Maine Gov. Janet Mills spent election eve not rallying voters or reviving her dormant Senate campaign, but attending the funeral of the late Rep. Barney Frank in Boston. The 78-year-old Democrat, still technically on Tuesday's primary ballot, chose a memorial service over what national Democrats had desperately hoped would be a last-minute return to the race against Graham Platner, the party's deeply troubled presumptive nominee.
The decision, first reported by the New York Post, effectively closes the door on weeks of quiet maneuvering by Democratic operatives who wanted Mills to step back in and spare the party a general-election matchup between Platner and incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
What Democrats are left with instead is a candidate whose campaign has been dogged by misconduct allegations from former girlfriends, reports of sexting other women while married, and the revelation of a skull-and-crossbones tattoo with Nazi associations, all heading into a race against one of the most durable Republican incumbents in the Senate.
Mills launched her Senate bid last October with the backing of Sen. Chuck Schumer, who views a Collins defeat as essential to any Democratic path back to the Senate majority. But by late April, Mills was trailing Platner by double digits in some polls and abruptly ended active campaigning.
She never formally withdrew. Under Maine state law, specifically Title 21-A, section 371, candidates must file to withdraw from the ballot 70 days before a primary. That deadline fell at the end of March, well before Mills stopped campaigning.
Mills told the Lewiston Sun Journal earlier this month that she remained a live option.
"People have the impression that I 'withdrew' or 'dropped out,' but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot."
That distinction fueled weeks of speculation. Multiple allies privately urged her to get back in, and national Democrats quietly prayed she would rescue the Maine race. She didn't.
Instead, Mills made scattered public appearances after suspending her campaign, touting legislation barring cellphones in classrooms, celebrating dairy farmers. She refrained from endorsing anyone in the Senate primary. And on election eve, she was in Boston, not Portland.
The oyster farmer from Maine kicked off his campaign months before Mills entered the race and built a polling lead that ultimately drove her out. But the weeks since have not been kind to the frontrunner.
The New York Times broke a story last week detailing allegations from former girlfriends about Platner's past behavior. Among the accusers: Lyndsey Fifield, a GOP operative and former girlfriend, who alleged that Platner pulled her out of a cab by the wrists and at another point twisted her arm behind her back before locking her in a room. Platner has denied being physical.
The Times also reported it had reviewed past text messages Fifield sent to a confidant describing Platner's tattoo, a skull-and-crossbones design he says he got while inebriated in Croatia in 2007. Platner has insisted he did not know about its Nazi ties.
The Wall Street Journal separately reported that Platner was sexting with other women while married. He tied the knot with his wife in 2023.
None of this has yet collapsed his polling position. The latest RealClearPolitics aggregate shows Platner ahead of Collins by 7.4 percentage points. But Democrats with knowledge of the race are far from confident. One Democratic operative aligned with Mills put it bluntly: "I think if Platner is anywhere in the 60s he's in trouble in terms of support."
Collins, for her part, has a history of massively overperforming polls, a fact that makes Platner's current lead less reassuring than the topline number suggests.
Frank, the late Massachusetts congressman whose funeral drew Mills to Boston, had backed Mills in the Senate race. While in hospice, he publicly expressed qualms about Platner's candidacy. His words, reported by Politico, now read like an epitaph for the party's predicament.
"I worry a little bit about the tendency on the Democratic side to fall for the flavor of the month. There is this flirtation or this attraction of people who are new and who are very good at articulating a response to the anger, but without talking about what you do about it."
Frank didn't live to see whether his warning would prove right. But Democrats heading into Tuesday's primary are now confronting exactly the scenario he described, a candidate who rode populist energy past a vetted, experienced governor, only to face a cascade of personal revelations with a general election looming.
Two other Democrats remain in the race: David Costello and write-in hopeful Andrea LaFlamme. Both have lagged behind Platner dramatically in most polling. Neither has emerged as a viable alternative.
One Democratic operative framed the Mills option in terms that underscore how thin the bench has become: "Mills sits vetted and scandal-free, with her only baggage being a list of accomplishments and a record of effective scorn for the president."
That operative was making a case for a candidacy that, as of election eve, Mills herself declined to pursue.
For Chuck Schumer, the Maine seat is not a luxury target. A win against Collins is described as paramount to his hopes of reclaiming the Senate majority. He invested early in Mills for a reason, she was the kind of candidate who could compete in a state where Collins has built deep personal loyalty across party lines.
Platner is not that candidate. His polling lead in the primary does not answer the question that matters: whether a nominee carrying misconduct allegations, a tattoo controversy, and reports of marital infidelity can persuade enough Maine independents to unseat a Republican incumbent who has survived tougher cycles than this one.
Democrats who hoped Mills would provide an off-ramp now have no off-ramp. She is still on the ballot, technically. But she is not campaigning, not endorsing, and not in Maine.
The irony of Mills attending Frank's funeral on election eve is hard to miss. Frank warned Democrats about exactly this kind of candidate. Mills was the alternative Frank endorsed. And the party let her walk away without a fight, only to spend the final hours before the primary hoping she'd walk back.
She walked to Boston instead.
When a party's best hope on election eve is that a 78-year-old governor might un-suspend a campaign she quit six weeks ago, the problem isn't the governor. It's the party that cleared the field for a nominee it now can't defend.
