There’s an opportunity here for TYT broadcasters to be genuinely helpful. Platner has dropped out, and the public outrage against the Republican incumbent Collins is at a fever pitch (as highlighted by John Iadarola in a broadcast I saw today).
So, there’s a key question to ask and answer, which is what are the Democrats going to do to replace Platner with an actual good candidate?
From what I can see, Mills was not the only option. Costello has run for the Senate before, and there was also a write-in candidate LaFlamme who had not dropped out?
Well, maybe all of this has already been covered by TYT or others, but it wasn’t apparent from Iadarola’s broadcast exactly what the hell the Democrats are going to do to stop screwing around in Maine and give voters there an actual good option.
John Iadarola and I think co-host Sharon Reed have done good analysis of Senator Susan Collins (Republican, Maine) and her poor leadership (I think in the most recent live presentation I saw they looked at her comments about the Supreme Court). However, where are interviews with Democratic and Third-Party candidates in Maine? If, as John and Susan say, Susan Collins “has to go”, how is that going to happen with the Democratic party in Maine in such disarray following the suspension of Graham Platner’s campaign?
It is totally unacceptable that Maine would not have a good Democratic candidate to push back against Collins’s awful posturing. I say that as someone from another state, but goodness, the consequences of Maine failing to get her out of office would be felt strongly by all of us. Susan Collins is a poor Senator, and the ramifications are magnified by the difficult voting situation in the Senate.
I had not read far enough in the wikipedia link. It appears that the Democrats in Maine on July 25th will have some sort of nominating convention to decide the matter. Hopefully this will give the candidate enough time to make a really strong challenge to Collins’s outrageous poor performance. It looks like there are a number of declared candidates. While I wonder if there is a role here for TYT, it is perhaps not as necessary to conceive of this as providing platforms to the candidates. Apparently there is a debate scheduled for today (July 16) and another for July 23, 2026. So, hopefully that will allow the candidates to get their points across and the Maine Democrats can make their best decisions.
Apparently (going by this wikipedia page) the candidate Troy Jackson is the leader in polling, followed by Shah and Bellows. Each of those three apparently were recently candidates for Governor.
"…Process
No political party in Maine has replaced their nominee in an election before. While the exact process to be used was not immediately certain, Maine Democratic Party officials and others like Maine Senate president Mattie Daughtry called for an open and inclusive process.[222] On July 8, the Maine Democratic Party voted to hold a state party convention to nominate a candidate to replace Platner as the Democratic nominee;[223] the convention will be held on July 25 in Bangor.[224] The convention will consist of 600 delegates overall, including the party’s state committee.[223] 500 of the delegates will be elected at county-level meetings. All delegates at the convention will be unpledged.[225]
In order to qualify for the convention, replacement candidates had to collect at least 500 signatures, with at least 50 signatures from 8 different counties.[226]
If this is true, be still my heart! I am open to a hearing of all candidates and how they stack up on pro-worker issues and no more Israel First. But if a candidate like Jackson gets installed who has those bona fides, it’s bye bye Collins!
The only issue then left for the makeup of the Senate is illegal voter suppression by Trump Cult GOVERNORS in cracker States…
“…Some of his priorities, if elected, according to his website, are passing Medicare for all, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and ending tax funding for Israel’s military, which he has said is committing genocide in Gaza…”
This seems like a decent slate of goals for Jackson. Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how the Democrats in Maine pulled together to get someone decent-seeming to oppose Collins. I don’t know what was going on there with Platner, and he seemed to have had a decent chance to defeat her, but the worst case scenarios were worse:
he could run and lose (this would not entirely easy to pull off this failure, when Collins’s faults are so much more clear these days to many more people in Maine).
once he was out of the race, a true second-rate candidate would come in who just did not impress independents and others, and that Collins would win again.
Mills or some other big name acceptable to Schumer et. al. could have become the candidate.
I’m very pleased not to hear Mills’s name any more for this office.
I really wanted to like Collins, once upon a time. I’m not a “socialist”, nor a “democrat”, and probably not even much of a “progressive”, but the Republican Party has so descended into mindless pseudo-freedom-defending pseudo-business-defending pseudo-capitalism-defending disingenuous malicious nonsense that it has become nearly impossible to find good candidates to consider. Every four years I try to challenge myself to find good Republicans that I think would have made good candidates for President and once upon a time, Maine had Olympia Snowe who used to be one of my answers. I don’t think she would have wanted to be drafted into running for that office, but the exercise was a useful theoretical to me. Snowe’s fellow female Maine Republican senator Collins is someone I also examined, and at times she seemed to be a possibility, but a friend or two in Maine told me to be careful of her, and she showed her true colors as being, ultimately, when the pressure came, more in the court of MAGA/Trump/etc. than not.
