This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 30 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 morning, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of the New Republic show Right Now. We have some breaking news—this is unusual today. Our guest is Alex Seitz-Wald. He’s the deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, which is a paper in Maine, and he was already scheduled as a guest.
We were going to talk about Janet Mills versus Graham Platner. But it appears that that is no longer a race going on—Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, has decided to suspend her campaign, her primary campaign, conceding that presumably Graham Platner is leading and likely to win. So Alex wrote the story for the Midcoast Villager, and he’s here to join us now. Alex, welcome.
Alex Seitz-Wald: Hey, Perry. Thanks for having me. Yeah, the news gods must have known that we had this scheduled, and dropped it right before we got online.
Bacon: So this happened about an hour ago, around nine o’clock Eastern Time. From what I can see, Mills has made some comments—I’m not sure if it’s a statement or an interview—but she’s saying that she basically has run out of money, or doesn’t have enough money.
I’ll be blunt—does she not have enough money, or is she going to lose and ducking that? The primary is on June 9, and she’s been down in the polls.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, this is a massive, totally unexpected development. I’ve been following this race closely—I’m shocked, honestly, by this. And I think the money is real. It’s a reminder that in politics you don’t drop out because you have bad press or bad polling—unless you have extremely bad press, like Eric Swalwell. It’s when the money runs out.
I don’t know that she was totally dry, but she had been outspent two to one and outraised two to one by Graham Platner. She pulled all of her digital ads last week, which was a big tell that money was tight. She pulled TV ads a little while ago. But the writing has been on the wall for a while.
I just noticed today, when I was driving to drop my daughter off at school—I always look at the yard signs—and I saw one new Janet Mills yard sign, which brought the grand total to three that I am aware of. Meanwhile there are dozens of Graham Platner yard signs. I’ll pass 25, 30 before I see a single Mills one.
The polling has been pretty consistent, showing Platner up by various margins. And then just on Friday—
Bacon: Like 15, more like three—I’ve seen it vary. What’s your sense of it? The numbers have varied a lot.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, primary polling is super tough, super volatile, especially a race like this where everyone thought you’re going to get voters who don’t typically vote. And the way you do primary polling is you screen out people who typically vote in primaries, but a race like this is going to bring in new voters. How many new voters?
So I just kind of look at the direction or the consensus, and I can’t really say how big Platner’s lead is, but when you have nine or 10 polls in a row that show an outside-the-margin lead, that tells you something. But then there was also—
Bacon: In other words, you think he was ahead and likely to win. He was the favorite, for sure, based on the polling.
Seitz-Wald: Yes, absolutely. And he was definitely a favorite based on the polling. He was the favorite based on fundraising. He was the favorite based on the enthusiasm of who turns out—just consistently getting these massive crowds at events that he’s doing.
She’s done very few public events, but at the handful that she has, there are empty seats. The vibes, so to speak, were not great. And when you don’t have perfect data, you have to look at all these things, including yard signs.
But there was also—and I don’t know if this was the straw that broke the camel’s back—but there was a big development on Friday where Mills vetoed this important bill. There was a first-in-the-nation moratorium on data centers. Maine had really gotten out in front of the country, and Mills vetoed it for an understandable reason—I think a very defensible reason—in that there was this one project that was already underway that this town really wanted.
But still, she put herself on the opposite side of an issue that almost all the Democrats in the legislature supported, and most of the Democrats in the voting base supported, as far as we can tell. And I heard a lot of plugged-in Democrats telling me, “Did she just commit political suicide with that veto on Friday?” So that might have been an inciting incident to get her to make this decision.
Bacon: I guess one view is that maybe she was leaving the race already and just decided to do what she thinks was policy right. And the other view is—’cause she’s—Janet Mills is not a bad politician.
There’s an anti–data center movement across the country, and so in a certain sense she must have known this would not be a popular thing, right?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe she didn’t anticipate how sharp the reaction was. I moderated a forum on Saturday—excuse me—for the Democratic gubernatorial candidates, and that’s also an interesting race that’s been totally overshadowed.
First question I asked was: “If you were governor, would you have signed this moratorium? What do you think of Mills’s veto?” And four out of five of the candidates were very aggressively against Mills’s veto, in favor of the moratorium, and the fifth one kind of dodged and didn’t take a pass on it. So she was getting a ton of flak and not a lot of support for that veto.
Bacon: Let me just—we’re not doing a data center segment, but let me ask. I would assume a state like Maine—Microsoft or Apple is not moving to Maine, probably, no offense to Maine, I’m in Kentucky we are in the same situation—but in a certain sense, data centers probably do bring in some jobs to create them.
