Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.
Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign Thursday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.
The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow.
They want fighters.
Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.
Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’ endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’ establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.
That’s what happens when voters finally get a real choice: they want the real thing, not a compromising deal-maker taking money from corporations and billionaires like Republicans do. As then-President Harry Truman said on May 17, 1952:
“If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”
And it matters that on roughly the same day Mills bowed out, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — just as fed up with moderate Democrats running the same losing playbook as voters are — rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a 10-point legislative package aimed straight at the cost-of-living crisis that’s now crushing working families.
It would make:
— Prescription drugs cheaper by establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount, cutting the price of a vial of insulin from $300 to $50;
— Utilities cheaper by cracking down on for-profit utilities overcharging consumers, saving the average family $500 a year;
— Gas cheaper by charging big oil companies a tax on extra profits from the war, then refunding that money to consumers. If oil stays at $100 a barrel, most families would get $324 back;
— Childcare cheaper by guaranteeing no family pays more than 7% of its income – under $10 a day for most families;
— Housing cheaper by building millions of new homes, offering every first-time homeowner $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental assistance;
— Groceries cheaper by cracking down on big grocers who fix prices and on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive;
— Time off cheaper by guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation time;
— Ban ‘Surveillance Pricing,’ where companies use personal data to raise prices with AI;
— Put money in pockets by requiring companies to pay double wages for overtime, as opposed to the current time-and-a-half standard; and
— Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy more policies that make stuff more expensive.
New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters.Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range.
That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate, and Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and the rest of the Progressive Caucus deserve real credit for putting it on the table.
Some of us have been ringing this bell since the 1990s. Back when Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through welfare reform and NAFTA, I was telling readers that we were watching the Democratic Party gut its own coalition for a handful of cocktail-party invitations from Wall Street.
As I laid out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and on the air for over two decades, when Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 and Obama maintained it through his eight years in office, the Democratic Party took a fatal turn to the right.
“End welfare as we know it.” “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bailing out the banks and hobnobbing with their CEOs at Davos while throwing the homeowners those banksters had defrauded out on the street, sucking up to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Defense, defending Netanyahu no matter how many war crimes he commits.
Then nominating Hillary Clinton on a platform that tried to tell working-class voters that things were basically fine, right before Donald Trump ran ads in the Rust Belt about NAFTA and how nobody in Washington gave a damn about them. The post-1992 neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t lose because it was too progressive: it lost because it kept refusing to be progressive at all.
Meanwhile, look at what the Republicans have actually done with the power voters keep handing them. They’ve:
— Cut taxes on billionaires and corporations so dramatically that the national debt just officially crossed 100% of GDP, the highest peacetime level since the years right after World War II.
— Rigged elections through aggressive voter purges and partisan gerrymandering, with help from a Supreme Court that just this week further gutted the Voting Rights Act.
— Cheered on foreign wars, including the “magnificently stupid” current Iran war Platner himself has denounced, while running interference for the daily war crimes happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon.
— Allowed the Trump family to turn the presidency into a multi-billion-dollar grift machine of meme coins, crypto launches, stablecoins, and foreign payoffs while millions of Americans skip prescription doses to make rent.
— Kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25, where it’s been stuck since 2009, and even went to this corrupt Supreme Court to kill Joe Biden’s student debt relief.
— Taken hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel industry while heat domes, hurricanes, and wildfires are killing thousands of Americans — most recently children in Texas —every single year.
— Taken millions more from the gun industry while terrified schoolkids hide under their desks.
— Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version that Jesus would’ve flipped tables over, while hustling for huckster televangelists, performatively demanding mandatory school prayer, Ten Commandments postings in every classroom, and Whiskey Pete pitching prayer every weekend in every barracks.
— Deployed armed, masked thugs to intimidate and murder American citizens while building a massive series of concentration camps across the country.
That’s the record American voters across the political spectrum need to know about, and Democrats should be shouting from the rafters. A wishy-washy Democrat saying “well, we’ll try, but we really don’t want to p--- off the Republicans by impeaching Trump or Clarence Thomas” — like we saw in 2024 — is never again going to work.
Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.
The lesson for the DNC, DCCC, the DSCC, and every damn consultant who’s suggested running on an anodyne “don’t make waves” agenda without naming who’s screwing everyday Americans is clear: the New Affordability Agenda isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics.
It tells voters exactly who’s stealing from them and offers concrete steps progressive candidates will fight to actually deliver. That’s the formula Bernie Sanders has been pushing for three decades (and did for 11 years weekly on my radio program), the formula AOC and Zohran Mamdani just rode to victory in New York, and the formula Platner just used to blow Janet Mills out of the water.
So, reach out to your Democratic member of Congress and senators and tell them to sign onto the New Affordability Agenda. Tell them you want fighters, not neoliberal wusses.
If you’re in Maine, help Graham Platner finish the job and send Susan Collins home in November. And if you’re anywhere else, find the populist progressives in your state’s primary and back them, too, or sign up to run yourself.
Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.
It’s now on the rest of us to follow their lead.