A 79-Year-Old Freshman Senator?
· The Atlantic
“I’ll share my lipid profile with anybody!” Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, pledged to me.
Visit milkshake.it.com for more information.
These are the kinds of assurances that candidates make when everyone keeps harping on their age.
Mills, who is 78, is trying to dislodge Susan Collins, a spring chicken at 73, in Maine’s Senate race this fall. Unlike her Democratic primary opponent, the gun-loving ex-Marine turned oyster farmer Graham Platner, Mills does not have a dicey Reddit history or a recently covered-over Nazi tattoo. She is well-known in the state and has a tested political organization. And yet, in several recent polls, she has been trailing Platner.
One likely factor: If she is elected, Mills would be the oldest freshman senator in history. Platner, at 41, is a relative political infant.
I spoke with Mills on a recent Friday afternoon in the coastal town of Rockland. We were sitting in a quiet café, and I kept steering the discussion to her least-favorite topic.
“I feel bad asking all these questions,” I told Mills.
“No, you don’t,” the governor shot back.
Mills gives off the disarming sense of a secure soul undeterred by whippersnappers who toss around fancy words such as gerontocracy. “I’m too old to care,” she told a CNN reporter last month, which may or may not be a winning campaign message but struck me as sincere. She presents as younger than her years—still sharp of mind, a weathered workhorse whose energy showed no signs of flagging during a 13-hour day that included a speech to a craft-beer convention in Portland, visits to a food pantry and a chocolate factory in Rockland, a stop at a fishing expo in Rockport, and an evening house party in Waterville. At least judging by our day together, she seems to be personally acquainted with a large portion of Maine’s 1.4 million residents.
[Tyler Austin Harper: How ‘big tent’ are Democrats willing to go?]
Still, Mills has to appreciate why Democrats are so sensitive to matters of age these days. The story begins and ends with the fresh trauma of how a certain geriatric presidency ended up for them not long ago. Joe Biden has made this race “far more difficult for her,” Jessica Taylor, the Senate editor for the Cook Political Report, told me. When I spoke with Mark Brewer, the chair of the political-science department at the University of Maine, he said that Democrats simply “do not want to get burned by that again.”
Mills was reluctant to concede the point. Age, she told me, is less of an issue for voters in Maine, which happens to have the oldest population of any state in the country. Angus King, the state’s other senator—a three-term independent—was reelected in 2024 at the age of 80. “And how old is Bernie Sanders? Like, six years older than me?” Mills asked. “Are they asking him not to run again?” (For what it’s worth, Sanders, who is 84, headlined a massive Labor Day rally in Portland—for Graham Platner.)
“I come from hearty Maine stock,” Mills said. She mentioned her ancestry of potato farmers, fishermen, and stone cutters. Her mother lived to be 93. “You don’t stereotype people because of their hair color or their age or their gender.”
The governor’s point was that age affects people differently. “Good Lord, I’m not Joe Biden, for God’s sake,” she told CNN, her exasperation cracking through her stern Yankee demeanor. After Biden’s face-plant during his June 2024 debate against Donald Trump, Mills acknowledged that the president’s performance had been “difficult to watch.” Notably, she did not call for Biden to quit, as some other Democrats did, and instead reaffirmed her support for his reelection. But Mills told me that during a meeting between a group of Democratic governors and Biden around that time, she was among those who pleaded with him to step aside.
“He walked in the room. He said, ‘I’m running again. You’re stuck with me,’” Mills recalled. “That was sad.”
Maine was always destined to be one of the nation’s most fiercely contested Senate races of 2026. Collins, the only Republican incumbent on the ballot this year in a state won by Kamala Harris, has become a kind of white whale for Democrats. She has withstood several well-funded challengers over the years, even while Republicans have lost every presidential election in the state since 1988.
From the start of this election cycle, Mills was the preferred candidate of national Democrats. A two-term governor (now term-limited), she had won several statewide races and has been a fixture in Maine politics since the 1970s. She became an unlikely resistance heroine last February after Trump singled out her state during a speech to a group of governors at the White House. When he asked whether Maine would comply with an executive order that would bar transgender women and girls from participating in female sports, Mills stood up and ceded only that her administration would follow “state and federal law.”
“Well, we are the federal law,” countered Trump, who then threatened to withhold funding from the state.
“See you in court,” Mills replied.
The clip went viral, representing a rare show of backbone amid what had otherwise been a flaccid Democratic opposition after Trump’s return to office. See you in court appeared on hats and T-shirts around Maine. (The state wound up suing the Trump administration, which agreed to restore federal funding soon thereafter.)
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a host of Democratic officials and donors urged Mills to challenge Collins, even though the governor would be 79 at the start of her Senate term. “It was tough,” she said of her decision. “I mean, I waited a long time.”
Maybe too long. While she deliberated, Platner splashed into the picture last summer: full-bearded, gravelly voiced, and straight out of everyman casting. He exuded populist appeal and was seemingly designed in a lab as an antidote to Democrats’ ongoing alienation from working-class voters. The media devoured his story like a plate of fresh oysters.
