AUGUSTA, Maine — Whoever becomes Maine’s next Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate will spend the next three weeks running three campaigns at once.
One is to revive fallow operations, raise money and grab endorsements and attention. They must also make their case against U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in November. And they need to shape and then persuade the pool of 600 people who will actually decide the nomination.
That is a fraction of the more than the 156,000 Democrats who chose Graham Platner in June’s primary. He made a bitter video saying he would withdraw from the race on Wednesday, two days after Politico reported an ex-girlfriend’s rape allegations against him and after warring with the Maine Democratic Party about the process still being crafted to replace him.
A Democratic strategist not involved in the race who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly summed up what candidates and the party are walking into. They plan to hold a convention and pick the nominee by a July 27 deadline after Platner formally exits. Democrats have not yet said when the convention itself will be held.
“It’s going to be a misery,” the strategist said. “But what else can you do?”
Few candidates have ever been replaced like this in U.S. history. None of those carried the national implications of the race against Collins, a Republican whose seat is at the center of the battle for control of the Senate. A host of former gubernatorial and congressional candidates formally entered the nominating race the day after Platner’s departure.
Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson locked down more than 50 endorsers. Former Maine public health chief Nirav Shah said he would embark on a town hall schedule. A third former gubernatorial hopeful, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, entered the race Thursday. Three former candidates for federal office from this cycle are also in.
The convention will seat 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees, plus the party’s full state committee, which drew more than 100 members to Wednesday’s vote on it. The party has not announced the full details of the process.
Campaigns were hunkering down Thursday to map out their strategies to influence those committee votes and win over the electorate. However, they don’t know the mechanics that party officials say are still being built in real time.
County chairs were meeting later to sketch out a delegate process, according to a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. As of Thursday morning, they had not been told how many delegates each county would get or how they would be chosen.
The same source described a mix of enthusiasm and nerves among state committee members, several of whom said they had already heard from Mainers eager to serve as delegates, alongside repeated warnings that the timeline leaves little room for error.
Raising money and building a public profile normally comes first in a campaign. It has to happen here alongside the far narrower task of locking down delegates, all while the eventual nominee is expected to pivot immediately into a full general election campaign against a five-term incumbent in Collins who has won decisive swing support throughout her career.
The split is unavoidable, said Jordan Wood, who was a Senate candidate before switching over to the 2nd Congressional District primary. He has revived his campaign to run against Collins again. Wood said he still expects the trappings of a normal race to the wider Democratic electorate, including debates, even with the compressed timeline and the decisive convention.
“This represents people giving up their authority, their power, their vote to another person to represent them,” Wood said. “I think those [delegates] will take it seriously, and it should be.”