MAINE SQUEEZE

Democratic operative TheMaineWonk on the Trump-like antifragility of Graham Platner PLUS how to watch Maine on election night.

Jun 10, 2026

TheMaineWonk is a Democratic strategist based in northern Maine’s conservative second congressional district.

He’s watched Republican Susan Collins skate to victory over and over by bringing home the pork, but thinks this cycle is different.

The Oracle spoke with him the day before the primary about who’s behind the Graham Platner oppo dump, possible game-changers in the campaign, and what to watch on election night.

This interview has been edited for length. All answers are his own.

🚨 Just In: Before hitting publish on this piece, we received this audio update from MaineWonk breaking down yesterday’s primary results. Listen here 👇

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Maine is one of the key Senate seats Dems are hoping to flip. Give us the state of play.

Maine’s politics are incredibly unique, and Maine is infamously difficult to poll accurately. The one thing that makes Maine more unique is the tariff aspect of being a border state. We do a lot of business with our northern neighbors, and relations have been a little tense between the Canadians and the US over the last 18 months or so. And Mainers do not take well to having outside forces, whether it’s establishment politicians or establishment media, trying to influence them.

Susan Collins has been written off in every cycle and keeps winning. What is it about her?

The number one currency in Maine is personal relationships. It’s not campaign ads, it’s not literature, it’s not Twitter posts or Facebook posts. In Maine, it’s two degrees of separation: either you know your representative or senator directly, or somebody close to you knows them and knows their story, knows their family, knows their background. Collins is from a big family in Caribou, Maine, and these folks have networks.

The second point is that Susan Collins is one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate. She’s chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee, because it deals with all of the money. In this presidency there’s been $460 million allocated to Maine through pork barrel projects. $400 million of it has come from Susan Collins. That is how she does it. She hasn’t had a town hall in 30 years. She campaigns through press releases, going to VFW halls, going to fairs, going to parades. She stays away from answering tough questions. Her avenue to win is: “I bring home the bacon.” If I stay in the Senate, I’m still going to be a chairperson or ranking member. Graham’s a new guy, he’s going to go to the back of the line.

The question is, is it going to be enough? And my answer to that is, I don’t think so. Not in this cycle. She has high net negatives. Last polling averages have her at a net negative of minus 13, minus 14. You’re in an anti-incumbent cycle. People are fed up with the status quo politician, and there’s nobody more status quo than somebody who’s been there for 30 years. And the president, who is the head of her party, has a negative 25 or 26 net approval rating in Maine.

Let’s talk about the Democratic candidate, Graham Platner. Where did he come from and what is his story?

Graham grew up in Sullivan, Maine, about 35 to 40 minutes from where I’m sitting right now. He went to John Bapst, a semi-parochial private school in Bangor, went to the Marines, went to George Washington University, went back into the military after that, came back to Maine after his deployments and started his oyster company around 2018. As a disabled veteran, he lives off his benefits and the small money that comes in from his oyster farm.

Graham and I met about seven, eight, nine years ago through mutual friends. Everybody outside of Maine doesn’t understand how small Maine really is. There’s only 1.4 million people here. I was just in Bar Harbor the other night with Ro Khanna and Graham and his wife Amy and Troy Jackson, who’s running for governor, Matt Dunlap, who’s running for Congress, and some others, and we were all just marveling at how we’ve met and how we’re connected. That’s just how Maine is. Everybody somehow, some way, knows everybody.

As far as how they found him, this is not a secret in political circles, there are people out there in activist circles that go and recruit candidates. Some of the mainstream Democrats in Maine were not interested in jumping in this race, many were running for governor. When Graham got in and shot up like a rocket, his fundraising was through the roof. That’s when the establishment Democrats started to get nervous, your neoliberal corporatist Democrats, the Chuck Schumers of the world, and they had to dragoon Mills to get into this race. She didn’t want to run. The people behind Graham are the same people that ran Mamdani’s campaign, the Fight Agency. The same people that ran Fetterman’s campaign.

I actually like that he is not polished, he hasn’t been groomed to run for office his entire life. His story of going through the military, coming out of it with PTSD, going to seek therapy, still working through that, I think that is commendable.

