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As primary season enters full swing, we’re beginning to get a clearer picture of which states will play a key role this fall. None is more critical for Democrats’ hopes of retaking the Senate than Maine, where a damaged Sen. Susan Collins only recently announced that she’s running again. Democrats view Maine as a rare opportunity to flip a seat that’s a must-win for a future Senate majority under a potential Democratic president in 2029—or a central part of an extremely narrow path to regain the chamber this November.

When the Democrats have held the Senate in the recent past, though, the progressive agenda has been stymied by legislative procedure. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision ending Roe v. Wade, any path to reviving Americans’ reproductive freedom has been particularly vulnerable to the 60-vote filibuster. So it may seem curious that multiple reproductive rights groups have endorsed a candidate in the Maine primary who has spoken out in favor of the Senate filibuster, which would inevitably doom legislation to protect abortion rights should Democrats retake the White House.

That candidate is Gov. Janet Mills, who at 78 would be the oldest freshman senator ever elected. Her top competitor is Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner, the first-time candidate who covered a tattoo of a Nazi symbol only after it came to light. He’s endorsed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressives.

It’s easy to see why. Two days after entering the race, Mills not only told reporters she wanted to retain the filibuster but cited a false justification. “When it comes to Trump appointing 200 judges with very questionable qualifications, I would want to have a say in those judgeships, for instance,” the governor told the Bangor Daily News in October. The supermajority threshold to end debate and hold a vote hasn’t applied to district or appeals court judges since 2013, or to Supreme Court nominees since 2017.

Yet the pro-choice political organization EMILY’s List had already endorsed Mills two days before, and Reproductive Freedom for All endorsed her in December. (Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the other big political player in the reproductive rights space, has not yet endorsed in the Maine race and declined to comment on the timing of its future 2026 endorsements.)

Even more strangely, in backing Mills, these two groups appear to have abandoned their stance on the filibuster from just four years ago. EMILY’s List and Reproductive Freedom for All ended support of then-Sen. Kyrsten Sinema over her refusal to reform the Senate rule to pass voting rights legislation. A spokesperson for EMILY’s List declined to comment on whether its filibuster stance has changed since 2022, while a spokesperson for Reproductive Freedom for All claimed that its position had not changed. Both declined to comment on how filibuster reform factors into their organizations’ current endorsement criteria.

In a statement, EMILY’s List chief communications officer Amanda Sherman Baity called Mills “an unwavering, battle-tested champion of reproductive freedom” and contrasted her record with that of Collins. Mills “doesn’t just talk about protecting abortion rights, she’s used the power of her office to defend and expand abortion access in Maine. EMILY’s List knows she’ll bring that same grit and determination to protecting reproductive rights in the U.S. Senate,” Sherman Baity said. The Reproductive Freedom for All spokesperson referred Slate to its December endorsement of Mills, in which President and CEO Mini Timmaraju said, “With abortion on the line nationwide, we are proud to endorse Gov. Mills, who is the only candidate in this race with an unimpeachable record of expanding access and removing barriers to reproductive care.”

The Mills campaign, however, has changed its tune since October, saying in response to Slate that the candidate does support reforming the filibuster. “The Governor believes the filibuster is the only thing standing between Republicans and a nationwide abortion ban,” spokesperson Tommy Garcia said. “But she supports serious reforms to the filibuster—including lowering the vote threshold required to break a filibuster—in order to protect and advance civil rights like fully restoring reproductive freedom nationwide.” The campaign did not respond to a question about Mills falsely asserting that the rule still applied to judicial nominations. Mills’ updated stance on this issue is to the right of former President Joe Biden, who supported exceptions to the filibuster for abortion and voting rights.

While it’s true that Republicans could try to pass a federal abortion ban if they were to reform the filibuster, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said this week that his caucus doesn’t even have the votes to do so on the SAVE Act. This suggests that the GOP would be loath to force Democrats to use a talking filibuster to oppose a nationwide abortion ban, which is even less popular than voting restrictions. If Democrats are the only party with an appetite to reform the filibuster, they must use it to make structural changes that address the rot in our democracy—and prevent unrepresentative Republican trifectas that can enact unpopular policies. That means voting rights legislation, campaign finance reform, statehood for D.C., and Supreme Court expansion.

However, the filibuster also stands in the way of legislation that would overturn state abortion bans should Democrats regain a trifecta. The party faces a structural disadvantage in the Senate, thanks to less-populous states getting as many votes as, for example, California and New York. Even if Mills’ magic number is, say, 55 instead of 60, Democrats would need a blowout to reach that benchmark. After all, winning 56.5 percent of the national Senate vote in 2020 resulted in just 50 seats. Lowering the threshold to any number above 50 could still handcuff lawmakers who want to make systemic change.

As a contrast, Platner supports ending the filibuster altogether and has said that if Democrats “get back into power, we need to get rid of it and we need to start passing legislation that’s good for the American people.” The Platner campaign did not respond to a request for comment on these endorsements or on Mills’ public statements about the filibuster.

Platner is operating at an advantage, according to available polling, including a February University of New Hampshire survey that had him up by 38 points—64 percent to 26 percent. That same poll showed Platner beating Collins in the general by 11 points, while Mills was up only 1 point, well within the margin of error. (A spokesperson for the Mills campaign contends that the UNH poll overrepresented voters 18 to 34, a sample that doesn’t reflect the primary electorate, which has skewed in the past two cycles toward voters over 65. They also said that voters choose Collins over Platner when polls inform them about “his record.”)

