Democrats in Maine have been clear about who’s not going to select their next nominee for Senate. It won’t be Graham Platner, the disgraced ex-candidate who had hoped to have sway over the process. And it won’t be Chuck Schumer.
But it’s still not quite clear which Democrats, exactly, are going to pick the next contender.
“You have one more day to register to become a delegate,” Devon-Murphy Anderson, the executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, said in a video on social media Tuesday night.
The collapse of Platner’s campaign left Maine Democrats with a dilemma. They needed to find a new candidate quickly — but without relying on any process resembling Kamala Harris’s quick coronation after President Joe Biden’s re-election bid imploded in 2024.
What the party has set up instead will be a test of small-d democracy that is hard to explain and hard to pull off. And it just might make everybody mad anyway.
Party organizers are, in real time, standing up a county-by-county process in which registered Democrats will elect 500 delegates at county party meetings this coming weekend. Those selected, along with 101 members of the Democratic Party’s state committee who automatically got the role, will choose from a bevy of declared candidates on July 25.
The process is certainly diffuse, and no candidate appears to be an overwhelming favorite. It is also cumbersome and confusing — and it can’t, by definition, include everyone who might like to participate.
“All you can do is figure out, how do we get the broadest number of voices to participate in this that is practical?” Marcia Myers, the chair of the Hancock County Democrats, who was not involved in devising the process, told me. “What is realistic?”
“I mean,” she added, “we’re Democrats for God’s sake!”
My colleague Bayliss Wagner has an action-packed look at how candidates are honing their appeals to those state party members and maneuvering to ensure that their supporters run for the role of delegate. Their focus on such a tiny electorate is making even some of those who are part of it uncomfortable.
“Having candidates go down the list and try to get all of our votes, and then use that to become the U.S. Senate candidate when we’re such a small portion of the populace, doesn’t sit right with me,” Taylor Grant, the president of the Maine Young Democrats and a state committee member, told Bayliss.
The process is by definition open only to registered Democrats, excluding independent voters, who were an integral part of Platner’s insurgent coalition. And the only Democrats who get to participate are those willing to be part of the meetings this weekend.
“I’ve heard from a lot of people on the outside who are deeply suspicious that the Maine party, you know, is going to have this insider-controlled event,” Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine told me. She insisted that the participants would not be “insiders” but “willing volunteers” — the kind of party activists who “bake the brownies and bring the potluck meals and organize the fund-raisers and all those things.”
“I didn’t design the process,” said Pingree, whose daughter, Hannah Pingree, is the Democratic nominee for governor. “I’m just saying, you know, it was a state party faced with somewhat of an impossible challenge.”
Maine Democrats say that any Democrat who was registered as of the original June 9 primary is welcome to participate and that thousands of them have expressed interest in doing so. They say state law — and the calendar — prevents them from taking the even more inclusive step of simply holding another statewide primary.
That’s what is happening in South Carolina, where voters will choose a replacement for the late Senator Lindsey Graham on the November ballot in a special primary election next month.
Yet the winner of that election could effectively be determined by far fewer people than 601 delegates. It might just come down to the endorsement of one person: President Trump.
“What matters to the hard-core voters who are going to show up?” said Scott Huffmon, the director of the statewide Winthrop Poll. “Right now in South Carolina in 2026, the answer is, Who’s going to help push Trump’s agenda?”
Who’s running in Maine?
Here are some of the most prominent Democrats who have jumped into the Senate race so far:
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Troy Jackson, the former State Senate president and a progressive who campaigned alongside Platner
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Dr. Nirav Shah, the former director of Maine’s public health agency
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Shenna Bellows, the Maine secretary of state, who fought to keep President Trump off Maine’s presidential primary ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack
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Jordan Wood, a former chief of staff to former Representative Katie Porter of California
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Dan Kleban, a brewery owner
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David Costello, an environmental policy consultant
PENCIL IT IN
Nov. 17
That’s the release date of a memoir by former President Joe Biden, he announced today in a video on a social media.
Biden had originally said that the book, “Promise Me, America,” would come out in September. But that apparently offhand remark was not met warmly by Democrats, who worried that a September release would distract from their efforts to win in the midterm elections. My colleague Reid J. Epstein has more.
Nearly $25 million
That’s the war chest that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona reported across his federal accounts. He has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s top fund-raisers and donors in recent months as he considers a potential 2028 presidential run.
He shared his fund-raising figures with my colleague Shane Goldmacher before a federal filing deadline tonight.
ONE LAST THING
The House takes a step toward making daylight saving permanent
The House on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to make daylight saving time permanent.
Some state governments have tried for years to end the practice of turning clocks back — an effort I wrote about way back in 2017! The fate of the measure, called the Sunshine Protection Act, is now in the hands of the Senate, where at least one Republican seems poised to try to block it.
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
