The Race to Replace Graham Platner Is Heating Up

With Graham Platner bowing out of the race for U.S. Senate in Maine following allegations that he raped his former partner, the scramble to replace him is well underway—and the field of possible alternatives is starting to get considerably crowded.

Since the allegations that essentially ended Platner’s campaign came out, on Monday, the Maine Democratic Party has been constructing a plan to select another candidate. The party has landed on hosting a nominating convention, which will include 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees and a preexisting 100-person state committee. Together, those 600 delegates will decide which of the many potential Platner replacements will face Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. They have until July 27 to officially nominate Platner’s opponent. (The convention has not yet been scheduled.) Meanwhile, Platner still has business to attend to—he has until Monday at 5 p.m. to officially withdraw his name from the ballot.

The delegates will have a wide field of candidates to choose from—so far, seven have declared their candidacy. To be eligible for nomination, candidates must garner 500 signatures, a potential barrier to entry for some of the lesser-known candidates.

Broadly speaking, the candidates who have announced their desire to run have been emphasizing their progressive and working-class credentials in an effort to hew as close as possible to the policy platform that lifted Platner to his primary victory, while distancing themselves from his scandals.

Still, there are distinctions to be made among the would-be players in this burgeoning field. Here is an early guide to who the seven candidates currently vying to take on Collins are—and where they stand on some critical policy questions.

Troy Jackson: Jackson’s name was one of the first floated after the allegations against Platner came to light. An anonymous memo circulated among some progressive strategists emphasized “his authentic working class bonafides” and said that his “anti-establishment message [contrasts] effectively against Collins as a swamp creature.” Jackson is a fifth-generation logger from Allagash and the former president of the Maine Senate.

Recently, Jackson came in third place in the state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. In that race, he was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders. Before running for governor, he served in the Maine state Senate from 2008 to 2014 and again from 2016 to 2024.

Jackson supports Medicare for All, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, and says he’ll never vote in favor of taxpayer-funded aid to Israel. In recent days, he has been endorsed by Representative Ro Khanna and the Maine AFL-CIO.

Nirav Shah: Shah is another 2026 gubernatorial candidate. He garnered the highest number of votes but ultimately lost the primary to Hannah Pingree due to ranked-choice voting.

Shah is a public health official who served as director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention from 2019 to 2023 and the principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2023 until 2025.

“The other thing that voters in Maine are clearly looking for is someone who is an outsider. I come to this race not having been part of the political establishment in Maine or indeed even in the United States,” Shah said in a CNN interview.

Before serving in Maine and at the CDC, Shah was director of the Illinois Department of Public Health. During his tenure, an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed 13 people. This has recently come back to haunt him: When Shah announced his bid to replace Platner, Senator Tammy Duckworth wrote in a post on X that she “strongly [opposes]” his run for Senate due to his handling of the outbreak.

Shah supports Medicare for All, says that ICE “in its current form” cannot continue, and has described Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

In a poll released Thursday, Shah showed the best chance of beating Collins in November, though the poll had him winning by just one point.

Shenna Bellows: Bellows came fourth in this year’s gubernatorial primary. She is currently Maine’s secretary of state. She has run for Senate before—in 2014, she went head-to-head with Susan Collins and lost in a landslide, notching only 32 percent of the vote against Collins’s 68 percent share. This was a wipeout: Collins carried every county in the state. Before entering politics, Bellows served as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine from 2005 to 2013.

Bellows has scrubbed the policy pages of her gubernatorial campaign website, but has explained some of her policy positions in interviews during her run for governor. She proposed creating a Maine Housing Corps to increase the supply of housing in the state, and suggested that Maine “work toward universal, single payer healthcare.” In an X post announcing her run for Senate, Bellows said she supports Medicare for All.

Jordan Wood: Wood ran for the House seat in Maine’s second congressional district this year, garnering just shy of 29 percent of the vote. Wood was former Representative Katie Porter’s chief of staff and vice president of End Citizens United, a group that seeks to end the influence of money in politics.

