On Thursday morning, Maine Governor Janet Mills announced that she would suspend her struggling senate campaign. Mills’s decision was not a surprise; her Democratic primary opponent, oyster farmer and military veteran Graham Platner, had opened up an enormous lead over the last few months. Still, it was a remarkable moment: a sitting governor conceding defeat to a political novice who had been unknown to the public a few months ago, in a contest Democrats must win to retain control of the upper chamber.

To understand where Mills went wrong and gauge Platner’s chances against Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November, I chatted with New York writer-at-large — and Maine resident Rebecca Traister (currently on book leave), who has closely followed this race from the beginning.

Benjamin Hart: This was one of the stranger high-profile senate candidacies in recent years. At least from the outside, it looked like Janet Mills barely even ran a campaign. Do I have that right? And if so…why didn’t she?

Rebecca Traister: You do have that right! It has been very strange. She’s been a candidate since October, but she hasn’t been a huge visible or audible presence in the race, perhaps especially in contrast to her opponent, Platner, whose campaign has been built around steady and relentless engagement with voters: zillions of town halls and rallies and protests outside Susan Collins’ office. It’s a small state, so Mills is visible in the way she always is — you might see her at a hockey game, or a restaurant or just on the street — but she hasn’t been campaigning with that same level of visibility or engagement with voters. She ran a handful of negative ads against Platner, which appear to have backfired spectacularly, but did not do any major advertising about her own record as governor. She declined to attend a candidate forum hosted by the Wabanaki Alliance in April, a strange choice since tribal issues have been a real weak point for her and I would think that she’d want to show strength there. She had a scheduling conflict for another early debate/forum. So she hasn’t even been in a debate with Platner; the first big one is scheduled for next week and it’s striking that she dropped out before it happened.

As to the why part of your question: I do not know! Mills has a lot of loyal fans in the state. When I was doing reporting for a piece about Democratic Party gerontocracy in the fall, I cannot tell you the number of people I interviewed — both in Portland and the rural north of the state — who described themselves as “Mills Democrats” or identified as people who loved Janet Mills. I also noted at the time that almost none of them were supporting her for Senate. There was a widespread feeling that this job should perhaps go to someone younger, and also such a feeling that maybe Mills wasn’t even that eager to run for it. Yet I’m surprised that she didn’t find a way to make more of the loyalty she inspires in people.

Ben: It feels like her heart was never really in this — that she was tapped by national Democrats as the person who could finally beat Susan Collins, which made a good deal of sense on paper (notwithstanding her age) but just never translated in the real world. Which, I will admit, surprised me.

Rebecca: Yes, though she insisted to me in an interview in the fall that Schumer’s pressure had nothing to do with her (late) entrance into the race.

Ben: Also, I see a lot of people saying that her timing was off, by waiting so long to jump in.

Rebecca: When it came to running against Platner, I think the lateness really hurt her, in part because he’d spent late August, September, and October running around the state, creating a very strong in-person bond with voters, that I think wound up absolutely saving him when the Reddit/tattoo oppo dropped on him. Had he not had that six or eight weeks of early bonding with Mainers, those stories could have been the campaign-killer I think most people in the Democratic and media establishment assumed they would be.

One quick recollection before we move on: When I was reporting my piece........

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