This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 13 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the Right Now show by The New Republic. I’m excited to be joined today by Alex Seitz-Wald. He was a national political reporter for a long time. We worked at NBC News together—he covered Hillary Clinton, he covered the Democratic Party particularly for a while, but he did a lot of great stories at NBC and other outlets.
He recently moved to Maine a few years ago, and now he’s the deputy editor at the Midcoast Villager. And so we wanted to bring him on today because it looks like Maine politics is getting interesting right now. The reporting is that Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, is likely to enter the Democratic race for the Senate, where you already have a few candidates—most notably Graham Platner, who’s become kind of this phenomenon both in Maine, as far as I can tell, but also around the country.
So, Alex, welcome.
Alex Seitz-Wald: Hey, Perry, great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Bacon: And so, I’m excited to have a person who’s in Maine now, but also someone who knows a lot about national politics because I wanna put this race in that context. So I guess my first question would be, how long [have] you been in Maine?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, it’s a strange thing. I tried to leave D.C. and politics and campaign reporting, and then I go to Maine for small local journalism—and it just suddenly became an outpouring of politics. I’ve been here for about three years. My mom has lived here for a lot longer. We lived in D.C. for 15 years, where Perry and I worked together at NBC.
Then my mom got sick in 2021, and I was working remotely anyway, so we decided to move up and be closer to her and so our daughter could have some experience with her grandmother. And we’ve decided to stay. Then Villager started up just about a year ago, and I was so impressed with what they were doing—and obviously so concerned about what’s going on in local media—that I thought it was a really exciting opportunity to try to do a cool, innovative new thing. I started in February, and since then we’ve had one political race after another. It does seem like Maine is going to be the center of the political universe in 2026, although I’m obviously biased in making that assessment.
Bacon: Well, let me ask first of all, I don’t get the sense—I’m an outsider to this—that Graham ... in a lot of state politics, there are people who become famous nationally, but they’re sort of known activists, they’ve been in the community, people know that they are, they’ve been sort of building their profile for a while. My sense is that Graham Platner is not that. He sort of jumped on the scene. Did you know who he was in January?
Seitz-Wald: No, I live one county over from Graham Platner— a very similar kind of area economically, culturally, geographically. I do not know him. I know—his wife actually is from the next town over from me, so a lot of people in my area knew him. But no, this is... I mean, basically unprecedented. I’ve been, for the past six to seven weeks now since he’s been in the race, trying to come up with any kind of analog from my experience covering national politics, and it’s really hard to, because—not just the intensity of the energy that he’s found, but how unknown he was.
He was not a well-known guy at all. The closest thing I can think of is Jon Ossoff in his first run for the House race, where you go from total unknown to, kind of, national star supernova overnight. He’s a harbormaster. His highest position was chair of the planning board in his town of 1,200—which is small, even by Maine standards. My town is 3,500, so it’s just crazy. But the enthusiasm is real, it’s genuine. I drive around, I see Graham Platner signs everywhere.
Last week I was at an event at our family’s favorite pizza place where 1,000 people were there. It was insane. No one had ever seen anything like that. I talked to state senators and reps who’ve been around for a long time. They said that the closest they could think of is Bernie Sanders or Obama or, you know, maybe like a Pete Buttigieg or Elizabeth Warren—but in other words, presidential level. And the only other comparison I can think of is like Beto O’Rourke in his Senate run. But even then, he had been a House member. He was a known thing.
So this is a really intense outpouring of support for him, and Janet Mills looking like she’s going to get in tomorrow. So I think we’re about to have a very interesting primary kicking off here.
Bacon: So, I want to hit all three candidates. So let’s start with Platner and then I want to hit Collins and Mills as well. So Platner: There’s big crowds, who’s at the Graham Platner—is it older people, younger people? You can’t tell who’s college educated and who isn’t, but give me a sense of who’s there.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, I love playing this game, and it’s tricky around here because, you know, you can have like multi-generational wealthy people who dress like farmers because they are farmers, and you can have farmers who have PhDs, you know, so it’s tricky to do that kind of—but I try, of course.