A series of oppo stories has come out just a few days before the June 8 Primaries. How much has it moved the needle?

The movement in the polling has been nominal at best. Both sides have put out internal polls, and the one that really stuck out to me was the internal poll released by Collins from Fabrizio Ward, a Trump pollster, showing it a dead heat, even after all of this. And that was before the Bar Harbor event, when the amount of media on our tiny island…you would have thought the Pope was here.

This was Graham’s first big event in front of cameras since the oppo dump, and all the news reports after fascinated me. Even Fox News, you go back and watch the field reporters they had here, they were talking to voters up and down the coast, and they were all telling you what I’ve been saying: nobody cares. Mainers don’t care about the personal character stuff.

I saw this with Trump in 2016, you could throw every scandal you want at him, it may stay in the 24-hour news cycle for a couple of days, and then it fades.

The severity of the attacks is going down. First it was the tattoo. Then it was the Reddit comments. Then it was the Kik app. Now the last attack from the Maine Wire this week is that Graham’s oyster company and his campaign website were set up at the same time, meaning the oyster company isn’t real, which is not true, and already been debunked. I think they realize they can’t figure out how to take him down, and his support is actually growing.

Polymarket odds for Platner went from around 75-80% before the oppo dump, down to 50, and are now recovering to around 62%.

As I’ve said, this race was always going to be close. The early odds of him being 80-20 — okay, this is Susan Collins, and we’re talking about Maine, which is incredibly difficult to poll accurately. I think what you’re seeing right now is pretty damn close — 60-40, 55-45, 50-50, somewhere in that range makes sense to me.

Now, who are the swing voters in Maine? The people that are going to decide this election are the people who were either independent, or Republicans that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. That’s key. When you see polling come out, look at the cross tabs instead of looking at the top line. Look at people that are registered independent in that boomer age group. Look at people that are identified Republican in that age group. Start to see if you see any movement there. Both sides are going to have their base, that swing voter is going to decide the election in Maine.

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What is Graham’s actual platform? If you go to a Graham Platner speech, what does he hit?

Health care is one of his top issues. He’s a Medicare for All person. He talks about rural hospital closureS, the One Big Beautiful Bill that passed in the Trump administration basically decimated rural health care. We’ve had hospitals already close in Maine because of that. He’s your classic populist going after the elite class that he believes isn’t paying their fair share in taxes, that they’re getting all these tax breaks while working Americans are seeing higher inflation, lower services, and higher tax bills.

He’s the same cut of cloth as AOC or Bernie Sanders or Ro Khanna. And by the way, this has been a long time coming in Democratic politics. The frustration with the National Democratic Party has been that they focused on identity politics when the one thing that is still essentially identity politics, but is not race or sexual orientation or religion-based, is class-based. It’s middle and working-class America versus the elite class. You’re starting to see those changes in the Democratic Party, and it’s resonating.

What about the Israel question? He’s been described as an Israel-skeptic. Is that fair, and does it help or hurt him?

You’re spot on. Any cross tabs in the polls show a pretty good sample of Democrats that share the same view Graham does; about Gaza, about deterring and stopping funding of Israel. That is a key component of that Democratic coalition. And at the national level, a lot has been made about the autopsy report from 2024, where Democrats lost Michigan because a lot of Arab Americans voted for Donald Trump. I’m willing to bet those folks do not support the president now.

To the normies, the people that aren’t in the weeds of this every single day, they want to know simply: how are you going to make my life better? How are you improving the economy? Why do I have to drive 100 miles to go to a hospital? The national stuff plays in, but it all really comes together.

Will the Democratic establishment try to sabotage him?

He has said Schumer shouldn’t be the majority leader, and I believe the majority of Democrats will tell you the same thing. Schumer has already endorsed Graham. There was a well-covered meeting after these stories came out last week, Graham went to Washington and met with senators including Schumer, Gillibrand, Warren, and Sanders. The one way you’ll know if Graham is in trouble is if any of those folks withdraw support. You’ve seen the opposite, they’ve doubled down.

The one person I thought was really interesting is the godfather of establishment Democratic politics: James Carville. Carville endorsed Platner this week in a funny way, where he essentially said, maybe this is what we need…For an establishment Democrat from Louisiana, who is most certainly not a leftist or a progressive, to realize what Maine’s politics are about and why he’s a good fit for this cycle tells you something’s happening.

