In 2024, nearly 6 in 10 registered Democrats in Maine lived south of the state capital Augusta.
That part of the state would not constitute an urban metropolis anywhere else in the U.S.,
but it is a drastically different world than the one #Platner is fighting for.
The party’s gravitational center sits in Cumberland and York counties:
Greater Portland and the southern coastal strip.
That electorate is more educated, affluent and urban
than the state as a whole,
clustered in Portland’s walkable neighborhoods,
college towns such as Brunswick
and artsy coastal communities that swell with summer tourists.
Southern Maine
– closer in feel to Boston’s suburbs than to the paper mills and potato fields up north
– is where Democrats are already strong.
#Collins’ vulnerability lies instead among independents in small cities and towns,
in deindustrialized and rural counties drifting rightward for two decades.
The 2020 U.S. Senate race
– one that nearly every analyst, myself included, thought Collins was doomed to lose to Democrat Sara Gideon
– makes that reality clear.
💥Collins outperformed Donald Trump in every county.
She built commanding margins in rural Maine,
offsetting Democratic gains in Portland and the southern coast.
🔥Her real breakthrough came in the kinds of small towns where Trump lost and she won or closed the margin:
Ellsworth, Brewer, Machias, Gardiner and Winterport.
Those former mill towns and service hubs once anchored the Maine Democratic Party.
They’re home to exactly the kinds of voters who,
in principle,
might give someone like Platner a hearing:
not deeply ideological,
modestly skeptical of both parties
and wary of national polarization.
❌ But they are also the voters least represented in the Democratic primary electorate or the donor class fueling Platner’s campaign.