So he definitely has young people, he definitely has some older, you know, there’s a lot of kind of former hippies or back-to-the-lander type people who—they just self-identify as such. Your usual suspects, in other words, is what I’m saying. The kinds of people who would turn up to a Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or somebody like that, who would read The New Republic.
But you also have a lot of others, and it’s people who are not engaged in politics, you know, actively. And what I’ve heard from a lot of people—these are kind of soft-progressive Democrats who don’t like Trump and are just kind of despondent about the state of politics in general—and this is the first thing since the second Trump election that has given them a sense of hope or purpose, that something possible can happen.
I have seen some evidence of real working-class, you know, bigger support. The joke that I make is, is it just brunch boots or is it work boots who are turning out? I’m not totally convinced yet that it is actually work boots. He did have some town halls this past weekend up in what we call “the county,” because it’s so big it’s the only one that can matter, but it’s way northern Maine—it’s super rural, incredibly poor and conservative—and he had big turnouts there. And I do think his message is the kind of thing that could resonate.
And we also have Jared Golden, the congressman who’s much more conservative but aesthetically sort of similar—you know, a younger guy, veteran, tattoos, doesn’t look like a typical politician. He’s been very successful. So I think Platner has all the ingredients. I’m not yet fully convinced that it will actually come together.
Bacon: Because I think you and I could say crowd sizes are something, but they don’t necessarily—Bernie always got bigger crowds than Hillary Clinton, at times got bigger crowds than Hillary Clinton in 2016. Obama got bigger crowds than Clinton in states Clinton won. I remember being in Pennsylvania—huge rallies in Philadelphia for Obama. Hillary won the state. So you can have enthusiasm among a—but I wonder if he just has a ... you know, Bernie has a very devoted base, and it looks like he’s drawing some of the Bernie people who show up at rallies but are intense but small in number, ultimately.
Seitz-Wald: Yes, it’s a great question. I remember a guy on the Bernie campaign in 2016 told me he realized he was going to lose. He had spent time touring with the Grateful Dead—because, of course—and when he started to recognize people in the crowd at Bernie rallies like he had when he was touring with the Dead, he knew that they were in trouble. He was like, “Oh, these are the same people who are coming to multiple rallies.” So that’s definitely, you know, something to be aware of.
And just, I mean, peaking too early is absolutely a thing, and his campaign is concerned about this. They didn’t anticipate—you know, you can’t plan or expect for this kind of thing—and to go from zero to 100 so quickly, without having really taken a single shot yet. I mean, no one has really come after him, no one’s really had to come after him.
But, you know, the durability of that support, and the length of time that they can maintain that—those are the big questions for me going forward. That was our cover story this week, a story I wrote about, you know, it’s incredible that he has this momentum, but can he sustain it for 15 months to the general and 12 months to the primary?
Bacon: So I’ve never heard him on the stump. I mean, he sounds—I assume he doesn’t sound like Mamdani, in that rent freezes are not necessarily an issue in Maine—but he sort of sounds populist, you know, fighting billionaires, outsiders. What does he sound like on the campaign trail?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, he sounds like a Maine Mamdani, actually—you know, replace all the New York issues with lobstering and timber—but yeah. And that, so I got a—this is, I’d never heard of him, as you know. As I just said, I was trying to avoid doing politics this year. I got a text from a guy I knew from the John Fetterman campaign saying, “Hey, I’m working with a Senate candidate who’s about to launch tomorrow. Do you want to talk to him?”
You know, when he first announced, I was like, it’s going to be Janet Mills, or she’s not going to run, or this race is going to be boring. But fine—because I know you, I’ll talk to you. I did not expect to be impressed with this guy. A harbormaster in Sullivan—nice, sweet, maybe it’d be like a good Mr. Smith Goes to Washington story.
