Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | News | July 7, 2026
As the resident Mainer here, I feel it is my obligation to write about the Graham Platner situation. Another article came out yesterday on Politico, and there’s no need to rehash the details, other than to say: I believe her. I believe every one of the women who have come forward. Graham Platner is cooked. He will almost certainly drop out this week, which is an absolute blessing for that Senate seat, because it had become increasingly likely — even before yesterday’s revelation — that he was not going to win. “He’s not Susan Collins” and “he may decide the fate of the Senate” can get a candidate past a tattoo he clearly lied about, but the article from the NYTimes in June left most Democrats here very uneasy, because violent men do violent things. When yesterday’s article dropped, it didn’t feel like much of a surprise. Beyond the horrors described in it — which are obviously terrible from a human perspective — it felt almost like a relief from a political one, because “at least he’s not Susan Collins” was really starting to feel like a thin slogan.
Whatever else one might think of Maine right now, know this: We just really wanted our own Zohran Mamdani, Maine Edition. And from a policy perspective, that’s what Platner represented. From a human perspective, however, he was really starting to feel like our own version of the President.
The good news is this: When he drops out (and he better, because his support has completely evaporated except for some deranged hangers-on on Reddit), we have genuinely good candidates to replace him. We ran a gubernatorial primary last month with five candidates — four of them very viable — all of whom I would have voted for ahead of Platner. We have ranked-choice voting here, and those four candidates each received between 20 and 27 percent of the first-choice vote; it was actually the second-place finisher who won the race after the ranked-choice tabulations were complete.
Her name is Hannah Pingree. In the first poll released by the Times last week, she was up by 14, and that’s even with an independent candidate who siphons some votes away from her (head-to-head, she’s up by 15). That’s the tilt of Maine right now. And the biggest reason that Susan Collins was still competitive against Platner (he was up by only 2 points in that same poll) is all of Platner’s hideous baggage.
I think that any of the three runners-up in the Governor’s race can compete with Collins, as long as they don’t have any unknown baggage themselves. I almost don’t even have a preference: Shenna Bellows is the Secretary of State and the former executive director of the ACLU of Maine (the position my wife now holds); Nirav Shah was the state’s CDC director and a very popular figure during COVID; and Troy Jackson is a logger and the former president of the Maine Senate. Jackson is the guy most in the mold of Platner (politically), has the backing of Bernie, and would probably fare better in conservative Northern Maine, even if he did come in third in the Governor’s race.
It’s unclear exactly how we might choose, although there’s talk of a caucus later this month. The state Democratic Party has already stated that it won’t make the decision unilaterally, so at least we learned something from the situation the national party faced when Biden dropped out. I don’t know who the state will pick, but all three candidates are solid, though Bellows (because of her past with the ACLU) and Shah (because of his association with COVID) may not play as well upstate.
We may ultimately still lose, because when voters get into that booth, they might — once again — consider how much money Collins brings into the state (it’s ungodly) and fill in her bubble, because that legislative pork feeds a lot of Mainers, so to speak. But I truly think that most of the state is ready to be done with her; we just need a viable candidate without a violent history toward women. Shah, Bellows, or Jackson all fit that bill. They’re all reasonably well known in the state, they all just came out of a statewide race, and they were all incredibly civil to one another throughout it. The way that the three who lost comported themselves during the debate and after the final results came in may have actually endeared them more toward voters.
(Worth noting that social media is floating Heather Cox Richardson’s name, too. That’d be cool. Unlikely, but cool.)
