Prediction: Mills won’t run for Senate
From the Department of the Future
Based, largely, on a variety of political maneuvers she made during this term, I always thought Janet Mills was unlikely to run for the United States Senate against incumbent Susan Collins. Consider everything that has happened over the past year in Maine.
She’s been perfectly willing to engage with Donald Trump over an issue, transgender student athletes, that tilts heavily against her party, even in Maine. She could have backed down or worked out some sort of compromise with Trump, or encouraged the Maine Legislature to change the law. She didn’t: instead, she leaned into the fight, despite claiming earlier that she wouldn’t join the Democratic resistance against Donald Trump.
She passed an unpopular budget along party lines, raising taxes on things that ordinary people pay for, like cigarettes and Netflix. She could have forcefully pushed for more spending cuts, alienating her base completely but appealing to moderates and avoiding tax increases, but she didn’t. Those aren’t the political maneuvers of someone angling for a promotion. Whether it’s to her detriment or credit is up to you to decide ideologically, but she wasn’t positioning herself well politically.
She vetoed several bills that, while not high priorities, were popular amongst the liberal base. Most of them were vetoed for the basic reason that they cost too much money. While that’s certainly reasonable, they’re not the actions of someone trying to lock down her own base and avoid a primary challenge. Neither of these behaviors are anything new: over the past eight years, she’s been perfectly willing to both challenge her own base at times and, yet, sign multiple party-line budgets that alienated Republicans. Those aren’t the actions of someone who’s coalition-building on either side of the aisle.
Finally, today, Fox News released a bombshell report about rumors that have been circulating for years regarding her alleged cocaine use. Rather than commenting more on this, you should read it yourself. The DSCC certainly should have been well aware of these allegations, since they’ve been part of the Department of Justice records for a while now - and even if Democrats didn’t have access to those, the rumors were there. It’s no coincidence, of course, that this report was released after the Legislature adjourned for the year, when she might be announcing her decision soon.
We’ll see how the report shakes out, but all of these things point in the opposite of what national Democrats might have been hoping for. They really don’t have any other serious options to run against Collins, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens now. Will Mills prove me wrong and go ahead with the campaign, despite all of these liabilities, or will the Democrats simply let the race go forward with, well, whomever wants to run? Despite their default position as the dominant party in Maine, they don’t have a lot of other great potential candidates besides Mills. All of those who have already declared are nonentities. None of the gubernatorial candidates would be better, and Jared Golden seems unlikely to suddenly change his mind and run against his old employer.
They’re kind of stuck.
Jim is also a weekly columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Maine’s largest daily newspaper. Follow him on X, BlueSky, on Facebook.