Maine Democrats approve 600-person convention to pick Graham Platner's replacement
Source: Bangor Daily News
The Maine Democratic Party’s state committee voted Wednesday to hold a nominating convention to select a replacement for U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, according to a party statement and an account of the meeting shared with the Bangor Daily News.
More than 100 state committee members attended the meeting and voted in favor of the convention process, the party said in a statement. The convention would include 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees, along with the entire state committee, according to the account of the meeting.
The party has not yet released a full timeline or the details of how the nomination process will move forward. The meeting of the party’s governing body was not open to the press. The account of the meeting was written by an attendee and provided to the BDN.
“We will announce the full timeline, details for how the nomination process will move forward, information about how to participate, and requirements for candidates soon,” party Chair Charlie Dingman, Vice Chair Imke Schessler and Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson said in a statement. “We will keep the public informed throughout the process – transparency is of the utmost importance.”
Platner, who is facing U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in one of the biggest races in the country this year, has been at the center of a two-day firestorm following a Monday report in Politico in which an ex-girlfriend accused him of raping her in 2021. The Maine Democratic Party, the national party and candidates here have disavowed him and called on him to leave the race.
The move marks the first time Maine Democrats have used a convention of this scale to replace a statewide nominee. It would be a dramatic event in which a relatively small number of people would decide among a growing list of candidates to pick a last-minute nominee to face Collins.
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Read more: https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/08/politics/elections/maine-democrats-want-convention-replace-graham-platner/
I kind of wish it had been statewide caucuses, but this is better than the committee selecting the new nominee.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I firmly believe this and the data backs up the assertion.
https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/some-thoughts-on-whats-next-for-maine
We are going to spend some time with data now.
Over the last several months prior to the June primary Platner led Collins by an average of 7 points over Susan Collins. This is exactly the margin Harris won Maine by in 2024, 4 points below the +11 generic ballot the NYT published last week, and at least 8 points below our gubernatorial candidate, Hannah Pingree. I will once again share that recent chart of how our battleground Senate candidates are doing relative to Harris. This uses the NYT results for Platner from last week:
The Fox News poll last week had Platner trailing Susan Collins by 3. What this all means is that Platner has had the worst polling of any of our battleground candidates in the country this summer in what is by far and away the most Democratic state we are competing in this year.
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The +15 is where Hannah Pingree, a well-established Democrat in Maine, is right now. Last week Platner was +2 in the NYT poll, and -3 in the Fox News poll.
G. Elliott Morris published an analysis last night that makes some of these same points...
Let’s now look at a bit more data from this new analysis from Morris. The number on the right column is the number of percentage points our candidates are over/underperforming against expectations right now in their nowcast model:
Talarico 5.4
Cooper 4.5
Brown 4.2
Turek 3.7
Michigan -5.9 (both El-Sayed and Haley Stevens)
Platner - 9.9
While Ossoff and Peltola are not included in Morris’ analysis they would fall into the overperformance camp, not the underperformance camp based on publicly available polling data of late.
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