But are people in Maine more anti than pro data centers, even though data centers probably do create some jobs? What’s your sense of the sentiment on the ground there?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, it’s pretty broadly anti, and the big argument that I hear is electricity rates. We already have some of the highest electricity rates in the country. It’s cold in Maine—breaking news—and so fuel costs, heating your home, is a huge cost-of-living issue. A lot of people have heat pumps, which run on electricity.
There’s also—it’s a very environmentally conscious, conservation-minded state, and that’s both in the kind of progressive hiking-and-kayaking way and also in the more conservative hunting-and-fishing way. And it’s a very NIMBY, anti-development, keep-things-as-they-are state. So there’s a broad consensus against it.
The biggest argument in favor is more about the tax revenue that it would bring, and that’s also a big issue. And some of it is jobs—but this was going to be put in an old paper mill, and like a lot of parts of the country where industry has gone, there are huge parts of the state that are really struggling economically.
So it would bring some jobs—it would have been like a hundred jobs or so on an ongoing basis. But really what the local town council, the school board, and the local officials were really excited about was the tax revenue, to take a little bit of the burden off of residents. But that wasn’t enough for them.
Bacon: It’s hard to ask this question, but is Mills losing this race because she didn’t do well? Before she entered this race, I looked at the polling—for governor, she was a mid-range popular governor. She wasn’t extremely popular, but she wasn’t unpopular at all.
So this result—to me, it feels more like this is a result about Platner being a strong candidate than Mills being a bad one. But there’s a balance there—it’s zero-sum on some level. But what drove this result? Why has Platner done so well? Is it because of him, or because of her, or because of both?
Seitz-Wald: I think it’s absolutely both. Yeah, Platner is—the timing, the man, the moment—it all worked out. He looks like coastal Maine. I know a million guys who look like him. He talks the right way. He kind of straddles that populist but can also appeal to conservatives divide. So that’s all true.
But I think a huge part of this—and maybe the bigger part—is that Mills frankly ran one of the worst campaigns that I’ve ever seen. It’s just shocking to me as somebody who’s covered a lot of campaigns. I think she’s been a much better governor than she has been a Senate candidate. She had issues with Democrats where she disagreed with labor or the tribal nations on certain things, but nothing that would have prevented her from getting the Democratic nomination.
But it’s just been this very lackluster, very dated campaign. She’s still running as if it’s 2001, not at all adapting to the new media environment. Last summer, there was all this question—is she going to run, is she not going to run?—and no one knew. She didn’t put out word to her allies. She waited a long time to get in. So a bunch of people who would have supported her were looking around for someone else, and then Graham Platner comes along.
A small thing, like—she tweeted her announcement on a Friday when she was supposed to go out on a Monday, and it took them four hours to take the tweet down. It’s just like little—but when you’re the two-term governor, you’re supposed to be the adult in the room.
These basic blocking-and-tackling things just don’t work. And then she just has not held public campaign events. She’s held these private talks where she meets with local leaders. Having covered the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, it reminded me of the kind of early Clinton campaign stuff, and I kept waiting for her to kick into a higher gear, but it just never really came.
And I think it did her a disservice because everyone made this connection—her age was the big thing—and everyone made this connection to Joe Biden. This is not a Joe Biden situation. She is not doddering, she is not being protected. I’ve spent time with her—I think she’s very sharp, she’s physically able. I saw her last month, and all her aides wanted to drive from one event to another. It was cold out, and she said, “No, let’s just walk,” and she just walked over.
But we didn’t see that—voters didn’t see that, because I saw that as a reporter, I was one of three people with her. The voters didn’t see that because she just was not out and about.
And then she decided to go negative in her TV ads against Graham Platner, which I think really backfired. And all her ads were about Donald Trump and not her. So it just felt very disconnected and very dated.
And I think it’s unfortunate—because in a small-d democracy sense, voters should get a good, honest choice of all the candidates. And I think she and her campaign didn’t do her that service. And I think Maine Democrats got a disservice too, in not getting a real choice between Mills and Platner, because her campaign was so lackluster.
Bacon: Let me ask two related questions, because you’re saying she didn’t campaign well. One is: did she want to run, or did Schumer and Gillibrand encourage her strongly, and it was kind of their campaign that she was reluctantly running?
And then two, related: did she expect to win because she’s the two-term incumbent governor and this guy has never run for anything before, and therefore she assumed voters would rationally come to her?
