Maine Democrats had a Senate candidate. Then a sexual assault accusation happened. Now they have until July 27 to find a replacement to take on Susan Collins, and the replacement auditions have officially begun.
How We Got Here, Fast
Graham Platner suspended his Senate campaign this week after a woman accused him of sexual assault, allegations he has denied. Under Maine Democratic Party rules, once Platner formally files withdrawal paperwork, the party has until July 27 at 5 p.m. to pick a replacement nominee through a nominating convention. The process details are still forthcoming, which is a very polite way of saying everyone is making this up as they go.
The whole situation is, to put it charitably, a mess. Collins, one of the most durable Republican incumbents in the country, now gets to watch her opponents trip over each other in a compressed five-week window. She has spent decades surviving political near-death experiences. She is probably fine.
Some Democrats with obvious name recognition passed. Rep. Jared Golden said no. Patrick Dempsey, yes the Grey's Anatomy guy, also said no. So we move on to the people who said yes.
Shenna Bellows Has Done This Before, Which Is Either Reassuring or Alarming
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows jumped in first and loudest. She posted on social media that she has taken on "tough fights for working people" throughout her career. She is not wrong that she has fought. She lost to Collins in 2014 by almost 37 percentage points, which is less a loss than a geological event.
Bellows is 51, a former ACLU of Maine director, the first woman to serve as Maine secretary of state, and a native of Hancock. She ran for governor earlier this year and came up short in last month's primary, finishing behind Hannah Pingree after the three leading candidates endorsed each other under Maine's ranked-choice voting system. She raised just under $1.8 million for that race, which is real money but not Senate-race money.
To her credit, she was among the first to publicly call on Platner to step aside after the allegations surfaced, writing on X that the accusations were "extremely serious" and that he needed to go. Now she wants his spot. That is, at minimum, efficient.
A Logger, a Nurse, and a Craft Beer Guy Walk Into a Senate Race
Former state Senate President Troy Jackson filed an FEC exploratory committee and told the Bangor Daily News he is the "best person" to replace Platner. Jackson is a 58-year-old fifth-generation logger from Allagash, a town so small and remote it makes Platner's outsider-candidate pitch look metropolitan. He served in the Maine Legislature since 2002 and was Senate president from 2018 to 2024. He bills himself as a "pickup truck progressive," which is exactly the kind of phrase that either works brilliantly in Maine or collapses immediately on contact with a debate stage.
Jackson has Bernie Sanders in his corner, which has real organizing value. The two go back to 2016 when Jackson worked on Sanders' presidential campaign. Sanders said Jackson would "stand with working-class families against the enormous power of the monied interests," a sentence Sanders has now delivered approximately 40,000 times in his life but that still lands. Jackson finished third in last month's Democratic gubernatorial primary after raising around $1 million. He urged Platner to withdraw, writing that there is "no place in our politics for sexual violence."
State Rep. Valli Geiger, 70, a nurse from the coastal town of Rockland with three legislative terms under her belt, is also expressing interest. She is a close Platner ally and told WMTW that Platner was supporting her bid, though she later walked that back to say he was speaking with "several people" including her. And then there is Dan Kleban, co-founder of Maine Beer Company, who made it official with an FEC filing. Kleban briefly ran for Senate last year before dropping out in October and endorsing Gov. Janet Mills. He self-funded nearly $215,000 of that earlier run and raised another $244,000 from donors, per federal records, spending almost all of it. He called the Platner allegations "horrifying and completely disqualifying."
The Doctor Who Came in Second Also Wants a Shot
Nirav Shah, former director of the Maine CDC, announced interest after finishing second in last month's Democratic gubernatorial primary. His opening line on X was "Establishment politicians have failed us," which is a bold choice when you are asking party insiders at a nominating convention to hand you a Senate nomination.
Shah's profile is real. Running a state CDC during a pandemic is not a light credential. But the nominating convention format is an insider game by definition, and positioning yourself as the anti-establishment choice while courting party delegates is a trick that requires a certain kind of agility.
What Collins Is Doing Right Now
Watching. Probably from a comfortable chair.
Susan Collins has survived everything. She survived the Tea Party wave, the Trump era, the Kavanaugh vote, multiple cycles of Democrats convinced they had finally found the candidate to beat her. She is one of the most institutionally embedded politicians in the country, and her opponents just lost their nominee with five weeks to replacement and three months to Election Day.
Whoever comes out of the July 27 convention will be starting a general election campaign with almost no money banked specifically for the Senate race, no established campaign infrastructure, and a very compressed timeline. Collins' war chest, by contrast, has been building for years. CBS News is reporting all of this, and the math does not flatter the Democratic field.
The Dingo Take
Look, the sexual assault allegation against Platner is serious, and the Democrats who called on him to step aside were right to do so. That part of the story is not complicated. What is complicated is everything that comes after it. You now have a rotating cast of candidates who each just lost a different race, competing in a five-week nominating sprint run by a state party that had not planned for any of this, to take on a Republican incumbent who has been winning against Democrats who were supposed to beat her since roughly the Obama administration.
The pickup truck progressive, the former ACLU director, the craft beer entrepreneur, the nurse, and the ex-CDC director all have real arguments for why they should get the nod. Some of them are genuinely interesting candidates. But interesting candidates need time, money, and infrastructure that none of them currently have pointed at a Senate race. Collins does not need any of those things. She is already there.
The real story here is not who replaces Platner. It is that Democrats once again find themselves, weeks before a critical election, improvising when they should have a plan. The party will pick someone. That someone will run hard. Collins will probably win anyway. And somewhere in Maine, Patrick Dempsey is not answering his phone and feeling very good about that decision.
