Maine Gov. Janet Mills suspended her U.S. Senate campaign Thursday morning, citing a lack of financial resources. That's the official explanation. The more accurate one is that the polls showed her trailing badly to Graham Platner, an oysterman from coastal Maine with no electoral experience. 

Mills had every structural advantage working for her: she’d already won a statewide election, had name identification, and the support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The writing was on the wall for weeks, but Mills’s exit from the race was her concession that all the momentum on the Democratic side was for Platner. 

Platner had long lapped Mills in polling and fundraising, and she'd stopped running television ads weeks earlier. Which means Platner will be the party's nominee against Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most consequential Senate races of the 2026 cycle.

In 2007, Graham Platner got a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest. He kept it there for roughly 18 years. He claims he didn't know what the symbol meant for nearly two decades. But there is significant evidence that he did, and that it was intentional. Platner amplified a social media post from Stew Peters, a neo-Nazi radio host the Anti-Defamation League has called "a prolific antisemite" who blames "'the Jews' for everything he believes is wrong with society" and who has openly called for a "final solution" to mass-deport American Jews. Platner deleted the post, but only after it got attention, not before. He also sat for a lengthy interview with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Nate Cornacchia, describing himself as a longtime fan. He has called the U.S.-Israel relationship "shameful" and praised a violent Hamas attack on Israel in 2014.

"In November Susan Collins, a proven leader with an indisputable record of delivering for Maine, will face a Nazi sympathizing self-proclaimed communist with a record of hate-mongering and dishonesty," said RNC spokesperson Kristen Cianci. "It's safe to say we are confident going into Election Day."

There’s no denying that a candidate with this profile would have been a liability the party ran from not all that long ago. Now he's the frontrunner with enough momentum that he forced the sitting governor - recruited by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer himself - to drop out of the race.

This didn't materialize overnight. The Democratic Party's tolerance for anti-Israel sentiment has been building for decades. 

The trajectory is traceable. 

Barack Obama won the presidency despite his two-decade relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a pastor whose hostility toward Israel and Jews was a matter of public record. Once in office, Obama systematically manufactured distance between Washington and Jerusalem, signaling that cool skepticism toward Israel was not just acceptable but arguably sophisticated Democratic foreign policy. 

Obama’s administration was the most anti-Israel administration since Jimmy Carter, and it frequently undermined our democratic ally in the Middle East. Obama exposed classified information about Israel's nuclear capabilities - an alarming breach of trust. His IRS targeted pro-Israel organizations, and his administration declined to enforce anti-BDS provisions, effectively offering a federal green light to a movement whose stated purpose is the economic strangulation of the Jewish state. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, delegates initially refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital — a true sign that the party was becoming more openly antisemitic.

Joe Biden accelerated the trend by allowing the antisemitic wing of his party to set the terms of the Israel debate rather than confronting it. Last year, polling showed Democrats favoring Palestinians over Israelis by a staggering 59–21 percent margin, and overall American sympathy for Israel reached a 25-year low. 

The line from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama to Graham Platner is unmistakable. It also helps explain how anti-Israel sentiment found a foothold inside the Democratic Party. Each step made the next one easier to accept, and party leadership either accepted it each time or chose not to push back.

Ironically, Democrats spent years calling their Republican opponents Nazis. The charge was deployed so casually and so broadly that it became almost ambient noise in American political life. Now the same party is on the verge of nominating a man who wore a Nazi symbol on his chest for two decades as its nominee for the United States Senate in Maine.