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- [00:00]
Jon Favreau
Offline is brought to you by Zebiotics. Let's face it, after a night with drinks, if you're my age, you don't bounce back the next day like you used to. I can either have a great night or a great next day. That is, until I found Pre Alcohol zebiotics. Pre Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut, and it's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. The hardest thing to do is to remember to take zebiotics. Take your pre alcohol before you drink. That's why we have it in different places around the house. Just to sort of remind me if I'm going to have a drink, oh shoot, I got to have my Zebiotics.
- [00:48]
Alex Seitzwald
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- [00:49]
Jon Favreau
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- [01:06]
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- [02:05]
Jon Favreau
Since everyone's doing lessons learned from the Platner debacle, what are yours?
- [02:10]
Alex Seitzwald
Dig into people's past more obviously, but believe my eyes and ears more. But also hold views strongly but lightly, like be willing to change your mind when evidence changes things. And I think that, you know, Platner took his voters on a ride. I don't think we can blame the voters for that, but I think we need to be on as much as we want regular people, quote, unquote, to get more into politics and have fewer, you know, fancy Harvard, Yale lawyers in office. I think it will make everybody second guess the kind of next viral candidate that comes out of nowhere.
- [03:04]
Jon Favreau
I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from this week's guest, Alex Seitzwald, a former NBC political reporter who's now the deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager in Maine. I haven't really had a chance to talk about the Graham Platner fiasco because I was on vacation when it happened in Maine, of all places, staying with Emily's family in Biddeford. I kept Twitter off my phone for the week, wisely, it turns out, so I had some extra time to think and even talked to some real life Maine voters about the whole thing. Mostly, I'm still furious at Platner for his dishonest and selfish and reckless behavior that's left so many people feeling hurt and betrayed. Jenny Racicot and Lindsey Fifield, his wife Amy, and others who care about him. The staffers, volunteers and voters who believed in him. Many who finally allowed themselves to feel a glimmer of hope about politics that was just snuffed out by yet another reason to stay cynical and disengaged. What an incredible fucking disappointment. People keep looking for lessons Democrats are supposed to learn from Platner's downfall. Clearly, his campaign and consultants should have demanded more thorough vetting. At the very least, they should have interviewed their candidate. Just a baffling failure. But honestly, even the most extensive vetting can't help a candidate who refuses to be honest with his closest advisors. Platner lied to his campaign, the press, the public, and honestly, my first reaction after watching his exit video was that he may even be lying to himself. I obviously liked Graham Platner. I didn't actually endorse him over Janet Mills because as I said at the time, I wanted to keep an open mind and let the primary process play out, which is why we made it a point to interview both candidates on Pod Save America. But I was definitely impressed with Platner. I also believed him when he apologized for the person he used to be. I believed him when he said that his life started getting better a few years ago because he finally got help and reconnected with his community and met his wife. When he talked about how he's grown and changed now, it turns out that I gave him a lot more trust than he deserved. And that feels shitty. As does the fact that I'll probably approach the next candidate I'm inspired by with more skepticism. A principle I try to live by in life and in politics is to assume well of other people and to show grace when they ask for it, even if it's possible they'll make me regret it. I'm okay taking that risk because I need to believe that people can change. It would be hard for me to be in this line of work if I didn't. I've noticed over the last week that some of the people who've been longtime Platner skeptics, rightly so, are now trying to make sure that the scandal's blast radius reaches beyond the candidate. I get that it's not at all surprising that this has become part of a factional war within the Democratic Party that's already making me wish I could spend the 2028 primary in a medically induced coma. But I have to say the effort to dismiss the entire Platner campaign as some kind of a left wing psyop that was foisted upon unsuspecting Mainers just does not reflect the reality of what actually happened. Out of state activists recruited Platner, but they didn't make him the nominee. More than 150,000 people in Maine did that. He got more primary votes than any Senate candidate in the state's history. And I think it's worth trying to understand why. At the start of this race, most primary voters were ready to get behind whoever could beat Susan Collins, especially since Democrats blew their last chance to take her out in 2020, when the party establishment cleared the field for Maine House Speaker Sarah Gideon, a thoroughly vetted candidate with a decade of experience who ended up losing to Collins by nine points in a year where Joe Biden won Maine by 9 points and Democrats flipped Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia. We didn't get any soul searching from the Democratic establishment about that loss. We didn't even get an explanation for why Gideon ended the campaign with nearly $15 million in the bank. We were just told that