I never said Platner is a Nazi, but I am one that said I wouldn’t vote for him if a Mainer.
As you correctly point out by implication, I do not vote in Maine. So my opinion on him cannot affect one Maine vote. As for the possibility that I will influence some Mainer lurker, I have been posting here for years and can confidently say my ability to change how others vote is zero. Expressing my opinion will not give Donald Trump not one bit of help.
And even if I move to Maine next month, which I will not, the chances a statewide election would turn on my one vote are vanishingly small. Someone might ask – what if everyone thought that way? Here’s the answer. Janet Mills would win with a write-in majority.
I think Mills is getting too old for an executive job. A legislative job is different.
There’s one really good reason. Maine has ranked choice voting.
You can reject Platner by selecting him 4th in your ranked choice, behind everyone except Collins. So you can reject him but still not support the fascist regime currently destroying America.
I wish everyone in America had that option (we almost certainly wouldn’t be in this raging fascist dumpster fire of a political system if we had that in the presidential election in 2016)
This is silly. If the media had that much power to make up people’s minds, Platner wouldn’t have won the primary in the first place.
And also if the media has that much power to make up people’s minds why would it matter if someone like me (who btw doesn’t live in Maine and all of whose friends in Maine are going to vote in this election for any democrat) isn’t enthusiastic enough about Platner?
If I believe that the media is going to tell swing voters in Maine how to think and out-of-staters don’t understand the state anyway why does the author feel the need to get bent out of shape about Platner’s critics and blame us in advance for Susan Collins winning?
The reality is that insufficient enthusiasm from the base, especially in the instance of people who have no decisive vote, is extremely overrated. Swing voters vote based on a combination of punishing the party they blame for their problems and personality, with the occasional scandal being big enough to tank someone’s prospects. Swing voters don’t judge those scandals based on how divided the base is over them and if one of these controversies is enough to bring Platner down it’ll be the fault of Platner for having the controversy in his background, not be able to message out of it and for his primary opponents for being too weak to really test his candidacy before this point.
And for the record I still think Mills is too old and Platner is probably a racist. I didn’t think someone who is both definitely not a racist and also under 70 was too much to aak for but apparently it is.
I never said or implied that, at least not before this post..
And it’s a trick question now that I’ve been reminded they have ranked choice voting.
There are five general election candidates. I haven’t checked them out carefully, but at least one of the no-hopers sounds more MAGA than Collins.
So I might rank her close to last but still vote for her.
Does not matter because I’m not a Mainer and it is not about me.
Right now, I’m thinking I would rank a Mills write-in first. What I would do next I do not know. There’s reason to reject all the rest. Maybe I would wait for debates.
P.S. I cannot see ranking Collins above Platner, if that is the accusation.
Or, in this hypothetical, not voting at all? Because that is really the probable result for many of the lack of focus on on horrible a Collins win would be, the cin favor of … “yeah enabling Trumpism is bad but what about that tattoo!!!” … depressed turnout that allows for a Collins win, not too many additional votes for her.
Yeah, a lack of enthusiasm is indeed the result of nominating The Boy with the Nazi Tattoo, among those of us who don’t like people with Nazi tattoos. Who woulda thunk?
Yup. Those who are the level that that is the conclusion they make are at risk of thinking the consequent enabling Trumpism is much less important than the dislike for a tattoo with a fairly obscure association with Nazism.
Mostly those will be low information voters, impacted by some pearls being clutched, and many of those sincerely clutched pearls will be being clutched by people who just happen to really dislike economic populism, progressives, and/or criticism of current Israeli actions and American enabling. Just by coincidence!
I’m not really making an accusation. The fact is that either Platner or Collins is going to win the election, so I guess ranking Platner above Collins in the ranked choice makes sense.
Are there any Democrats who do not criticize current Israeli actions? My House member, Chrissy Houlahan, does, and I agree with her. I’m fine with her having stayed away from Netanyahu’s speech to congress. As far as I am concerned, whether she takes money from AIPAC should be based on pure political benefit.
What she doesn’t do is accuse an opponent of being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu,” as does Platner. That echoes the antisemitic trope of Jewish puppeteers and suggests the tatoo wasn’t a one-off. I can understand someone who has different priorities considering this of secondary importance. But as a Jew it is important to me and a reason to reject Platner.
Meh. If you’re getting one-third of your funding from a single source, I think it’s well within the bounds of acceptable hyperbole to say that source has “bought and paid for” you. And, despite their claims, it’s not like AIPAC is a nonpartisan pro-Israel group. They specifically support the Israeli right wing, which supports Trump. I’m comfortable calling them a MAGA-aligned organization at this point.
Jewish man here. My father was one of the first American soldiers at the gates of Dachau. Some family never made it here. Been called a kike and a Jew boy in my time. Very much on board with the idea that some antisemites use criticism of Israel to conflate with Jew hatred, see the Tucker Carlson approach. And some on the Left also. Very conscious that there is increase in Jew hatred. And not seeing it … at all.
It is not an echo of anything; it is directly saying that Collins depends inordinately upon support from an organization that functionally exists to support Netanyahu and anything done by him at this point in time. News flash to those who think they are allies against anti-Semitism and Jew haters alike: Israel is not equal to Jews.
Platner picked a 90 day window during which Collins raised something like a third ($538,000) then received from AIPAC or associates. Outside that period, not so much – my link below says her lifetime AIPAC total is $647,000.
I have no problem by itself with a politician running for office framing things in a way favorable to them, but she is not getting one third of her funding from a single source:
So – "bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu,”
Sounds to me like bigotry. Your milage may vary, but I reject Platner for that.
One third of her money from AIPAC – normal campaign rhetoric with a factual basis, but out of context. We should call him on it (if he exactly said that) but not reject him for such.
AIPAC bundled more than $538,000 from 315 individual donors in a recent filing period, according to the Bangor Daily News, and accounted for nearly 20 percent of all money Collins raised in 2025, per Zeteo. Cumulative AIPAC contributions to Collins over her career have been reported at approximately $647,000.
it’s not clear if “over her career” includes the recent contributions, but either way, AIPAC has either quintupled or nearly doubled what they had given her over 29 years, just for this election.
I don’t know much about Legis1, so I checked over at OpenSecrets to see how much they say “she got this election” so far. They say a little less, $10.28 million:
To give the (to me) devil his due, Platner never, to my knowledge, said that one third of Collins’s funding comes from AIPAC. He specified that this was only true for one quarter:
O/T: In a recent election in NJ, AIPAC went hard against the presumed winner of the Democratic primary, Tom Malinowski. Malinowski wasn’t quite pure enough of an Israel supporter for them, and I suppose they hoped to weaken him in the primary race enough to lose in the general. Instead, he lost the primary, which was won by Analila Mejia who has accused Israel of genocide. She went on to win the general. Whoopsie!
My point, relevant to this thread, is that AIPAC has become extremely politically conservative, no surprise they’re supporting Collins. And, they don’t represent Jewish Americans, who tend to be more liberal than your average American.