But then I got on the phone with him, and I was blown away by the intensity and the thoughtfulness of his message. I mean, it was clearly not—not the content so much, but that he had clearly thought it through. This was not the first time that he was talking about these issues. And he’s like, “I’m a four-term combat veteran. I’m not afraid to name the enemy. The enemy is the oligarchy. It’s housing. My friends can’t afford to live here anymore.”
Which is a very real phenomenon—I mean, it is everywhere, but particularly here. Coastal Maine—during COVID, people wanted to move here, including me—so real estate prices went up 40 percent, and now people who have been here forever are having trouble affording it. We’re not building houses fast enough for the same reason that everybody everywhere else isn’t.
Healthcare—we’ve had horrible rural healthcare experiences. We have basically two giant companies in the state that do all the hospitals and most of the primary care. The one that represents southern Maine, which is wealthier, is doing fine. The one that represents northern Maine, where he comes from, is in terrible financial straits. They’ve closed a bunch of hospitals, they’ve closed labor and delivery wards—they’re on the brink of bankruptcy.
So these issues are very potent and real. And he doesn’t really talk about Trump—it’s not a resistance-y kind of thing. In fact, he says, like, “I know people who voted for Trump. A lot of my friends voted for Trump. They’re not stupid. He told them the right problem—he just is the wrong answer. But they’re right to be upset. They’re right that the system is rigged.”
So, very populist, very progressive—and he came out with the Bernie Sanders endorsement a week after getting into the race, which is a big, you know, that’s a big swing, that’s a big choice to make.
Bacon: So let’s talk about Janet Mills now. I’m on the progressive side myself, but I don’t think of her as being the kind of centrist I find annoying. She seems to be pretty strong—like, she’s been critical of Trump, at times; she’s defended transgender rights. She was one of the people saying Biden maybe should consider moving on last year, early on. So I think she’s been— he’s not super progressive, but I think she’s been a pretty good Democrat. What’s your sense of her? Forget about the ideology I gave for a second—what’s your sense of her as a politician? Is she popular there? Is she well-liked? She’s won twice; that’s an indication of something.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, she’s—I think she’s reasonably popular and reasonably well-liked, definitely among Democrats. The whole, you know, spat with Trump earlier this year over the trans issues, where he called her out in a meeting of governors and she—he said, “You’ve got to change your policy on trans athletes.” She said, “We’ll see you in court.” And it’s been a major, monthslong saga, and she’s gotten a lot of goodwill from Democrats on that.
But the places where she has some preexisting things where Democrats feel like she hasn’t been as progressive as they’d like—on labor, on guns—she’s vetoed a red flag law even, which is, unusual in a state where Democrats are pretty pro-gun, maybe like Kentucky. But she’s been even more—she’s now to the right of Jared Golden on guns, for instance. So I think people like her and they think she’s competent. She’s a former attorney general. But, you know, she won in—we have a large independent history and a large number of independent voters—so there’s always an independent candidate on the ballot. So she didn’t, you know, win by overwhelming margins or anything.
And she’s 77. A lot of people have pointed out to me—and more than one person has pointed out—that she called on Biden to step down and now is kind of facing similar calls.
Bacon: How old is Platner, just briefly?
Seitz-Wald: He’s 42, so big gap. And he looks—you know, he’s a four-term combat veteran who hauls up oyster traps every day. He looks fit. Yeah, you can’t—I mean, as some people in my life said immediately upon seeing him—“Oh, he’s really attractive.” We have to acknowledge that that is a factor here.
But I think the other big thing that Mills is contending with is the kind of hangover from 2020, where the DSCC and Chuck Schumer—Washington Democrats—came in heavy for Sara Gideon, embraced her early, cleared the path, and she had an unobstructed path to the Democratic nomination against Susan Collins. She ended up outspending her more than two to one—and lost by nine percentage points—and ended up being a kind of easily mockable candidate. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already heard about her stove. This is six years later—five years later—which, her announcement video was in front of a 10-burner Viking stove, like a $10,000 stove.
So there’s this kind of knee-jerk reaction among a lot of people that anybody that Schumer or the DSCC—if they’re pushing Mills this hard, therefore, that’s bad, because we got burned last time. I think they’re kind of learning the wrong lesson. The real lesson is that Susan Collins is much stronger than they might anticipate.