Susan Collins is some kind of a unicorn, and everyone moved on. Chuck Schumer then tried to rerun the same play against Collins in 2026, this time by trying to recruit a 78 year old governor who won her first election in 1980 and would have become the oldest freshman senator in history. Even Janet Mills didn't think that was a great idea, which is why Schumer spent most of 2025 trying to convince her, and why the DSCC pressured another outsider, Senate candidate brewery owner Dan Cleban, to cancel his July campaign launch. Which is around the time those out of state activists who've now become famous for all the wrong reasons showed up at Graham Platner's door and asked him to run. Platner was reportedly chosen off a list of Bernie Sanders donors who worked in the fishing industry, which sounds even crazier when you say it out loud. But Platner wasn't a stranger to politics. He'd spent the last few years organizing with local progressive groups, and Democrats had already tried to recruit him for a state Senate run in 2020. This time he said yes, and he caught fire. Within two weeks of announcing in August, he was speaking to 6,500 people in Portland with Bernie Sanders. By the time Mills entered the race 10 weeks later, he was doing up to six events a day, including more than 20 packed town halls, and had signed up over 11,000 volunteers. A UNH poll that same week showed Platner with a 34 point lead over Mills, a margin that was basically unchanged when the governor suspended her campaign six months later. The revelations about Platner's offensive Reddit posts and Totenkopf tattoo did nothing to change this trajectory. Laksha Jain, the argument's pollster who's never been a fan of the guy, points out that Platner's lead over both Mills and Collins significantly expanded in the months after the Reddit and tattoo stories broke. It wasn't that most voters hadn't heard a lot about these controversies. Polls showed that by the end of the primary, almost all of them had. But most voters either forgave Platner or were satisfied with his answers. I bring up this history because a lot of pundits and establishment types are now trying to argue that Platner's coalition was never much more than a collection of elitist progressives and Bernie Bros people who fell for a DC Persons idea of a working class candidate, which was said unironically by a D.C. person who is not working class and one whose centrist think tank is now arguing that the right lesson for Democratic presidential hopefuls to take from a campaign that imploded over a rape allegation is that Graham Platner's politics were too far left. But that's not how actual Maine voters saw things. Here's Nate Cohn on their New York Times poll, fewer Maine voters thought Platner was too far to the left than said the same of the Democratic Party in general. Also, quote, platner did something most progressive outsiders appeal across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic primary electorate. Rebecca Traister, the feminist writer and journalist, also pointed out that the Times poll had Platner performing eight points better with women than men and wrote about being, quote, surrounded by white haired ladies cheering their hearts out at a Platner event in June. Alex Seitzwald, our guest this week who covered the race as closely as anyone for Maine's midcoast Villager, said that he saw, quote, extremely offline friends, family members and acquaintances fall hard for Platner. Again, none of this is a defense of Platner. To me, it makes his betrayal even worse. And I'm not arguing that Democrats should run candidates with Graham Platner's politics in every competitive race. Two weeks before one corner of the Internet kicks my ass over Platner, another corner of the Internet kicked my ass over saying that abolishing prisons, police and borders are bad and dumb ideas. Believe me, I very much get the concerns of more moderate Democrats that voters in places we absolutely need to win might very well reject candidates and policies they see as too far left. But then make the case to voters that those ideas are bad, that your ideas are better, and that your approach to politics is more likely to improve their lives. Don't pretend that progressive outsiders are somehow more likely to lie about sexual misconduct when there's Eric Swalwell and Andrew Cuomo and Bill Clinton. Don't unsubtly suggest that the next Platner might be Michigan's Abdul Al said, just because the two share political beliefs, consultants and agenda. Especially when Abdul has already gone through the fairly robust vetting process of running for governor of his state. If you think his ideas are out of step with voters, fine. Make that case. Here's the reality. Two in three voters told the Times poll that the political and economic system in America needs either major changes or to be torn down entirely. Eight in 10 Democrats think that that doesn't mean they want socialism. It doesn't even necessarily mean they want progressive change. But people who've spent the last decade or more watching their lives get harder and their country fall apart are starving for something different from their leaders. Those are the people who had their hopes dashed by Graham Platner and a long line of candidates before him. They're some of the same people who poured into the streets of Bidderford after their own government killed their 26 year old neighbor, who delivered their food and cared for their pets to support his wife and three year old daughter. Just like any other American, people are starving for something different, something better. And if they don't see that and hear that and feel that in the Democratic Party's candidates, they will eventually look somewhere else or stop looking at all. Next up, my conversation with Alex Seitzwalt. Alex, welcome to Offline.