Excuse me while I do cartwheels! It’s not official, but all the numbers are in his favor.
Platner was hinting he was a logical successor. I am glad to see Maine Dems were not going to throw their chances just to snub Platner.
Watch Israel First and the Repubs start piling on against Jackson (but he has a longer battle tested career in Maine politics, so if there was anything to be found on him, they would have gotten to it in previous elections…)
This is DEVASTATING news for Collins and the Repubs. This might also explain Israel’s new State-level lobbying initiative!
As I said, the only major problem now with the makeup of Congress in the midterms will be cracker State governors doing vote suppression by illegal means. You already got a hint of that in Louisiana.
One complaint I hear from pundits is Jackson is not slick in his advertising. Memo: that’s a feature, not a bug. He’s not a phony; like it or not, he’s authentic. NOBODY will be buying Collin’s being slick when he’s stacked up against HER. [It wouldn’t surprise me if Collins suddenly goes corn-pone, to try and combat his honest message.]
from the one interview I saw, he reminded me a little of Tim Walz.
I’ve been talking with friends and family in Maine for some years about Collins. A long time ago I was willing to keep an open mind that Collins might be a rare decent Republican, but over the last decade or so, that has gone away. I think there have been moments when she still appeared to me in a good light (in February 2021, she voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment… of inciting an insurrection), but overall it’s not enough. I feel like I’ve been fooled by her here and there, though I don’t keep good extensive receipts.
I heard some grousing from a Turks commentator that Jackson is not the ideal candidate. He’s pro-worker, anti-Israel First -and this after it was left in the hands of career Maine Dems!
I don’t know what that commentator was expecting from Maine! Platner? If he didn’t have a prior history of alcoholism and flake [former] partners, maybe we could indulge that fantasy. But it was not to be; Collins’ campaigners would have eventually peeled him open like a cheap aluminum can! I like Platner, but he wouldn’t have made it…
I know only what I have recently read about Jackson, and we know that the Republicans under Trump are the party of ad homenim, blackmail and such, (a bit moreso than the Dems), so it’s still quite possible that Jackson will somehow go down the drain, but let’s momentarily assume for the sake of discussion that whatever dirt-digging the Republicans do, then it won’t be enough to force voters away from deciding this particular race on the issues and ideas of the two main candidates.
With that being said, we should not under-estimate Collins. She’s an experienced politician who covered her backside by voting for impeachment conviction in one case, and so is probably going to be adept at making the case that she’s that rare “moderate and reasonable and uncorrupted” Republican. I have seen through this, but I’m not a Maine voter, and I sure hope they are able to get going on getting her out of office.
This recent (June 12, 2026) article would be helpful to me, if I were a voter in Maine trying to make up my mind:
"…Fact Check: Nonpartisan analysis shows Collins backed Trump’s position on about 94.6% of votes
“A nonpartisan analysis by CQ Roll Call found that Collins voted in line with President Donald Trump’s position about 94.6% of the time in 2025, making the claim that she supported him 95% of the time largely accurate…”
By the way: I have not seen a Turks short complementing the Maine Dems on making a strategically correct decision. Maybe it’s out there and I missed it -someone post here if that is the case…
I think both Musk and Collins can be intelligent in their way, and this unfortunately sometimes is in service of no-good.
I’d like to see a comparison of Jackson’s and Collins’s views on the Canada/Maine trade-and-tourism situation. I don’t know what Jackson’s views are, but when I looked the other day, Collins’s were smart, but only to a very limited extent. She seemed to be fine with criticizing the bad impact on some Maine businesses of the Trump Administration’s tariffs (the tariffs and short notice on new tariffs can do damage to the supply costs that Maine businesses pay). She did not have the decency to address the root of the matter though, which is the Trump Administration’s disgraceful threats to Canada’s sovereignty, not to mention that she did not sufficiently criticize the Administration’s complete mishandling of a trade relationship and the damage to businesses on the US side, in terms of lost tourism, lost exports and more expensive prices on key established imported goods. (And note: I’m ok with re-examining US trade relationships and considering imposing tariffs in some cases if a terrible imbalance seems to be going on. And I think the Canadians would have been open to discussion. However, that is not what the Trump administration has done.)
If Jackson does not stake out a strong and smart position on this issue, and lay bare the failings of Collins’s position, I will be extremely disappointed. It is not only a key issue to some Maine voters, but it is an issue where Senator Collins is vulnerable due to her own failure to speak out more clearly on some of the key matters.
I reiterate also that I think TYT may not be doing enough coverage of Canada relations. However, I don’t watch that much, so maybe I am just missing it. The Trump administration is vulnerable on this matter, with their Stephen Miller/expansionist/thug-bully-dictator philosophy of trying to acquire land by force and by accompanying sleazy undermining of other countries.