Like most of the other candidates, Wood supports Medicare for All and believes that Israel is committing a genocide, and that any U.S. aid to the country must come with conditions. In an interview with The New Republic, Wood also emphasized his support for universal childcare, said that the Senate needs new leadership, and said that the Senate should get rid of the filibuster.

He expressed concern that the other candidates for the Senate seat haven’t yet explained their views on national policy: “I don’t have any idea what they think of future leadership. I don’t know what they think about the filibuster. You wouldn’t ask those questions at a debate for the governor’s race,” he said.

Dan Kleban: Kleban is the co-founder of Maine Beer Company in Freeport. He ran for Senate in late 2025, but dropped out of the race to support Governor Janet Mills just one month later.

In a Substack post announcing his candidacy on Wednesday, Kleban emphasized his status as a political outsider but didn’t share any policy proposals. “I’ve spent years talking to Mainers over a beer in our taproom and throughout the community. We’re all sick and tired of a system that’s been rigged by corporate interests, and we’ve had enough meddling from Washington establishment insiders and New York City consultants trying to dictate who represents us,” he wrote.

Paige Loud: Loud is a social worker who, like Wood, ran for the House seat in the second district. She received 10 percent of the vote. Loud has a progressive platform that emphasizes health care and food security. She supports Medicare for All, raising and tying the minimum wage to inflation, and eliminating the Social Security income cap. She has called for an end to the genocide in Gaza and for a block on all U.S. weapons transfers to Israel.

David Costello: Costello ran in the Democratic primary for Senate and received 8 percent of the vote (Platner received 72 percent).

Costello shared a list of his policy priorities with The New Republic. They include Medicare for All, universal childcare, an elimination of the payroll tax cap, judicial and legislative term limits, and a ban on gerrymandering (among other proposals).

He’s also called for an “end to presidential wars of choice and holding allies and foes accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and other human rights violations.”

In an email, Costello emphasized his experience in government, having served as an aide to Maine’s secretary of state, the mayor of Baltimore, and the governor of Maryland.

Manny Rutinel’s victory this week in Colorado’s primaries has set up a once-unthinkable scenario: This November, in one of the most crucial swing races in the country, a former vegan activist will face off against a cattle rancher in a district dominated by meat-processing giant JBS.

Rutinel, a 31-year-old member of the Colorado House of Representatives, beat his more moderate opponent, Shannon Bird, earlier this week in yet another victory for insurgent progressives. But as he now pivots to the general election, he’ll be facing Republican Gabe Evans and an onslaught of attacks over his past statements on animal rights and meat consumption.

The 8th district, created in 2021 by the state’s independent redistricting commission, is Colorado’s only swing district, and swingy it is—voters in the district elected a Democrat in 2022 by fewer than 1,600 votes and Evans in 2024 by fewer than 2,500 votes.

“It’s reasonable to think that [the district] will just switch back and forth with whatever party is having a good year that year,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at the University of Denver. “Given what we’ve seen in other elections this year, I think there’s a very good chance it swings to the Democrats.”

The district, which includes the northern suburbs of Denver and stretches north into more rural communities, is a major agricultural region. JBS, the world’s largest meat-processing company, is one of the district’s biggest employers. Evans himself owns a small cattle herd and is a self-described beef producer.

As a student at Yale Law School, Rutinel gave an interview to a campus publication calling animal agriculture “a horrific, exploitive industry.” That same year, he told a legislative committee in Connecticut that “the globe must dramatically shift away from animal products and toward fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and nuts.”

Since running for Congress, Rutinel has backtracked, saying that he is no longer a vegan and that “it’s important for me to be able to enjoy the delicious products that Colorado ranchers make.” He’s also stopped calling for Medicare for All and a ban on fracking.

Republicans are already jumping onto Rutinel’s vegan past. After Rutinel won his primary, the regional press secretary for the National Republican Campaign Committee posted a photo on X of Rutinel as a college student, shirtless and carrying a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sign. “He is a far-left vegan activist who wants to end animal agriculture,” the post reads.