- [13:21]
Alex Seitzwald
Hey, John, thanks so much for having me.
- [13:22]
Jon Favreau
I want to talk all about the Graham Platner fiasco and the Maine Senate race, but I actually want to start with you. You did, in your own words, an insane thing in 2025. You quit your job as a political reporter for NBC News in Washington, moved to Maine, where he took a 50% pay cut to become the deputy editor of the Mid Coast Villager, which had a circulation of about 5,000 at the time. What made you do that?
- [13:52]
Alex Seitzwald
Well, you know, local news is just such an exciting growth industry right now. We're just, you know, unicorns shooting to the moon. Obviously not. It's probably the worst industry in America, or one of them. We moved up in 2021 to help take care of. And so that's how we got to Maine, who she's in a nursing home nearby and had lived here for a long time. And my wife and I had always loved Maine. Our first conversation ever, actually in the capitol building in D.C. was how we like D.C. but one day, it'd be nice to live in a small town by the sea one day. So we came up here during COVID I kept working for NBC News for two years remotely. And as we were getting close to 20 at the end of the 2024 election, I was kind of thinking I wanted a break from politics anyway and starting to think about what that might mean. And then this local newspaper, it was actually four papers before they relaunched. I got coffee with them. Not at all with an eye towards a job, just, you know, wanting to know what's going on in the local newspaper. And they laid out this really exciting vision for what they wanted to do. Then I saw the first issue and I was like, this is really good. But you know, anybody can do a good first issue and then. But the second issue was great. The third issue was great. And then they reached out asking if I knew anyone who might be interested. And I just, I gave them a couple names, but I just kept thinking about what I would want to do in that role. And so I was like, you know what? I think I actually would like that. And it's been awesome. I mean, I graduated in 2009, like into the great Recession. My first job in journalism was in D.C. so I've just been in D.C. the whole time. There used to be this pipeline where you would go work for your local newspaper and then maybe, you know, the Capitol paper in your state, and then maybe one day you'd get to D.C. and that pipeline's just broken because local news, you know, is in such hard times. But this is like where journalism is at its best and most fundamental and personal. Midcoast Villager Midcoastvillager.com is awesome. We have a cafe right downstairs. And every Friday, like this morning, I was just down there where it's like open office hours. Anybody in the community can come and pitch a story or complain about something. It's great. And it's great. Like, it's great market research, it's great political research. You know, I just, it's a way to take the temperature every week. And we would do great arts coverage because it's amazing arts coverage in this area. And I don't know if I'm technically allowed to say this, but we are on track to break even this year, which is incredible.
- [16:20]
Jon Favreau
That was going to be my next question.
- [16:22]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, I mean, it's sad that not losing money is a win, is a success, but it absolutely is in local news. Our paid readership is up like 27%. Our circulation has grown, our sales are up. Everything is like, the numbers are all looking good and we've gotten a lot of nice attention from other outlets and other folks looking to, to do this version. So there's, there's a lot of interesting local news models happening all across the country, like, ways to reinvent this. And there's always this kind of search for, you know, that one silver bullet model that will just solve everything. But it's. This is local news. I think everything has to be place based. And I think what we're doing really works here. But I can't say that it would, you know, necessarily if you pick it up and put it somewhere else, because every place is different.
- [17:15]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. And just so people know, Mid coast Maine is so there's, there's Portland, biggest city in Maine. And then there's the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News, Northern Maine. And like, when you say local news, like mid coast Maine is as local as it gets. It's. It's far from any big city in Maine. And so you guys are really in it, just covering. Covering all kinds of local stuff. And I believe you're in Camden, right?