Seitz-Wald: Those are excellent questions that many people are asking. I don’t know what’s in her head, I can’t say what’s in her heart. But I can say for sure that she did not do nearly enough to combat either of those perceptions, which both became…
Bacon: She didn’t want to do it, that she could coast to winning. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah. Those kind of became accepted truisms—that her heart wasn’t in it, she didn’t really want to do it. I heard Democrats who supported her saying maybe she secretly wants to lose, and she’s just doing this to kind of go through the motions. Because she—it did seem so wishy-washy on whether she wanted to run, and Schumer was pushing her so hard.
She also said, two weeks before she jumped in the race, that she praised Susan Collins and said Susan Collins is doing the best job she can as senator. Things like that. And then also the perception that she felt entitled to it, or that she was just going to coast to victory—again, by not holding campaign events, not aggressively campaigning. She didn’t really do anything to combat those notions.
So she was going to come into that race with the age issue, with the perception that she felt entitled to it, with the perception that her heart wasn’t really in it. So she should have been working from day one to show that she was in it, that she wanted this, that she was going to fight for every vote. And she just really didn’t do that.
Bacon: Okay, this is interesting. So let me just come out—you and I were talking about this—the comparison in this primary between Platner and Fetterman. What do you think about this? This has come up a little bit. The one thing about him that’s been buzzed about has been that maybe we can’t—maybe he—we don’t know, because Fetterman has become this more conservative person. Fetterman is also a white guy who doesn’t dress in suits all the time—talk about that—’cause people—
Seitz-Wald: Working-class-coded.
Bacon: Yeah.
Seitz-Wald: Yeah. I could totally see the comparison coming out of left field—the aesthetics-forward candidates. And the biggest thing maybe is that they share—or used to share—consultants. The kind of big masterminds behind Platner’s campaign: Rebecca Katz, a longtime New York strategist, and her firm, the Fight Agency. They also do Ruben Gallego. They were the Fetterman people early on.
So I totally see the concern, and this kind of broader concern that you hear about: Democrats shouldn’t fall for viral candidates, for candidates who produce a great video—like Amy McGrath, in your neck of the woods and then end up flaming out.
Or there was just a story about McMorrow in Michigan deleting all these tweets about how Michigan sucks and she wishes she still lived in California. Another kind of cautionary tale—go for the tried and true. Yes, maybe these career politicians are boring or not as exciting, but you can trust them—that’s the kind of idea. So I totally get that comparison. But I think if you spend a little bit more time looking at it, it doesn’t really stand up.
First of all, because Fetterman has totally nuked Graham Platner and said he should get nowhere near the Senate, and I hate him. And Graham Platner has said basically the same thing about John Fetterman. Fetterman’s big issue where he’s broken with the left—there’s a lot of things—but Israel is the big one.
And Platner has been incredibly vocal on Israel, to the point that some of his supporters have even been like, a little bit, just chill out. If you go way back in Platner’s résumé to his high school yearbook, he was given the superlative “most likely to start a revolution,” and he is holding up a sign saying, “Free Palestine”—”Free Tibet”—”Free Chechnya.” The idea that he’s some kind of dark-horse secret AIPAC conservative—I just don’t see it.
It’s different for me here—I personally know people who grew up with him. His wife is from one town over from me. I know people who were best friends with her in high school. She used to teach at the high school that my daughter will go to when she goes to high school. So not everyone can have that level of understanding, not all white men.
Not always a good defense, but in this case, yeah.
Bacon: Like, the question I was going to get at was: the nationalization of this primary has been—it’s become a proxy for this sort of progressive versus “quote-unquote moderate” thing. Senator Warren and Bernie Sanders endorsed Platner. Schumer and Gillibrand endorsed Mills. So that’s nationally how this is playing out. So some of my friends who don’t live in Maine are texting me—who are progressive—Yay, Mills lost.
But on the ground in Maine, are these dynamics playing out—the progressive versus the moderates? Because it seems like Platner’s doing well enough that he’s not just getting the progressive vote, ‘cause that can’t be that big. So are those national dynamics playing a big role there, or is this more about local factors on the ground?
Seitz-Wald: Yeah, that’s definitely a factor. And more progressive people are more aligned with Platner, and more—it’s establishment-y, moderate, whatever you want to call it—more aligned with Mills. It’s really people who have been in politics more, kind of regardless of their views. That’s definitely a factor, but it’s not the whole thing, and it’s not—like anything, it’s not as simple as that dynamic.
There have been specific issues where Mills has alienated specific progressive interest groups, especially organized labor, which is not huge in Maine, but there’s not a lot of progressive infrastructure, so they play a big role in what infrastructure does exist.
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.