Bacon: Let me come back to that: they are pushing this, like, this is a story. Schumer has been ... let’s talk about this a little bit. Explain how the Democratic Party has been involved in getting Mills to run in this race.
Seitz-Wald: From the beginning, the Democratic Party—[the] powers that be, whatever is left of the Democratic establishment—has been very clear that Janet Mills is their candidate, and their only candidate. They didn’t talk to Jared Golden. I know that. They didn’t talk to a number of the other Democrats in the state. They were just clear—and with good reason. Like you said, she’s won twice, and she’s the only Democrat to win a Maine election statewide since 2002, which is crazy. John Baldacci. Because Angus King is an independent, and Susan Collins wins a lot, and we don’t have other statewide elected offices. But the state is not that Democratic, and in the ’90s it was a Republican, a liberal Republican state, you know, Susan Collins [unintelligible].
So there’s a reasonable desire there with Mills to take the proven winner, because Collins is going to be tough to beat. But there are also concerns that she is really that tough to beat. So I think we’re going to end up with a big electability contest, very similar to the Hillary–Bernie thing. I think this is going to be a lot of both sides litigating with each other to convince primary voters that they are the ones who can best beat Susan Collins.
Bacon: Interestingly, I’ve seen a couple of polls—I don’t know who released them—which suggest that, I guess it must have been a poll from the Platner group, because it showed Platner ahead of Collins by a lot, but it also showed Mills ahead too. So that goes to the question of Collins—she’s won a bunch of tough races, including in, I think, 2014 and 2020. 2020 was a hard year. 2014 was a good year for Republicans; 2008 and 2020 were bad years for Republicans generally across the country. She won both times, which tells me she’s done a really great job in terms of electoral strategy. So her approval looks pretty bad right now, but do you think she’s still a strong candidate?
Seitz-Wald: Yes, I think underestimate Susan Collins at your own risk, without a doubt. I think that’s actually one of the benefits, is that people do underestimate her. She’s this tiny lady with a voice that sounds like it’s going to give out at any minute. She doesn’t hold a lot of public events, and when she does, she often gets protested. But she is one of those people who seems to have infinite energy for talking on the phone and texting and emailing. It just feels like every week, somebody I talk to has just gotten off the phone with Susan Collins, or was just texting with her.
She maintains these kind of one-on-one connections with so many people. It’s a small state where that really matters. People feel like they know her—you know, people say Maine is like a big small town—so that goes a long way. She is older, you know, she’s slowed down, but the Republicans have her back more than they did in ‘20, and I don’t think she’s going to have that much difficulty uniting the Republican Party.
And the argument that I find very convincing for Mills—really the only argument, electability argument, that I find very convincing for Mills—is that Collins wins on middle-aged women, mainly, in the coast and in the south, so Portland. You know, these are more moderate-leaning people who like her stance on—at least she’s always said she’s pro-choice. And if you look at the numbers, there’s a case to be made there. Collins basically won Biden’s number in Maine. She won all of Trump’s voters plus a bunch of Biden voters. So she is genuinely getting a lot of crossover support.
And the pro-Mills argument is: Those people are not going to like Graham Platner. A young, angry-coded guy is not going to be the suburban middle-aged woman candidate. So I think that’s something to contend with.
Bacon: And Collins has done a still has enough votes against Trump to say, to argue she’s not a Trump crony, right? I haven’t studied her votes this year, but in the past she’s like I think she voted against Amy Coney Barrett right before the 2020 election. She’s obviously not Ted Cruz. She’s done a good job. Her brand is different than the typical Republican, right?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s similar to the Manchin kind of thing on the Democratic side. She is definitely, you know, if you ask Democrats, they say she never—she just votes in lockstep with Republicans. If you look at the actual numbers, she is mostly voting with Republicans and very occasionally will take a no vote that actually does, you know, hurt. But usually she’s taking no votes on bills when they can afford to lose her vote, which is, you know, that’s standard practice. She’s a team player, and everyone understands, you know, in her party. And I think she has done a better job of not, you know, antagonizing Trump this time too, and they’re smarter about it. So she is really good at picking those high-profile places to take a stand that will kind of overshadow the 50 places where she voted with Republicans.