- [17:40]
Alex Seitzwald
That's right. Yeah, my office in Camden. I live in Rockport, next town over. We basically cover two counties and yeah, they're, I don't know, the seventh and eighth biggest counties in Maine, which is a small state. Yeah. So it's about. Our coverage area is like 100,000 people on a good day. But it's an incredible place. It's kind of the western shore of Penobscot Bay. So we have, it's like 43 towns total, seven or eight of which are on islands only accessible by ferries.
- [18:09]
Jon Favreau
That's Maine.
- [18:10]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, that's Maine. We have, you know, we have farming towns. We have our. Our big city of Rockland is like 7,500 people, but incredible arts scene, incredible literary scene, fishing, forestry. It's a big, like, organic agriculture hub. So there's. There's so many amazing stories to be told here and lots of really interesting people who come from all over the world to retire here or live here. And it has this kind of feeling that any little driveway through the woods, there could be some incredible story down there because there often is.
- [18:46]
Jon Favreau
So I know you're focused on stories like more local than even the main Senate race. It seems like one of the many challenges of this media environment is that all politics has become nationalized. And partly that's a, a cause of local news being in trouble, and maybe it's also fueling it as well. To what extent do people in your community, like, hunger for local news versus national news? Like, when you talk to people, are they. Is the politics that's on their mind national or at least main governor, main Senate, or is it really local?
- [19:21]
Alex Seitzwald
100%. And it's such a great question. It's something that we think about a lot because, yeah, everybody, we assume that all of our readers are, you know, reading the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or watching Fox News or they're consuming national news. Everybody is in this landscape. And I really noticed that in 2020, covering the Democratic presidential race, where I'd be in Iowa, but people were watching, you know, Pete Buttigieg or whoever on msnbc, and that was informing their vote. So it's almost like the local area is a soundstage for the national environment, which then reflects back locally. So there's definitely a lot of that, especially around the Senate race, which has obviously been huge. But at the same time, even when those things happen, we try to localize everything. So Graham Platner was at this pizza place that my daughter just had her sixth birthday party at. There's 1,000 people there. Early in his campaign, I saw him at this organic farm with Troy Jackson, where I saw him teach Troy Jackson, who's now running to replace him, how to shuck an oyster. All the Trump administration stuff like that filters down. So if we're talking about, you know, cuts to SNAP benefits, say, like, we go to a food pantry and talk about how they're trying to make up for the gap there. So to your point, your question about, like, are people hungering for it? I think yes, absolutely. Though they might not call it local news, it's like, and there's this kind of debate in the local news world, like, do we rebrand ourselves as local information or community information or community connection? Because it's on there. There's, there's Facebook groups, there's, you know, social media groups. People want this information and it's going to get out there one way or another. But it's better, I think, that it comes through, you know, responsible journalistic practices that, where we're accountable, you know, who we are, you can yell at us, you can cancel your subscription rather than like a fly by night Facebook account. So I think the challenge is on us as journalists to make what we're doing relevant in people's lives, even if they don't necessarily realize it. And that's often not going to be doing the kinds of things that we, that local media has done forever, because those kinds of things are now being served by other means of information. Every town has a website now, so you don't need to necessarily post like the polling location. People can find that. So do the more value added work of talking about what the stakes are for their local ballot. You know, who the select board candidates are, who the school board candidates are, and going deeper than just the basic information that they can already get online.
- [21:59]
Jon Favreau
Well, it's fantastic that, that what you guys are doing is working and, and, and I'm glad you're doing it.
- [22:04]
Alex Seitzwald
Appreciate that.
- [22:05]
Jon Favreau
Let's dig into the Senate race. Maybe we can start with the Platner era. One of the reasons I've been eager to talk to you is it's always Seemed to me that there was an unusually large disconnect in the Senate primary between the national discourse and what was happening on the ground in Maine. I've sensed from your reporting in tweets that you feel the same way. But you tell me, was there a difference? And why do you think so?