Meat occupies an almost sacred space in American politics—and a particular obsession with it on the right is nothing new. Already this cycle, Republicans have attacked Texas Senate candidate James Talarico over his past comments about reducing meat consumption: “This freak wants to BAN BBQ,” Senator Ted Cruz wrote in an X post. In response, Talarico leaned into meat eating, posing for a photo in a Texas flag shirt while eating barbecue. At an event, he said, “I deny all accusations of veganism.”

“Republicans will just be working to portray him as out of step, as too far left for Colorado. That is to some extent what they’re trying to do now with going after vegetarianism,” Masket said about Rutinel. But he’s not terribly worried that Rutinel’s vegan past will hurt his campaign. Unlike in Texas, Masket said, vegetarianism and veganism are well established and understood in Colorado, and the more important dynamic in this election will be voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump, he said.

“November is going to be, particularly at the congressional district level, a referendum on the Trump administration,” agreed Robert Preuhs, the chair of the political science department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. The outcome in the 8th district in particular, he added, will “depend to some extent on what the Trump administration does between here and November and the extent to which Dave Evans feels comfortable endorsing those actions.”

Rutinel has established himself as a forceful critic of the Trump administration, campaigning adamantly against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and criticizing Bird for her committee vote against a bill that would prohibit local law enforcement from collaborating with ICE.

Rutinel also took a strong stance on artificial intelligence. In 2025, he was a sponsor of a bill that would protect whistleblowers who sought to disclose AI safety issues. Public First Action, an AI-safety PAC, covertly supported Rutinel by giving $2 million to the Latino Victory Fund, Transformer reported on Wednesday. A PAC funded by Chris Larsen, a billionaire cryptocurrency firm founder, also spent $980,000 on the race in favor of Rutinel.

Analysts say Rutinel now faces a difficult balancing act: moderating his positions enough to appeal to swing voters, while also keeping his base energized. He’ll have help: The Democratic Party is expected to spend heavily to try to flip this district. The race may wind up being a test of whether culture-war issues—like Rutinel’s past veganism—will matter more to swing voters than ICE and Trump’s record.

“This is Citizens United 2.0,” Representative Greg Casar said Tuesday about the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing political party campaign committees to coordinate directly with campaigns without a cap on spending. Republicans praised the decision, while Democrats issued dire warnings about the fate of democracy.

But behind the partisan divide, there’s an interesting disagreement about what, exactly, the ruling will do: Some analysts say this decision could weaken the power PACs have over elections, making political parties the dominant spending force. Unfortunately for Democrats, though, the decision will probably heighten a fundraising advantage Republicans already have this year.

Then-Senator JD Vance, then-Representative Steve Chabot, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee, or NRCC, first brought National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission to federal court in 2022. They argued that the court should overrule its 2001 decision restricting the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates—particularly via committees like the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, or House and Senate campaign committees. The petitioners argued that these limits violated the First Amendment.

Due to Tuesday’s ruling in favor of Vance and his associates, political parties can now both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds—giving them an advantage over PACs, which can raise unlimited funds but cannot coordinate directly with candidates.

Super PACs have become a dominant force in campaign spending since 2010, when the Supreme Court struck down caps on independent spending by corporations in Citizens United. That decision gave corporations immense power to influence elections, but with the important caveat that super PACs aren’t able to coordinate with campaigns. (Campaigns have found creative ways to get around this, namely by putting “red boxes” on their websites that instruct PACs how to spend their money without directly communicating with them.) Super PACs will remain important forces in elections. But after Tuesday’s decision, political parties may once again have an advantage over super PACs.

Democrats are concerned about both the short- and long-term impacts of the decision. In the short term, they say, this could deal a blow to vulnerable House and Senate candidates, since the RNC has a major fundraising advantage over the DNC. At the end of May, the RNC reported its highest-ever cash-on-hand total, $125 million. In comparison, the DNC had just $14.4 million on hand and was $18 million in debt.