Bacon: So you’re saying the last thing—I guess you think this is going to be a campaign about electability basically, where Graham Platner’s theory is there’s this sort of working class of people disengaged from politics who want to hear an outsider, and Janet Mills’s theory is a group of moderates who are sort of swing voters that she appeals to better. You think this is going to be a primary about—which I hate—but a primary where we debate polling numbers and who… because the election is hard to predict. And so having an election about the next election is very complicated, but yes, you think it’s going to be an argument about electability.
Seitz-Wald: I think that will be one aspect that will be the kind of highest level, which I agree — it’s very, it’s like playing Apples to Apples with a stranger from the future, you know, where you’re trying to imagine what a hypothetical swing voter in the future thinks. But yeah, I’ve already been contacted by somebody who is interested in partnering with the Midcoast Villager.
We have a café in downtown Camden that we use for public events, and they want to put on a kind of forum with swing voters asking Graham Platner and Janet Mills questions — with the hope of showing that Platner does a better job, you know, to the swing voters. And then you pitch that message out to swing voters.
I hope I’m not violating anything by talking about this, but then you would target that out to swing voters to show, “Look, these swing voters were convinced that Platner was more electable, therefore you, Democrat, now looking for who is going to be best, yeah.” So people are already anticipating that game and trying to establish data points to put on the board there.
Bacon: Anything else in this race I should mention or we should know about?
Seitz-Wald: One final thing — because Maine has to be weird about everything — we have ranked-choice voting, which totally complicates how this plays out. And it hasn’t really come into play, not in a competitive Senate Democratic primary; it just came online in 2018.
Bacon: So this primary has ranked choice — because Maine does — so the primary and the general are both ranked-choice. New York had it with the primary, but not the general ranked-choice. Let me be clear.
Seitz-Wald: That’s right — ranked choice in both, ranked choice in both the primary and the general election for federal offices; ranked choice in the primary but not the general for the governorship, yeah. But yes, for the Senate. So there’s a number of other candidates in this race we haven’t even talked about, and they’re already looking to do the—the—the... a Brad— I’m forgetting the other, the Lander—
Bacon: Yeah, Brad Lander is the leading person who supported Mamdani
Seitz-Wald: So, I already—there’s already a candidate who’s maybe looking to be the Brad Lander to Platner’s Mamdani in the ranked choice. So that will be an interesting dynamic too.
Bacon: What’s the person’s name?
Seitz-Wald: Jordan Wood
Bacon: OK, the person who worked for Katie Porter, right?
Seitz-Wald: Correct, yeah — former chief of staff for Katie Porter. He ran End Citizens United, younger guy, moved back to Maine where he’s from. His dad is actually the new pastor at the church near me — because everything’s small.
And there’s a third candidate, who is the CEO of Maine Beer Company, which is a great brewery down in Freeport. He got in — and it’s so funny — I mean, like, you know, a beer brewer, you would think that that would be the most interesting candidate in the race. And he got in literally a week after Platner, but by then it was already like, you know, we’re on to this oyster guy. Sorry, beer man. 24:11:
Bacon: I hate to ask this question — this is a very D.C. politics question — but I guess Plattner has not been vetted in a certain way, right? We don’t know that, we don’t know that. He’s a new person running. There’s not a huge press in Maine, and I assume he just started running. So on some level, are there any—I hate to say this—but we don’t, like, Susan Collins, Mills, we probably... there’s been a lot of profiles written about them. Both parties have done investigative opposition research against them. Plattner’s a new figure. There’s probably some unknown here, right?
Seitz-Wald: It’s a great question, and that’s my biggest asterisk with him. My two biggest asterisks: can he actually get the work boots? Is he not just the brunch boots? And the second one is, what’s in his past? Because, yeah, I mean, that’s another thing that’s so unusual and hard to think of a precedent for.