- [22:32]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, there absolutely was. And it's easy now, knowing what we know, to look back in hindsight and kind of dismiss that. But I think if you are interested in understanding politics or Democratic politics especially, you should be clear eyed and open minded about why Graham Platner got so much success. Because he did have a tremendous amount of real organic grassroots support. This wasn't, you know, we can talk about the, the out of state consultants who came in, he certainly got help from them, but there was very real on the ground support for him. And I think that's where the, the, the disconnect was. It, it was just people that I interact with on a daily basis who are not political. You know, talking about him, yard signs everywhere, massive turnout at his events in town. It just like permeated the culture in a way that very few candidates do. Like, you know, Obama level, Bernie level kind of enthusiasm. And he did something basically unprecedented. Certainly since I've been covering politics for about 15 years of going from absolutely zero, no elective office, not even no celebrity, no big business, he was not a known quantity. Even here, I'm the next county over. From where he is to defeating a two term sitting governor who had the backing of Chuck Schumer and the DSCC in the primary. So I think people discounted the depth of his enthusiasm or wanted to kind of wish it away. And you can see now in the candidates running to replace him, they've all, you know, distanced themselves from him personally and say they don't want anything to do with him personally. But they've also said we have to embrace his policies, we have to embrace his voters. He won 72% of the Democratic primary and there was a debate last night. One of the first questions was, what policy from Graham Platner's campaign would you adopt? And they all listed something and it was different. So you know this. He kind of made a playbook that they are now running on, even if they don't want anything to do with the author of that playbook. Right now,
- [24:50]
Jon Favreau
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- [25:46]
Alex Seitzwald
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- [26:03]
Jon Favreau
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- [27:45]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah. I can tell you exactly where I was. I was sitting at this exact table where I am right now. An old source of mine, Joe Cavello, who was working for Platinum, texted me, and he was like, hey, I've got this guy who's gonna run for Senate. He's the harbor master in Sullivan. Can I put you on the phone with him for 10 minutes before he announces? And I kind of thought, all right, you know, Harbormaster and Sullivan, this tiny town of a thousand. Like, sure, Joe, I'll talk to your guy as a favor, thinking he would be some gadfly, you know, nothing. And then I got on the phone with him, and within, like, two minutes, just completely blown away by. That's a guy who knows what he's talking about. He has a fully formed political agenda. He's personable, he's charming. He, you know, can think on his feet. And with that background. And it was that conversation. And I went and, like, Googled him, and there was. Because he was a big. He was gonna announce the next day. And I screenshotted the entire Internet that existed on him, which was, like, nothing, because it's so rare that you can see a moment before somebody's about to blow up big. And I told everybody, like, I'm putting money on. On. On this guy. Like, I'm not saying he's gonna win, but he's going to be a thing, and people are gonna start paying attention to him. And I feel like that was borne out, even if he ended up not being the thing that a lot of people wanted him to be.
- [29:09]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, I know it is. Looking back now, there's a lot of, I think, revisionist history and people who were longtime Platner, skeptics, and rightly so, it turns out, will now say, oh, he was plucked from obscurity by these out of state activists. And then they gave him a bunch of lines. And because he looked. Looked the part, then that was it, you know, And I think that just misses the fact that he did have both talent, charisma, and like you said, fully formed political beliefs. You could tell, you can't really fake that. You said in an interview back in April, he looks like coastal Maine. I know a million guys who look like him. He talks the right way, he straddles that populist. But also appeal to conservatives, divide. Say more about that. Because even Platner's identity as a working class guy from Maine has been since the beginning questioned and attacked because of his more privileged upbringing. How did that whole debate play out among Mainers? Or did it.