Why are abortion rights groups endorsing Mills over Platner? The easiest answer is that she’s a “safe” establishment politician, and one who is unlikely to have authored any questionable Reddit posts, gotten Nazi tattoos, or appeared on conspiracy theorist podcasts. Mills has traditional credentials: She was first elected to the state Legislature in 2002 and served eight years as attorney general before becoming governor in 2019.

Mills has won statewide elections, and winning this seat is the most important thing to Democrats in the short term because, on paper, it is winnable: Collins is the only GOP senator in a state that Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024. Collins did manage to fend off her previous challenger, state Sen. Sara Gideon, in somewhat of an upset in 2020—despite trailing in almost every poll and spending just half the amount Gideon did, Collins won by nearly 9 points. (Gideon still has $3 million left in her campaign account and recently gave $4,000 to Mills.) But that election was before the fall of Roe—an event for which Collins was instrumental, thanks to her votes to confirm Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and especially Brett Kavanaugh—and her approval rating is now 13 points underwater. Only Sen. Mitch McConnell is less popular.

Efforts to protect abortion rights in Congress have faltered for years, due to a combination of the filibuster and general Democratic tentativeness. Only after the Supreme Court signaled that the end of Roe was imminent did the then-Democratic-controlled House pass, for the first time, a bill called the Women’s Health Protection Act. The proposal was initially introduced in 2013 but had never received a full House vote until the federal right was on life support. The bill twice failed to advance in the Senate, first in February 2022 and again that May, after the leaked draft of the Dobbs opinion that would overturn Roe. The bill didn’t overcome the 60-vote filibuster either time, but it would have failed even a simple majority passage because West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin joined Republicans in opposition. Democrats nominally had 50 senators and the presidency, but they were powerless to respond to the end of Roe because two senators wanted to keep the filibuster and one opposed protecting abortion rights.

At their core, Reproductive Freedom for All and EMILY’s List are pragmatic organizations, says Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California–Davis School of Law and an expert in the history and politics of reproductive rights. “I think they think that Janet Mills is the only one who can win,” Ziegler told me. “They think that it’d be better to have Janet Mills than Susan Collins, and they’re holding their nose.” Mills has publicly pledged to serve only one six-year term.

It’s also noteworthy that Mills was recruited by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The DSCC formed a joint fundraising committee with the Mills campaign. Platner won’t support Schumer for leader, while Mills hasn’t committed to voting for him.

The most gracious interpretation of all this is that these groups believe that Mills will do what’s necessary for abortion rights if the moment presents itself—they might have even discussed her then-private support for incremental changes to the Senate rules.

But these groups may have thought the same thing about Sinema, whom they endorsed in 2018. The Arizona senator said she supported abortion rights, but when push came to shove, she didn’t support taking the steps necessary to protect them at the federal level. “That’s potentially the fallacy,” Ziegler said. “It’s hard to know until the vote arrives. Because I’m sure they think that if they really needed Janet Mills, that she would do the right thing.”

Another lesson of the Biden era, though, is the misguided notion that because there’s still a semblance of abortion access, there’s no emergency, Ziegler notes. Which is to say: Mills, or other more classic Democratic senators, might not feel the push to do the right thing. This would be a real problem. Post-Roe, there are limited work-arounds for people in ban states in the form of abortion pills prescribed under telemedicine shield laws—there are eight states with such laws, and thanks to Mills’ signature, Maine is one of them. It’s unclear what will happen to those laws in the courts, however.

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There’s a related idea that nothing worse will unfold because abortion restrictions won’t pass this Congress, and because Republicans are expected to lose control in a matter of months. So while the failure of the 2022 bill was bad, to some lawmakers, “it hasn’t been as existential as it could have been,” Ziegler said.

She adds that there’s still complacency among Democrats on abortion, an unwarranted sense in the face of multiple federal lawsuits that could upend access nationwide. “It’s just a misunderstanding of how many things are coming into the courts,” which are stacked with Trump judges, she said. Abortion providers are bracing for a ruling in a consequential case filed in Louisiana in which the state is asking a judge to end telehealth prescriptions of the drug mifepristone while litigation proceeds against the Food and Drug Administration. Nearly 30 percent of all abortions in 2025 were done with pills via telemedicine; ending that delivery method could be disastrous.

Platner’s fairly extensive platform page notes that he supports “a strong federal guarantee of the right to choose.” Mills’ site features no such issues page, and though she has outlined her reproductive-health accomplishments as governor, she pledged only to prevent further retrenchment in Congress and did not mention proactive legislation. She has said she will “fight tooth and nail against any effort to further roll back these fundamental protections.”

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This defensive posture mirrors that of the national reproductive rights movement, and it has utterly failed. Leading groups like Reproductive Freedom for All, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for Reproductive Rights (the latter of which doesn’t endorse political candidates) have a long history of making policy and litigation decisions based on polling, rather than pushing the public where it needs to go to truly protect autonomy. Infuriating examples include not initially challenging the Hyde Amendment ban on Medicaid coverage of abortion, not uniformly suing states over abortion bans later in pregnancy, pushing ballot measures that allow viability limits, and not advocating for women criminalized for using drugs during pregnancy, which allowed notions of fetal personhood to fester.

These groups and others often traded the rights of people on the margins in exchange for limited abortion access and a promise that they would fix it eventually. What that has gotten us so far is the fall of Roe and more than a dozen state bans. At the end of the day, it’s not at all surprising to see establishment groups support an establishment candidate who seems interested more in nibbling around the edges of the federal status quo than in storming the gates over the loss of the rights those very groups were established to defend.

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