Maine Gov. Janet Mills made her much-anticipated entry into the Democratic primary for Senate on Tuesday, seeking to challenge Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.
Mills’ announcement video features an exchange between her and President Donald Trump, in which Mills said, “See you in court,” in response to Trump’s threat to take away federal funding. Maine ultimately prevailed, with the federal government stopping its effort to freeze funding for child nutrition.
“Honestly, if this president and this Congress were doing things that were even remotely acceptable, I wouldn’t be running for the U.S. Senate,” Mills says in her announcement video. “But when Trump rips away health care from millions of Americans and drives up costs on everything from groceries to housing to trucks and cars, then turns around and gives corporate CEOs a massive tax cut … and Susan Collins helps him do it?”
Mills, a two-term governor, handily defeated a comeback bid from GOP former Gov. Paul LePage in 2024, prevailing with more than 55 percent of the vote. The 77-year-old Mills is term-limited and cannot seek reelection, but she was seen as a prized recruit for Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., in seeking to unseat Collins, the only remaining Republican senator from New England.
Mills’ decision was long anticipated, with an ActBlue fundraising page and related social media appearing prematurely ahead of the formal announcement.
Mills joins a robust Democratic primary field that also includes Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and harbor master who has picked up the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; as well as former House staffer Jordan Wood; and Dan Kleban, a co-founder of Maine Beer Company. The primary is setting up to be a battle between the old guard and the new faces of the Democratic Party.
“People are just ready for generational change. They’re ready for folks who have shown that they’ve been embedded in their communities,” Kleban said before Mills entered the race. “We’re at a point in time when we should be thinking outside the box and looking for candidates, like myself, who just don’t fit that traditional elected politician mold.”
Collins, a fifth-term senator and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has the longest uninterrupted streak of consecutive roll call votes cast without missing a vote since the start of her Senate career, recently casting her 9,750th vote. She was first elected to the Senate in 1996.
While she has yet to formally announce her reelection bid, Collins, 72, is widely expected to run and has said she intends to do so. In her last campaign, in 2020, Collins defeated Democrat Sara Gideon, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, prevailing on the first ballot without needing to use the state’s ranked-choice procedure. Maine’s other Senate seat is held by Angus King, a former governor and an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race Tilt Republican.
The post Maine Gov. Janet Mills officially enters Senate race appeared first on Roll Call.