- [30:11]
Alex Seitzwald
I mean, yeah, it didn't really. I mean, it sort of did, but it was completely divorced from what the national conversation was. And there was a great tweet that somebody did that was like a Venn diagram of people who like Platner, people who hate Platner online. And then main voters up here being like, not at all connected to it because it did just. I'm like one of, you know, a dozen people in Maine who's extremely online and is on Twitter all the time. So I was one of, I feel like few people who had a foot in both worlds and they just felt completely disconnected to your point about like platform obscurity, whatever. Like, if it was that simple, it would happen all the time. If all it took was going around the country and being like you, we're gonna make you grand platinum, there would be a dozen of them and they're not. But his message resonated with people. His look, his feeling resonated with people. And the class dynamics here are fascinating and complex. Like, I was living in D.C. where class dynamics are pretty black and white and literally black and white. Like it's racial. That's kind of it. And here there's zero racial diversity. It's the whitest state in the country. But the class dynamics are large and complex. And there's a lot of this kind of what I've called intentional downward mobility. Planner. Yeah. So where the first generation, his grandfather, who's this famous architect, maybe summer's here, then the second generation comes, moves full time, but retains their professional identity. And his dad was a lawyer. And then sometimes the third generation goes full townie. And that was Graham Plattner. And I feel like there's a Lot of people like that around here. There are people who can trace their families back 13 generations to the land and there are people who maybe moved here 30 years ago, but you can't really tell the difference. And as long as the currency of the realm, at least in my part of Maine, is if you work with your hands and it kind of doesn't matter your background, if you are working, you are working class or you count if you dress that way, if you work that way, if you talk that way, if you're not haughty, you're not pretentious, you fit in. And I kind of thought his class background was almost a feature, not a bug. The fact that he had spent time, went to gw, went to the tune, worked at the tune, in on Capitol Hill, had family members who are more upper middle class. Like he can speak that language, he can speak to donors and go on cable news and be prepared, but at the same time he can go to the dock and you know, talk to fishermen and lobstermen, which is not a lot of people that can do that. Like Troy Jackson, who was running for governor, is now running to place him is what Graham Platner claimed to be or what the image of Graham Platner, he is a working class guy. He's a fifth generation logger from Allagash, which is way up in the middle of nowhere. But Troy Jackson is not nearly as compelling as a speaker as Graham Plattner. And I don't think could have gotten that kind of viral national following. We might end up with Senator Troy Jackson, ironically, at the end of all this. But early on I went to an event where Troy Jackson was the featured speaker. It was an event for Troy Jackson. Graham Platner had been hired to cater for oysters before he announced his interround. He was just going to be there working the event and then he happened to like it was amazing moment. Like he, he was catered to work it and then he had happened to launch a Senate campaign. So they kind of pulled him on stage and everybody who had come there to see Troy Jackson left being like, wait, who's this Graham Platner guy? That's the guy that I'm interested in paying attention to. So that's the kind of thing that I don't think you can just put pluck from obscurity and expect to repeat.
- [34:01]
Jon Favreau
I do think that this sort of ability to code switch is underrated as an attribute that can really be successful lead to success in politics. I mean, I always think about that with Obama, that the Fact that he had a foot in so many different worlds and not, I mean, everyone focuses on him being biracial, but also, you know, I mean, lived in Indonesia, had been around sort of poverty there, and then went to Punaha, which is very elite. And so because you in both elite and non elite circles and white and black and national and international, like, he sort of had the ability to speak to different audiences in a way that people found compelling. I think you could say that Trump can code switch as a billionaire from Manhattan, but also because he was sort of outer borough. Right. Like he had. And people have talked about that. And I do think that's sort of been missing in the Platner analysis because, yeah, if he never had the privileged upbringing and he'd only been working class, like, who knows if anyone would have noticed him or if he would have had those fully formed political beliefs that he was able to articulate like that, you know, And I think that it's an interest. The class dynamics and especially class dynamics in Maine, I think are fascinating and sort of underestimated in why this whole thing happened.
- [35:20]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think another kind of lens of diversity or angle of diversity that we don't think about a lot is rurality, for lack of a better word. And I think it mattered that Graham Plattner was from Sullivan, was from down east and not from the Portland area or from the 2020. Democratic nominee Sarah Gideon was from Freeport, which is where, you know, the L.L. bean flagship store. Lovely place. But it's, it's a. It codes differently for voters. And I think, like, that is a place that's an angle that often gets flattened with other kind of angles. When we talk about people that Democrats have lost touch with, I think is also kind of, you know, that just more rural lifestyle. And I've really seen it living here only for, you know, four years. But it's. That disconnect that we were talking about has made me question a lot of my coverage as a former national correspondent parachuting in across the country, you know, what did I get wrong? What did I miss when I was covering those races? Is there even a way to do that effectively while taking everything under the obvious time pressures that you have working in national news.