On the Senate side, candidates in competitive races like Mary Peltola in Alaska and Sherrod Brown in Ohio may face better-funded opponents this fall. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “frontline” candidates, incumbents running in swing districts, could face a similar challenge from their Republican opponents. The ruling could throw a wrench into the Democratic Party’s confidence that they will be able to retake the House, and perhaps the Senate, this fall.

In a statement, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, Chair Suzan DelBene, and DNC Chair Ken Martin downplayed the threat to Democratic candidates. “In November, voters will reject Republicans’ toxic agenda and efforts to rig the system and weaken our democracy by electing a Democratic House and Senate majority,” they wrote.

In the long term, Democrats say the ruling will make elections more corrupt and flooded with dark money. Casar called the decision an example of the “hyperpartisan donor-purchased Supreme Court” reversing one of the landmark campaign finance wins of the post-Watergate era. “It’s essentially legalizing corruption in our political system,” he said.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, had a similar view. “Republicans would get laughed out of Congress if they tried to repeal the few remaining guardrails against dark money and special interest influence,” he wrote in a statement. “So instead, Republicans run to their captured Supreme Court to do the democracy-damaging work for them.”

On Monday night, the House passed a weaker version of the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, aimed at regulating the tech industry and protecting children online. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on whom you ask.

House leaders have taken four years to reach a compromise on their own version of KOSA, which the Senate passed in 2022. The House version, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety, or KIDS, Act, passed by 267–117 on Monday night.

Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the Democratic co-sponsor of the KIDS Act, lauded it as an example of bipartisan cooperation last week. “This agreement proves Congress can come together to deliver real online protections for our nation’s young people,” he said in a statement.

But Senate Democrats have suggested that they won’t advance the House version. “We’re not going to go with some weak standard,” said Senator Maria Cantwell on Friday. “We are going to go with a law that can be enforced and accountability, and we’re not going with a study, we’re going on with something that holds them accountable.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a co-sponsor of KOSA, even suggested that passing the weaker House version could give tech lobbyists ammunition to “exploit the kind of misunderstandings that can occur” between the two chambers and kill provisions they don’t like. “We need to stop this bill in the House and we need to prevent the White House from forming an alliance with Big Tech,” Blumenthal said.

Cantwell, Blumenthal, and their allies say the KIDS Act doesn’t include the strongest parts of KOSA, like the “duty of care” provision, which makes tech companies legally responsible for the well-being of children on their platforms, or the stipulation that KOSA doesn’t preempt states, allowing them to pass stricter measures in the future. The KIDS Act, on the other hand, includes federal preemption language that opponents say could harm states’ ability to enforce tech regulations themselves. In late May, 44 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress opposing the KIDS Act on the grounds that it would preempt their legislative and legal efforts.

“This bill has no real duty of care. In other words, it has no standard to hold accountable the Big Tech companies that can drive addictive, toxic content through their algorithms and other technologies at children,” Blumenthal said in a press conference on Friday.

On Friday, nearly 100 digital- and kids-safety groups sent a letter to House leadership and the sponsors of the KIDS Act urging them to reject the bill on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough to protect children from Big Tech. In addition to the “duty of care” issue, the authors noted that the KIDS Act drops the requirement that tech platforms offer a chronological feed rather than an algorithmic, engagement-maximizing one. The authors are also concerned that the KIDS Act defines social media platforms too narrowly, leaving out apps and websites like Roblox, which has exposed some children to sexual and financial exploitation.

But others think both acts are a bad idea—that the provisions in KOSA and KIDS, instead of protecting kids, could harm their ability to engage in free speech and access resources for mental health, addiction, and other social issues. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and GLAAD say that measures meant to protect kids could push tech platforms to set age limits and push younger children off of their websites, harming LGBTQ+ kids or others who are looking for community and resources online.

“Maybe by different routes, [the bills] accomplish the same objective,” said Aaron Mackey, the deputy legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’ve pushed online services to have legal obligations to police their content and exclude kids from vital places and space.”