Usually, if you’re one of these viral candidates — an Amy McGrath or someone like that — you’re a fighter pilot. You’ve been vetted; you had to maintain a security clearance. Or you’re a CEO, or you’re, you know, a local elected official, or even a community leader who runs an important nonprofit. You’re some kind of public figure who has been somewhat vetted by some organization, and likely you’ve run for office, so the opposition has, you know, hired investigators and gone after you, and the press has done what they will with that.
Nothing like that on Platner. He is a total blank slate. And, you know, he’s spoken about coming back from combat tours and struggling, and we just don’t really — we don’t really know what happened in those years. So I suspect we will learn what happened in those years. I just don’t know what’s out there.
Bacon: So, talk about the Midcoast Villager a bit. I don’t know much about it. I’ve been to Portland, Maine — that’s the big city, I think, of Maine. So where are you? Where is your publication? Is it a newspaper? Is it a website? Explain kind of what the Midcoast Villager is, because I think we’re in a place where local media is dying — and I mentioned innovations in local media. So talk about the Midcoast Villager a little bit.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, I’m happy to mansplain a bit. This is — I’ll start out — this is Earn, our mascot of the Midcoast Villager. We are based in Camden, which is about an hour and a half north of Portland on the coast, and we cover Camden — which kind of sits right on two counties, Knox and Waldo County. So we basically cover everything from, like, Damariscotta, where a lot of oysters come from, up to kind of like Bucksport. There’s a bridge before you get to Acadia — that’s down east — that’s where Graham Platner is from.
So it’s coastal, it’s, you know, big fishing and lobstering industries, also a big tourist and kind of second-home scene, huge arts and literary backgrounds. So it’s the kind of place that, if we can make this work anywhere, this is the kind of place that we can make this work — and by “this,” I mean like a new model for local media. But the scary thing there is, if we can’t make it work here, I’m worried. And it’s hard — it’s really cool, but it’s hard.
It’s an area of about 80,000 people, very literate, very community-oriented. People want to know what’s going on. They want to be involved, and they want to read good stuff. It also attracts an unusually high level of talent — amazing other people who joined with me came from New York Magazine and Dwell and, you know, have worked at places like RISD and been high-level designers. And everyone really just cares about this product and wants to make it really good.
The idea is that we can’t just tell stories and just, you know, be observers anymore — we have to be active members of the community, building community. So we opened this café that’s a physical space to have these conversations. I do office hours in the café — editor’s office hours — where people can just come and pitch a story, or, you know, complain about a headline or anything. We want to be as accessible and transparent as possible.
And it’s also a way to diversify revenue — our owner owns the building, and he has the café, he has the newsroom, and he also has a little hotel that we’re using for writing retreats. So we just had our first writing retreat — Liz Lenz, if you know her from Iowa, came in and led the retreat. We’re trying to reinvent the model of local journalism because it is just fundamentally broken. It’s even worse than I realized.
I’m about to go this weekend first to the Maine Press Association and then to this national conference in Salt Lake City by this organization, Press Forward, which brings together a lot of innovative local media outlets from all over the country. I’m really looking forward to that — where we can all swap tips and, you know, try to figure this out together.
I’m a journalist — I come from editorial, that’s where my focus and my passion are — but I’m really increasingly seeing that I want to keep working as much on the business side, because we know how to do the journalism. We do the good journalism every single day. It’s figuring out how to make that not just pay for itself, but to make it vital and relevant in people’s lives.
And this is one thing where I disagree with some other views — I don’t think it should just be a purely philanthropically supported thing, where, you know, it’s a good cause. It should be something that people want to pay for. And so it’s a fun challenge and a very hard challenge, but it’s really exciting.
Bacon: And great. On that note, I’m excited about Midcoast Villager. It’s great to have Alex on. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for those tuned into watch, and we’ll be back later in the week. Thanks, Alex.
Seitz-Wald: Thanks so much, Perry. Good to see you.