Platner wins; DC dishes as Klipp misses

As political junkies all know, political novice and oysterman around town Graham Platner won Maine's Democratic Senate primary Tuesday night.

I offered my thoughts on his Totenkopf tattoo and other matters of his campaign about a month ago. That was before the sexting after marriage came out, and before the newest allegations of some form of abuse came out as well. Early voting in Maine also started about that time, meaning, especially since Democrats generally are more likely to vote early than Rethugs, that Platner didn't have to fully face the music on these issues in the primary.

That leads me to Klippenstein.

Ken used his space on Substack Tuesday to dunk on national Democraps and media punditry types for trying to boost Gov. Janet Mills and her walking dead campaign, while calling out the media punditry for publishing allegations against him as fact.

Ken says:

The New York Times was so desperate to align itself with the Party in Washington that it published allegations that it said it “could not independently corroborate” — something I’ve literally never seen them do before.

Versus something it claimed was corroborated, but wasn’t, like the story claiming Palestinian rapes?

Versus something I don’t think the NYT even tried to corroborate, but just took a “trust us” stance, like Judith Miller on Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction”?

Maybe not in exactly the way it did with Platner, but yeah, the NYT. has done this before, or similar.

As for his chances in the general, Ken is pretty right that Maine is hard to poll in primary races, in part because of ranked choice voting. But, unless there's a "name" third candidate, whether independent, Green or Libertarian, in the general, the RCV issue itself isn't in that much play. And, on the ticket-splitting and him looking at Collins overcoming polling takes to beat Sara Gideon in 2020? That one cuts both ways. Wiki's piece on the Maine 2026 Senate race notes Collins has outperformed other Republicans on the Maine ballot in all previous races.

The miss? Ken has uses this race to bash DC, rather than to talk about Democratic alternatives to both Platner and Mills.

Like Amanda LaFlamme. I only learned about her on Tuesday when I did teh Google to find out what other candidates were in the race. I don't know why she was only a write-in. The Bangor Daily News reported in February that she actually filed in 2025, plenty of time to get the 2,000 signatures necessary. But the first piece says "failed to get." So, did more progressive Dems in Maine deem Platner a lock? Well, he only filed in August 2025, two months after her.

She sounds like she could have been good on multiple issues, but, for whatever reason, got no traction. I'm sure there's something I'm missing, but I don't know what it is, and teh Goggle hasn't really helped me.

Since Platner was and is a flawed candidate, and yet he's the best Maine Dems could present, I'd like to hear more about why LaFlamme failed to gain that traction and less, for now at least, of dunking on Chuck Schumer and national media. 

The Maine Green Independent Party had its state convention May 30, and per Wiki's page on the election, per Ballotpedia, and per the party's book of face and website, sadly appears not to have a candidate. Ballotpedia lists three minor candidates, but they all appear to be Democrats who dropped out of the Doink primary. A sad election in many ways it shall be.