- [36:36]
Jon Favreau
Yeah. And resources and people that can go to rural areas and do that kind of reporting.
- [36:41]
Alex Seitzwald
Absolutely.
- [36:42]
Jon Favreau
So let's talk about Mills. I remember the first time I heard about the possibility of Janet Mills running against Collins, like way before I ever heard of Graham Platner. My initial uninformed reaction was like okay, this could work. Popular two term governor who is not seen as from away. Like Sarah Gideon was sort of seen as in 2020. I don't think I remember or understood her age at the time or knew her age at the time. But what's your take on the short lived Mills campaign?
- [37:13]
Alex Seitzwald
Stunning. This campaign was so crazy for me in a number of ways. On one, this crazy rise of platinum. But I think like equally as important, the other side of the coin was uniquely terrible campaign from Janet Mills. Like I have never seen anything quite like it. She didn't seem to want to run and kind of dragged it out. And everyone knew that Chuck Schumer was pulling her along. And even her support supporters were starting to get kind of antsy because she wasn't even like last summer, she wasn't even putting out those kind of behind the scenes words that you typically get if you're gonna support her. She said like two weeks before she announced, she said that Susan Collins was doing the best she could in the Senate. And so that created this opening for Platner where it kind of looked like she wasn't gonna do it. And then Platner gets in, rises, and by the time she gets in and by the time the first big negative information about him came out on the Reddit posts and the tattoo, he had already built up enough support that he was able to weather it. I think that's just was malpractice. If that was indeed oppo research and whoever put it out, that should have come out right away and it could have nipped him in the bud before anyone had heard of him. But by then he was a big enough thing. So she had two big issues to combat, which was the perception that she didn't want to do it, she didn't want to be a senator, and the perception that she was too old. And she did nothing to combat either of those very lackluster campaign hardly did events. There were these kind of closed door. She would meet with, you know, local officials, local community leaders, nice meetings I went to. Some of them reminded me Hillary Clinton used to do that in like 2014, 2015, before. She then eventually had public events. But Mills never got to that point of holding big events or doing much in public really at all. And her answer from her, the answer from the campaign was always, she's gonna keep doing what she's always done, which is delivering for Mainers or whatever. And like that just obviously wasn't gonna cut it. And the ultimate proof in the pudding is that Platner steps Down there's now a wide open race to replace him. She would be the obvious choice. And the filing deadline is now passed. She is not running to replace him. She doesn't want the job or realized that she couldn't get it. I had a big Platner support. I mean sorry, a big mill supporter. Tell me when this was all happening. He's like all I know the guy who had been haranguing me about our coverage the most for being he thought two Platner. It's like all I know is that it can't be Janet.
- [39:49]
Jon Favreau
So honestly when I was, I was in Biddeford when the news broke and was talking to everyone there, my in laws were there and the most common reaction I got from people was like, as long as it's not Mills, let's slot someone else in there. But we can't have Mills. And this is like, you know, bifurt pool area is very like, you know, resistance lib territory, very nationalized politics. And you know, you'd think that would be like a Mills. And people were just like no, we can't do Mills. It's interesting cause from here and a lot of the online discourse about this and I think from the left was it's Schumer and the establishment ties that are sort of dragging her down. And I agree with that in part. But I also think Schumer recruited Roy Cooper in North Carolina who's doing great and Mary Peltola in Alaska who's doing great. And I think that this is a mill specific thing more than it's just Schumer and the establishment because like you said, she just seems like she didn't want the job.
- [40:50]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, I think that's right. And the picks otherwise have been pretty good from him. But there was this sense among like insidery types that he wanted Mills and he was never going to be talked out of it. Even when people raised questions, well, does she really want the job? Well, she's pretty old. Well, she has taken done these things that have alienated factions of the left. And the perception was that he didn't even think about anyone else, didn't even look at anyone else. And I think maybe if he had gone through the motions of talking to some other folks, it maybe could have gotten better. But there was also the Biden hangover was huge. This a year ago, Biden had just, we had just done this with his age and him withdrawing. And then more specifically in Maine the Sarah Gideon hangover was big where there was this similar perception that she was chosen by Chuck Schumer by Washington Democrats, that she was a from away, as you said, which is the main derogatory term for somebody who's not from Maine. And you can be like, you can have lived in Maine for 80 years and still be from away.
