The tribal issue—she’s vetoed tribal sovereignty bills. There are just a number of issues where the kind of median Democratic Party has moved on from where she was, maybe a few years ago, on those specific issues. So it’s more about those. But I think the age factor is really the biggest thing.
Bacon: And the age thing is happening nationally—the Biden thing has glommed onto her on some level. Is that what you’re saying?
Seitz-Wald: Yes. Absolutely. The age alone, in a different election cycle, maybe would not have been as big of a deal—but put yourself back a year, last summer, when this was all coming up fresh. Trump was still new in office. Those wounds about the Biden fiasco were very fresh, and people felt like this might be a Biden—again.
I heard many times people say, “I liked Mills as governor, I thought she did a good job, but I think it’s time for somebody newer and fresher and younger.”
And then the other big thing—which I think has been somewhat captured nationally, but had been kind of underestimated—is just the extent to which Platner has been everywhere. He has been omnipresent. He’s done 65 town halls.
It’s a small state where everybody knows everybody—it’s one or two degrees of separation. So when you’re doing 65 town halls where you get 300, 400, 1,000 people at them, eventually you start to hit a critical mass where you are reaching a significant chunk of Democratic primary voters.
And he’s gone on every podcast, every Instagram influencer, every local media, every national media. He’s answered all the questions that people feel like have been thrown at him. I know there are a lot of people who feel like he hasn’t answered some questions. But he’s just ubiquitous in a way that Mills is not, and I think that makes people feel at ease with him and connect with him.
And then the aesthetic thing—I think it’s totally real. I’ve heard a lot of women say they find him attractive, and a lot of men. The Austin Powers line: “Women want him, men want to be him.” In at least coastal Maine, that look says a lot.
And people—in a place where there’s a lot of outside money that comes in, and there are all these kind of micro-class dynamics, and people are constantly sizing each other up based on how tall your boots are and how messy your beard is and whether you work with your hands or not—I think he can connect with working men and women in a way that Democrats often don’t.
Bacon: Let’s finish up by talking about the general election now, because I think we can talk about that a little bit. So talk about this as an observer, what are the advantages Collins has coming into this, and what are the advantages Platner has coming into this?
Seitz-Wald: Collins has a lot of advantages, and I would not undercount her at all. She’s easily the most vulnerable Republican. It is a blue state—it’s not an extremely blue state, but it votes [Democratic] at the presidential level.
But it’s elected Collins a lot. She has massive name recognition. People tend to like incumbents. People like to cross party lines and feel like they’re independents, not doing the straight-ticket voting.
And she has these deep relationships—she doesn’t do them the same way that Platner does, it’s not in public, it’s in private. But she works so hard, and I know because I hear from people who are like, “Oh, I was talking to Susan last night,” or, “I got an email from Susan last night at 2:00 in the morning.”
She’s just one of these workaholic people who seems to be aware of everything going on at any time in the state, plugging in and contacting people—so again, making that kind of personal connection.
And then the last thing is seniority. She’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee. And this is a very old-school kind of dynamic, but in certain states like Alaska or Maine or West Virginia that really do depend on a lot of federal money for infrastructure projects, it goes a long way.
And she has called in all her chips—the Republican Senate leadership, the White House, clearly interested in getting her reelected. So she has just been making it rain all over the state. Hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure projects: a historical society near me just got $100,000 to repair their building, a new bridge, a museum near me just got a new STEM center from money that she organized, the street that I used to live on got a new culvert from money that she supported. And she’s put up this map on her website, and it’s just saturated with pins of places where she has sent money to.
And I think that kind of hurt Mills in the primary, where she said, “I’m only going to serve one term,” to try to allay the age concerns. But then Collins and Platner turned around and said, “One term in the Senate—you’re not going to get any seniority.”
Bacon: Reasonable.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah. Collins has definitely made the gravy train run. I’m sure she’ll take a couple of high-profile votes where she’ll break with Donald Trump, to prove that she’s a moderate—I’m doing air quotes here.
But it’s going to be a really tight race, and I don’t trust the polling enough. In 2020, Collins was outspent two to one by the Democrat who ran against her and still won by nine percentage points—all the polls had her losing.
So I think this is going to be a really bitter, really tight-fought race. The super PACs are already here. It’s—from here on out, I think until November, it’s just going to be one political ad after another.
Bacon: What are his advantages? Obviously the age [of Collins] is the big one. And what else—what are you nervous about with Collins? Because Platner’s a little bit—he has a tattoo, he has some disadvantages, obviously—but what are his advantages over Collins?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, the vulnerabilities are very obvious with Platner. And I wouldn’t discount that other things could come out between now and then—there might be things that Democrats found, the Mills team found, but they didn’t want to put out, just in case. I don’t know, and things can come out in a new light.
The energy, the campaign cadence, the willingness to go everywhere—he’s held 65 town halls since [entering the race]. He could do another 100 before November. And again, at some point, you’re reaching a meaningful number of voters and having a personal connection, shaking somebody’s hand, and I do think that goes a long way.
