As Maine Goes
Gov. Janet Mills enters the Democratic Senate primary championing her willingness to stand up to Donald Trump. But why is she silent about who she was defending at the White House back in February?
Yesterday, Gov. Janet Mills threw her hat into the Democratic Senate primary to unseat Susan Collins. The Republican incumbent, despite being cited for years as one of her Party’s most vulnerable Senators, has fended off Democratic challenger after challenger, and is now running for her sixth term. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer aggressively recruited Mills to challenge Collins, eventually convincing the 77-year-old, term-limited governor that she was the best hope for flipping Maine’s Senate seat blue.
Though I’ve never actually lived in Maine, the state has long loomed large in my personal history: regular family visits to friends in Berwick, a camping trip to Acadia National Park and Bar Harbor during a week of torrential rain, regular getaways from Boston to a gay b&b in Ogunquit and long walks along Marginal Way, an interview for a faculty job at Bowdoin back during my academic days. (Mom & Dad registering our cars in Maine when we lived in Brooklyn is a story for another day.)
I also volunteered in and around Portland with EqualityMaine on its successful 2012 marriage equality campaign. Then-Attorney General Janet Mills first came to my attention, a forceful advocate for marriage equality, while I was canvassing on that campaign. She returned to national attention this past February, sparring with President Trump at the White House. One of Trump’s numerous transphobic Executive Orders demanded that public schools bar trans athletes from participating in women’s sports or risk losing federal funding. At the White House, Gov. Mills defended the anti-discrimination provisions of Maine’s Human Rights Act after Trump specifically threatened her, with Mills promising to “See you in court.”
As email after email and text after text announcing Mills’ run for Senate landed in my inbox yesterday, I saw how prominently they all featured the governor refusing to back down when Trump challenged her back in February. In her “Stand Up for Maine” launch video, she declares, “I’ve never backed down from a bully, and I never will,” adding how Collins and other Republicans “bend a knee” and “let bullies like Trump have their way.” She reminds Maine voters, “I did see him in court, and we won,” with a judge overturning Trump’s order freezing funding for Maine schools.
The ad does not mention transgender people once. Nor have any of the flood of fundraising emails and texts.
The Democratic Party establishment is running terrified when it comes to defending trans rights (and, indeed, the rights of immigrants and other vulnerable groups). Representative Seth Moulton — who just today announced a bid to challenge incumbent Senator Ed Markey — attacked his own party’s support for trans rights last November after Kamala Harris’ defeat:
“Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Mr. Moulton [told the New York Times]. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Just this Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a likely Democratic candidate for President in 2028, vetoed a bill that would have allowed transgender residents of the state to stockpile a 12-month supply of hormone therapy medications — an urgent concern when access to gender-affirming health is under fierce siege from the Trump Administration.
Highly paid Beltway insiders, committed to Bill Clinton-era Third Way politics and grossly out of touch with voters under 40, keep begging the Party to find a “middle ground” between the mythical white working-class voters looking for a reason to abandon MAGA politics and the basic right to exist for transgender Americans facing a regime dedicated to erasing them altogether.
Globally, the Democratic Party leadership is hardly alone in its believe that throwing trans people under the bus in hopes of electoral success is a viable strategy. In the U.K. the Labour Party’s willingness to sacrifice trans rights makes some mainstream Democrats on this side of the pond look like candidates for inclusion in the next edition of Profiles in Courage. And that sacrifice, unsurprisingly, has done nothing to rescue Labour’s freefall in British polling.
For evidence that it doesn’t have to be this way, look no further than Zohran Mamdani’s video paying extraordinary homage to queer and trans rights pioneer Sylvia Rivera. The New York City mayoral candidate uses Rivera’s story of exclusion as the basis for his promise to defend and expand the rights of transgender New Yorkers. Mamdani’s video was filmed at the Christopher Street Pier where Rivera fled when homeless and where her body was found in 1992, the victim of a suspected murder that the NYPD never investigated. From Rivera’s life of protest and struggle, Mamdani launches his promise,
“Since taking office, Donald Trump has waged a scorched-earth campaign against trans people. The man with the most power has expended enormous energy targeting those with the least. New York will not sit idly by while trans people are attacked. We will deploy hundreds of lawyers to combat Trump’s hate, make New York City an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city, and create the office of LGBTQIA+ affairs to allocate millions for youth and adult housing programs as well as gender-affirming care. We can’t bring Sylvia back. But we can honor her memory by building a city where trans New Yorkers are cherished. In a time of darkness, New York must be the light.”
Despite the desperation of Andrew Cuomo, Michael Bloomberg, and other establishment politicians and institutions in New York to promote a Third Way path to prevent his election, Mamdani continues to lead in pre-election polling.
In Maine, Janet Mills will first have to win a primary against a crowded field of Democrats that includes 41-year-old oyster farmer and Marine veteran Graham Platner and Jordan Wood, an openly gay 36-year-old who served as Chief of Staff to former Rep. Katie Porter. Platner, who has called to abolish ICE and hasn’t hesitated to refer to Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide, earned endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Maine UAW and has already raised over $4 million. Notably, while Platner hasn’t emphasized queer and trans rights in his campaign, he has also refused to adopt Moulton and Newsom’s Third Way “middle ground” strategy that has failed again and again
.
Perhaps the sixth time will be the charm for Mills and middle-of-the-road Maine Democrats looking to defeat Susan Collins. I’m not holding my breath for Mills to be sworn in as the oldest freshman Senator ever in January 2027, however. And I remain profoundly skeptical that the path to defeating Trumpism and MAGA authoritarianism and ensuring a resilient democracy in the United States can be found by sacrificing the most vulnerable among us.