If you were a Platner YES holder on Polymarket, what would make you panic and dump your shares?

Number one, of course, is people who have endorsed him withdrawing their endorsement. Bernie’s obviously the big one. Ro Khanna would be another. Elizabeth Warren would be another. Tim Walz was the first person out of the gate to endorse Graham, had an event here in Portland at the very beginning of the campaign, so I remind hardcore Kamala Harris supporters who are anti-Graham that Kamala Harris’s own VP candidate was one of the first people to rally for him. If one of the most popular Democrats in the country says something negative about Graham, AOC being one, Barack Obama being another, that’s important.

On the flip side, what would make me want to buy more of Graham: post-primary, the rallying that’s going to occur. I guarantee the press stories on Wednesday will be: despite all the scandals, despite all the red flags, the people of Maine have decided it’s Graham Platner. That’s when you’re going to see the rest of the Democratic Party, who’ve been a little wishy-washy, come in, both inside the Beltway and with donors.

Unless there’s what I call the Hindenburg, the nuclear bomb, the one thing that could possibly do it, they’re not going to be able to sustain this. And at some point people are going to say, are we going to talk about the economy at any point? Are we going to talk about the rural hospitals that are closing? The lobster catch in Maine last year was the lowest in 17 years, prices are dropping, diesel prices are higher, fishermen are getting out of the business. That’s what this election is ultimately about.

Will Collins debate him?

If I’m a Susan Collins advisor, I’m avoiding debates. Just the optics alone of a 73-year-old woman who has visible health issues against a young 42-year-old who has an aura and a presence when he speaks with that deep baritone — you put them on television, that’s quite the comparison. I would compare that to the Biden debate that basically derailed a presidency. Where you went out there and look like a damn zombie against a vigorous Donald Trump. That’s an optic you want to escape. She’s going to have to debate eventually, especially if this race stays tight.

One thing I’ll tell you: it’s been a rumor all cycle that Susan Collins didn’t want to run for reelection. This was the latest in her 30-year career that she made an announcement she was running, and it came after the National Republican Senatorial Committee promised $40 million in ad spending. That’s when she jumped in…This is the first time Collins is going to have to campaign hard. I’m not sure she’s up for it.

On election night, where are you watching to get an early read of how the day went?

We only have two congressional districts. Any Democrat is going to win Congressional District One, that’s Portland, no Republican will ever win it. Congressional District Two is where everything happens. Trump won that district by nine points in 2024, but a Democrat has won the congressional seat the last three cycles. That’s what I’m looking for.

Susan Collins in 2020 won Maine’s second congressional district by 24 points. The last polling has her winning it by only five — that’s major. If Platner makes Maine CD2 competitive, if she only wins that district by 10 or 12 and he runs up the score in the Portland district, he wins. That’s the key.

On the coast, Hancock County up to Washington County, right up to Canada, those will come in first. Those are the population centers here. You have Bangor two hours inside. That’s where he’s going to try to run up the score. And then the coastal communities, which are less populated but more liberal. Much like the Trump model of winning by running up the score in sparsely populated counties, Graham’s going to follow the same playbook, going to his liberal strongholds in Bangor but also driving turnout in those coastal communities with registered voters who aren’t necessarily likely voters yet.

Big picture, Democrats need Maine to take back the Senate. How do you see the path?

The Democratic path to the Senate majority hasn’t changed. They need to win Maine, North Carolina, and Alaska. North Carolina is basically settled. Cooper’s going to win by seven or eight points. Alaska, Murkowski challenger Sola is ahead of Sullivan. Then Maine, which we’ve already talked about. That’s three. Then they only need to win one more. Texas, Ohio, Nebraska, Montana, Florida is competitive, South Carolina is going to be interesting because of Lindsey Graham’s unpopularity. All they’ve got to do is win one.

And if Graham doesn’t win, you still have Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is leading. You still have Talarico in Texas, who I think has the best chance Democrats have had to win Texas since Lloyd Bentsen– I think the Senate ends up 51-49 Democrat or 50-50. That’s where we’re headed.

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