pitchforth said he feels Platner represents “a paradigm shift” and will try to protect the environment if elected.
“He’s pretty straight up. That kind of cuts through a lot of the chatter,” Pitchforth, a 79-year-old boatbuilder from Arundel, said.
Then he chuckled for several seconds after telling a reporter why Platner stands out. “He’s under 65.”
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Billy Kobin can be reached at [email protected].
