Another Reason to Support Platner in Maine

Janet Mills, Chuck Schumer's choice, has a long record as a stooge of predatory business.

At a time when Democratic voters are demanding new, antiestablishment leaders, the Democratic Party’s power brokers are pushing a seventy-seven-year-old candidate for a key 2026 Senate race who’s spent the past six years as governor vetoing collective bargaining rights for workers, tax increases on the wealthy, renter protections, and tribal sovereignty protections, according to a Lever review.

That candidate, Maine’s two-term governor, Janet Mills, entered the 2026 Democratic primary race last month to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) as the hand-picked candidate of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Her opponent is Graham Platner, a forty-one-year-old oyster farmer and populist candidate running on delivering Medicare for All and breaking up monopolies. He’s faced scrutiny for past postings in online forums and a tattoo from his time in the military.

Since entering the race, Mills’s campaign has highlighted her stances on a host of progressive causes, including her labor advocacy and her efforts to protect health care and abortion rights.

But the governor’s veto pen tells a different story, say her critics.

When bills arrive on her desk, “there’s a perception that she’s mostly concerned with business interests,” said Andy O’Brien, a former Maine state representative and the current communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO union federation, speaking in his personal capacity. “She’s very good on social issues like reproductive rights, LGBTQ issues, and the environment, but when it comes to economic issues, she’s very conservative.”

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Just months before she announced her Senate bid, Mills ended Maine’s 2025 legislative session by striking down a bill supported by labor groups that would have permitted farmworkers to discuss their pay and working conditions with one another without threat of retaliation from their employer, as well as file complaints to a state labor relations board.

Her veto letter explaining the decision cited concerns about “disruptions” to agricultural businesses caused by a “new regulatory burden.”

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Mills, the granddaughter of potato farmers, has made blocking worker protections for these laborers a hallmark of her time in the governor’s mansion. 

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In 2024, she killed a bill banning restrictive noncompete agreements that hamstring worker mobility. That same year, she vetoed another piece of legislation that would have strengthened workers’ collective bargaining rights by banning anti-union intimidation tactics used by employers

In previous years, she blocked efforts to stop employers from punishing employees who took state-guaranteed paid time off, killed a permitting reform bill to streamline offshore wind developments because it included a provision mandating union jobs, and vetoed a modest labor bill that would have required the state government to merely study the issue of paper mill workers being forced to work overtime without adequate compensation.

 Other vetoes:

• A bill prohibiting retaliation for using the state mandated leave rights.
• Campaign finance reform bill.
• Increasing taxes on the rich.
•  The creation of a rape kid database.
• Landlord protections.

I think that this is rather more significant than Reddit posts and a profoundly ill-advised tattoo.

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