Updated: 10/15/2025 10:10 AM EST

A blue state governor who has brazenly clashed with President Donald Trump on the national stage is hoping to take her progressive policies with her to Washington, D.C. Maine’s Governor Janet Mills (D) announced on Tuesday that she will be campaigning for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Susan Collins.

“I’ve never backed down from a bully and I never will. Donald Trump is ripping away health care from millions, driving up costs, and giving corporate CEOs massive tax cuts. And Susan Collins is helping him,” Mills said in a social media post plugging her first campaign ad. “Honestly, if this president and this Congress were doing things that were even remotely acceptable, I wouldn’t be running for the U.S. Senate,” she stated. “I won’t sit idly by while Maine people suffer and politicians like Susan Collins bend a knee as if this were normal.”

While Mills was encouraged to run for the federal office by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), she will first have to face fellow Democrats in the state’s primary. One of those Mills will have to contend with is 41-year-old oyster farmer Graham Platner, who has galvanized youth and far-left voting blocs in the state and earned the support of ultra-progressives like socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). Alex Seitz-Wald, a veteran political reporter and analyst now serving as deputy editor at the Maine-based Midcoast Villager, compared Platner’s surging popularity and skyrocketing prominence to that of former President Barack Obama, who notably rose from a Chicago area community organizer to a one-term U.S. senator and quickly became president.

“So this is a really intense outpouring of support for him,” Seitz-Wald said of Platner’s popularity. “He definitely has young people, he definitely has some older [people including] former hippies or back-to-the-lander type people who — they just self-identify as such. Your usual suspects, in other words,” the journalist explained. “But you also have a lot of others, and it’s people who are not engaged in politics actively.” Young and working-class voters have reportedly shown up to Platner’s campaign events and townhalls in large numbers. “The durability of that support, and the length of time that they can maintain that — those are the big questions for me going forward,” Seitz-Wald mused. “I think we’re about to have a very interesting primary kicking off here.”

Former End Citizens United head and congressional staffer Jordan Wood is also running. Maine Beer Company founder Dan Kleban announced the suspension of his campaign on Tuesday and endorsed Mills.

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Caprenter said, “Mills’ entrance into the Democratic primary promises to generate a pretty nasty contest to see who will go up against long-time Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins.” He noted, “Mills enters a Democratic primary in which the left flank is already well-established in Graham Platner, who was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders, and a variety of other candidates, some of whom already have significant war chests built up.”

Carpenter added, “Even if Mills were to succeed in the Democrat primary, Collins is a formidable opponent. When most pundits and pollsters wrote her off in 2020, she won by eight points against a well-funded Democrat challenger and with Joe Biden winning the state as well that year.”

University of Maine Farmington political science professor James Melcher told TWS that while Mills is an establishment favorite with strong name recognition, Maine Democrats — especially younger voters — may favor a younger, more radical figure to combat the Trump administration. “There is no Democrat in Maine who can match Mills’s name recognition — not just from two terms as governor, but her time as attorney general, state legislator, and coming from a well-known family in Maine politics,” Melcher said. “If she survives the primary — which will be contested — she’ll be pretty much even in name recognition with Collins.”

That primary, however, will be “very competitive,” Melcher warned. “Some progressives in Maine feel that Mills has been too conservative on some issues, particularly tribal sovereignty and law and order issues. A significant number of them are backing Graham Platner, who until recently was little known, but who has attracted much interest, both from Maine progressives and the national media,” he explained. “Janet Mills is the ultimate experienced political insider, and she will highlight that as a major asset against her more inexperienced challengers. But some Maine Democrats want someone more progressive, a fresh face and, in particular, want someone younger,” Melcher continued. “They want a changing of the guard.”

Mills is considered an establishment favorite and was quickly supported by pro-abortion activist network EMILY’s List. “This moment demands someone with backbone and grit, someone who has proven she will fight Trump head on and defeat him when he tries to hurt Maine — that is Janet Mills,” said EMILY’s List President Jessica Mackler in a statement. “When the stakes are this high, we should leave nothing to chance. Janet Mills is the only candidate in this race who is going to defeat Susan Collins.”

Mills has a long history of supporting abortion and working to force both public and private insurance companies to cover abortions. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in 2022, she quipped that “unlike an apparent majority of the Supreme Court, I do not consider the rights of women to be dispensable. And I pledge that as long as I am Governor, I will fight with everything I have to protect reproductive rights and to preserve access to reproductive health care in the face of every and any threat to it.”

The governor-turned-senate candidate has also publicly clashed with the president and his administration over transgender issues. After Trump signed an executive order earlier this year restoring Title IX provisions barring biological males from participating in girls’ sports or using girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, Mills openly defied the order, referring to the president as a “dictator.” In response, the Trump administration launched a multi-pronged investigation into Maine’s compliance with Title IX and eventually stripped Maine universities of federal funding. Later, the administration removed further federal funding after Maine’s Department of Corrections housed a man identifying as a woman in a women’s prison. The administration has also threatened to pull funding for K-12 schools if Maine does not comply with Title IX.

Despite Mills’s vocal opposition to Trump, a key theme of her inaugural campaign ad, Melcher told TWS that Maine Democrats may be looking for a senator who will fight the administration even more aggressively. “Quite a few Democrats in Maine and around the country are looking for a more combative, perhaps even angry, type of candidate to push back harder on what President Trump has done,” the political science professor observed. “A number of such people have come out for Platner.”