Tech companies have pushed against both the House and Senate versions, but have spoken more favorably about the House bill. Zach Lilly, the director of government affairs for NetChoice, a tech industry group, said that the House bill “is a real effort to improve upon the disastrous censorship regime being championed in the Senate.”

After Monday’s House vote, it remains to be seen which bill will ultimately come out on top and head to the president’s desk—and whether the tech lobby will be able to exploit the rift between House and Senate.

Abdul El-Sayed, a primary candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, released an ambitious AI policy platform Monday, joining other progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders in a push for regulation and public ownership. But El-Sayed’s proposal also goes a step further: not just public ownership, but also public governance.

Earlier this month, an AI super PAC spent millions to ensure that Alex Bores, the author of a comparatively weak New York state AI accountability law, wouldn’t make it to Congress. El-Sayed’s proposed changes to the AI industry go far further than Bores’s legislation. When asked whether he was worried about industry political action committees targeting his campaign over his new proposals, El-Sayed shrugged it off. “I’m just not afraid of them or AIPAC or any of the others. What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”

El-Sayed’s policy proposal, which he shared exclusively with The New Republic ahead of its release, has three key components: democratic governance of AI, public ownership of AI companies, and safety requirements. His proposal takes inspiration from Sanders’s American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund bill, proposed earlier this month—and like Sanders’s bill, calls for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund to distribute AI companies’ cash into Americans’ pockets. Sanders envisions establishing that via a one-time 50 percent tax on the country’s biggest AI companies, generating an estimated $7 trillion for social safety net programs, plus a yearly dividend for Americans. El-Sayed proposes using that money to fund education and job training, increase unemployment benefits, and boost small business loans.

“I love the senator’s point that we need to own the outcomes of this, in part because it is our data and our knowledge that went into creating it,” El-Sayed said about Bernie’s proposal. They both reason that, since AI has been trained on human writing, research, and collective knowledge, it is a good that belongs to all Americans. “But I think the ownership part needs to go a step further, because we also need some control,” El-Sayed added.

To get that control, he proposes democratic governance of AI companies. He proposes that frontier AI labs be chartered as public benefit corporations, legally mandating them to balance public interest with profit margins. Additionally, he suggests that a majority of board seats at these companies should be democratically elected or publicly appointed, rather than selected by shareholders. And, importantly, he calls for major tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta to divest from frontier AI companies. El-Sayed also recommends the establishment of a Food and Drug Administration–style agency to evaluate models before they’re deployed, a ban on AI-generated political media, and requiring companies to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Federal Emergency Management Agency to protect against biosecurity breaches.

El-Sayed’s breezy response to TNR’s question about possible industry retaliation—“What’s another hundred-million-dollar super PAC, I guess?”—references the unrelated money that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has already spent on the race. Through United Democracy Project PAC, AIPAC has spent over $2 million to support one of El-Sayed’s opponents, Representative Haley Stevens, who is the Democratic establishment’s favored candidate. El-Sayed has repeatedly criticized both the Israeli government and AIPAC’s influence in politics. El-Sayed is also facing State Senator Mallory McMorrow, though polls suggest the race is largely between El-Sayed and Stevens.

McMorrow released an AI policy proposal last month that focuses on creating a professional apprenticeship program funded by a token tax, which would charge by the number of tokens used (tokens are the basic units of data that AI models use). Stevens has not released an AI policy plan.

Despite a broad consensus among voters that politicians should regulate the AI industry, few bills have actually been passed. Following AI industry super PACs’ massive spending to defeat Alex Bores in retaliation for the RAISE Act, some feared politicians might become even more reluctant to try.

El-Sayed is hopeful that American voters are ready to push back against money in politics. “We live in an era right now where people are really smart to the old system of money coming in to buy elections. They see the wool being pulled over their eyes and they don’t like it,” he said.

He also doesn’t think politicians have the luxury of time when it comes to regulating AI. “We need to act yesterday,” he said, “and at best, we can act tomorrow.”