Platner attracted big crowds, loads of cash, and, after a brief honeymoon period, plenty of controversy. First, a bunch of noxious social-media posts surfaced in which Platner had committed all manner of racist, sexist, and equal-opportunity offenses. Then came reports of Platner’s tattoo of a skull and crossbones—widely recognized to be a Nazi death’s head—inked across his chest. Platner claimed ignorance to the tattoo’s Nazi associations, and said he’d acquired it during a drunken bender with his Marine buddies in 2007. He has since gotten the insignia covered over.
Within weeks of his rousing debut, Platner became an object lesson in the perils of rolling the dice with an unvetted neophyte in such a crucial Senate battleground. Yet Platner’s support proved resilient. He has received endorsements from establishment Democrats, including three senators. Although Maine polls have traditionally been unreliable—Collins handily defeated then–Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon in 2020 after trailing throughout the campaign—Platner has led Mills in most surveys. Less than three months before the June 9 primary, he appears to have a good chance of upsetting the sitting governor.
The volume of attention that Platner has received has also had the effect of making him, by far, the primary topic of discussion in the race. “Platner comes on the scene out of nowhere, and all of a sudden, Mills is an afterthought,” Brewer, of the University of Maine, told me.
Or, at the very least, she has been reduced to a one-dimensional caricature—the “old-lady governor.” Mills is barely asked about what she has accomplished in her career: being the first woman district attorney in New England (“one of only two or three in the goddamn country”), the first woman attorney general in Maine, the state’s first female governor.
I asked Mills whether she’s sicker of being asked about Platner or about her age, which have become the two defining features of her campaign.
“Yeah, right,” she muttered, sounding resigned.
I took that to mean both.
One of Mills’s recurring promises is that, if elected to the Senate, she will serve only one term. This is perhaps an unusual pledge—If you vote for me, I will leave soon—but it’s also an obvious nod to the reality of trying to begin a second term at 85. Mills says she wants to be able to devote her energy to fighting Trump, without wasting time having to raise money and run for reelection.
The Senate places a premium on seniority, however. Why would Maine voters want to forfeit Collins’s tenure—and all the benefits it can bring the state—in favor of a freshman short-timer on the cusp of her eighth decade?
Also: “We’re going to have to spend a fuck ton of money six years from now on another open election?” asked Amanda Litman, a co-founder and president of Run for Something, which promotes young Democrats running for office. The group focuses on down-ballot races, and thus does not have a preferred candidate in the Maine Senate race. But Litman seems quite hostile to the idea of a Senator Mills.
“What a damning indictment of the Democratic Party establishment,” Litman told me, “that it couldn’t cultivate literally any other talent or any other leader to run against Susan Collins.” Litman did not say she thinks that Mills is unqualified—just that she is old. “Why does this poor woman want to become a United States senator in her 80s?”
I brought up the notion of ageism. Did that apply in this context?
“I’m not saying ‘Take these elected leaders’ and, like, ‘Take them out back and shoot them,’” Litman said. (Reassuring!) “No one is saying ‘Abuse them,’ ‘Punish them.’ No,” she added. “We’re saying ‘Retire or step aside.’”
On the afternoon that I met Mills, we walked through the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport, a three-day extravaganza for anglers, gear suppliers, and fish people of all stripes and scales. She chitchatted, hugged, and posed for photos with fans and non-fans alike, including with a woman in a See You in Court T-shirt. At one point, Mills paused to introduce me to some friends, and who should saunter over but Senator Angus King himself.
[From the March 2026 issue: The Democrats aren’t built for this]
“Is this lady bothering you guys?” King asked. Mills told him that she had been talking with me about some whale-related regulation they had worked on together.
I joked that, actually, all we had really been talking about was old age.
“I’m a year younger than Mick Jagger!” King volunteered.
“We went to the Rolling Stones together,” Mills told me.
“Two summers ago,” King said.
“Mick is what, 83 or something?” Mills asked. (Actually 82—which is just a number, anyway.)
“If he’s still rocking,” King said, “so are we, right?”
Mills then belted out a few lines from “Gimme Shelter.”
King mentioned that they bought matching sweatshirts at the concert. “I almost wore it today,” he said. “It’s got the tongue, you know?”
Mills told me that her decision to run for Senate reflects how existential this moment is. Trump, she said, is “taking a wrecking ball to the Constitution.” Never has the check and balance of the U.S. Senate been so important. And the incumbent she is challenging, she said, refuses to stand up to Trump.
“I’m the most qualified person to beat Susan Collins,” Mills said.
In fact, Platner is just as—or more—competitive than Mills in head-to-head polls against Collins. But, as Mills’s allies might point out, that competitiveness assumes that nothing new and damaging will come out about Platner. And if he is the nominee, you can be certain that Collins and the various entities working to elect her will spend tens of millions of dollars ensuring that Mainers get the most chilling impression possible of the tattooed oystermonger.
Mills is at least confident that nothing disastrous will surface about her.
“I don’t have a tattoo,” she promised.
I took the governor at her word on this. But has she ever been on Reddit?
“No,” she said.
Later, while I was writing this story, I returned to the matter of the governor’s lipid profile. Because Mills had vowed to share hers with “anybody”—and told me that her life was “an open book”—I figured that she would gladly release the results. But it was not so simple. Mills’s pledge, as it turned out, came with a condition: that she would release medical information only when “Graham Platner and Susan Collins agree to do the same,” Tommy Garcia, a spokesperson for Mills, told me. Otherwise, those lipids are sealed.