Money—he’s already outraised both Mills and Collins, and I suspect he will continue to, especially once the institutional Democrats get behind him. And then the kind of fresh-facedness, change, check on Donald Trump—it’s going to be a Democratic election year. We don’t know if it’s going to be a wave yet, but the winds should certainly be at his back, I think. And just that kind of potential for cross-party appeal.
The one big caution I will say, that I think has not been given enough attention nationally: the real swing voters in Maine are not white working-class men the way we often think about them in the Rust Belt or the former union voters. That’s a piece of it.
But the ones that have really mattered are women—educated, middle-aged and older women—who will vote either way. They might be registered Democrats or independents, but they have voted for Susan Collins in the past. They find her reasonable. They find her a good leader who fights—
Bacon: She’s one of them, right? She’s an educated white woman of a certain age, right?
Seitz-Wald: Yes. And she’s a very reasonable choice. She brings federal money that keeps your local tax dollars down, and everyone here—no matter how progressive you are—cares about their local taxes, their property taxes. Because we have an unusually high share of property tax burden, just the way our system works.
So I don’t know. I think it’s a big open question for Platner—does his kind of aggressive maleness, his machismo, the anger—does that push some of those women into Collins’s camp? And are there enough male progressives, or women who feel differently, to make up for it on the other end? I don’t know yet.
Bacon: But the good news is he’s got some of the people who worked with Zohran working with him. He’s got some of Zohran’s fans. But Zohran is—we wrote a piece in The New Republic about this—Zohran is a very smiley, happy progressivism, and Platner’s more of a—it’s things are burning, we need to destroy the bad and rebuild, right? He’s much more aggressive in a certain way and much less positive, I would say, right? Is that fair to say?
Seitz-Wald: Oh, a thousand percent. He talks openly about his anger. He was a Marine—he has killed men, he has killed multiple men in combat. He did four combat tours. He was a machine gunner in Fallujah. This is a—the tattoos—whether you believe him at his word or not, regardless of the Nazi tattoos, the whole thing speaks to that kind of aggro male thing. He says he’s calmed down, he’s found peace, he’s different now.
But the anger is still very much there, and that excites a lot of progressives in the kind of Bernie wing who are more eager to burn it all down. But I think it can also turn off a lot of other people. And I don’t want to just broad-brush and say “women”—but in Maine, based on the historic trends, coastal educated women—that’s the key group to watch.
Bacon: So Alex, Midcoast Villager—talk about how you all will cover the race. You’re a local outlet, you’re a new outlet. What does it mean to cover a general election that’s going to be covered by everyone?
Because I’ve learned a lot from this interview because you are there on the ground, but we’re going to have a lot of us coming in from outside. So what is your approach to covering this race going to be?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, it’s a great question—it’s one that we think about all the time. We are pretty new. We started in September 2024, rolled together with four historic newspapers that go back to the 1800s. So as our publisher says, we’re a new newspaper with an old soul—which I love.
We cover Knox and Waldo Counties, which is the middle of the coast, between Portland and Acadia—or Bar Harbor. For statewide races like this, that’s not really our bailiwick. Yes, we are part of the state, but we have limited resources—in case you haven’t heard, things are rough out there for local news.
We need to be prioritizing school board races, select board races, city council races. There are important ballot measures going on, because no one else will be covering those if we don’t. Plenty of people will be covering the Platner–Susan Collins race.
That said, we have some local connections—Amy Gertner, Platner’s wife, is from here. So we did a story—we broke the news on her IVF treatment, going to Norway for that, because she wanted it to go to her local newspaper. Our sister publication, the Ellsworth American—we have the same owner—is Graham Platner’s local newspaper. So we will find our ways to come in.
And given my background covering national politics, it’s going to be targets of opportunity on the big statewide races. But we’re not going to feel like we have to cover the latest developments in the Senate race or the governor’s race, because that can be handled by the Portland Press Herald, the Bangor Daily News, and by all the national folks that are coming in.
But then personally—because I do talk to people like you and other national folks—I do feel like I have a bit of a role to Maine-splain for the rest of the world, because it is a weird, unique place. And I know everybody feels that way about their state, but I think Maine has some strong claims to being especially weird and unique.
And the Villager—because the region that we reach has locals with families that go back generations, but we also get these “summer people,” as they’re called, who come in from around the country—we do also feel like we want to educate those people from a local perspective. But it’s always local first and foremost. And that’s what local news is all about: doing the stories that no one else can do.
Bacon: Great way to finish—I don’t want to add more to that. Alex Seitz-Wald, thanks for joining me. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We’ll have Kimberly Crenshaw later this week to talk about the Voting Rights Act ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday, and her new memoir. So Alex, thanks for joining me. Thanks everybody for tuning in. This is Perry Bacon—see you soon. Bye-bye.
Seitz-Wald: Thanks, Perry.