- [41:55]
Jon Favreau
I was talking to people about that.
- [41:57]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, it's incredible. It's real. And then you can even be born in Maine. But if your parents are from away, some people won't consider that. Like my colleague puts it, if a cat has kittens in the oven, it don't mean they're biscuits. Like, just because you were born in Maine, it doesn't make you necessarily mater. So Sarah Gideon had this perception that she was from away that I heard so much about her Viking stove, like, in her announcement video in her kitchen behind her. She had like a. I guess a $10,000 stove. And so there was this already built in, kind of resisted. And she went on to lose by nine points to Susan Collins on the same ballot that Joe Biden won by nine points. So there was this perception that D.C. democrats chose wrong last time. They forced a candidate down our throats last time, and they're doing it again this time.
- [42:50]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, that's such a good point, because I had been thinking about that, too. Is that the Sarah Gideon hangover is also sort of an underplayed explanation here for why the Mills campaign went wrong. And there was also no real explanation from the Democratic establishment about why we lost Maine in 2020. It was just like, okay, well, Susan Collins is a unicorn and everyone just moved on. And Sarah Gideon had like $15 million in the bank afterwards, and that was that. So you mentioned the Platner's Reddit posts and the tattoo. Talk about the difference between, like, those stories drop. He weathers those. It seems like on the ground, those aren't as big of an issue as they are clearly nationally and online. And then, of course, when you fast forward to the spring and summer, we get a succession of big events. You know, Mills drops the Platner sexting story, drops the New York Times story with Lindsey Fifield and Jenny Racicot drops. Platner wins the primary. And then, of course, Politico breaks the sexual assault allegations and the campaign ends. Talk about how the sort of the mood and vibe on the ground shifted between those initial controversies with Platner and sort of the later controversies.
- [44:00]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, completely different vibes, reactions, and also actions from Platner. That initial round of the Reddit and the tattoos. I think people he was so. Or people felt like he was so Honest and forthcoming and taking responsibility for them and saying, I was wrong. I've learned. And it was so refreshing to see a candidate do that. But you can only do that once, right? Like, you can only ask for forgiveness once. You can't keep, you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And it was also the kind of things like, I think a lot of people could relate to that and that it fit with his whole kind of everyman image. It fit with his redemption arc about being a combat veteran with PTSD who came back to Maine. And through coming back to Maine and getting involved with his oyster business and meeting his wife, he had become a better person. And you know, who among us doesn't have some posts that they're not proud of or a bad tattoo? Fast forward and the first sexting story comes out and he was. His response was very different. It was defensive. It was blaming the media. It was, they are coming after me. You know, the evil, nefarious people that whenever somebody gets in trouble, they're always coming after them. It felt much more like a traditional politician's answer, which kind of undercut part of his appeal. And it also. Then the more and more and more stuff came out. He kept promising there was nothing more and there kept being more. And so, you know, people were willing to trust him to a point. But then it's like, wait, we don't know this guy. He came out of left field. We put aside a lot of questions because we believed in him, but I'm not sure now. And I think also, and this hasn't gotten very much attention, but in that kind of key period between when Mills dropped out and then things got worse for him. You know, he was riding high. He had basically won the primary. And so a lot of Mills aligned Democrats are Platner skeptical Democrats were hoping to see him kind of transition to general election mode and start appealing to people who hadn't supported him in the primary to independent voters. And instead he kind of doubled down on the factionalism. He, you know, got behind. He endorsed in the. In the governor's race. He kind of turned his campaign into the campaign for Troy Jackson for governor. He endorsed in other states, you know, the lefty candidate in other states. So that rubbed some people the wrong way. Exactly the kind of people that he needed to start to win back into the fold. And then, you know, by the time the Times and the Politico story, patience had already worn thin. And that was just the nail that, you know, absolutely broke the camel's Back to mix my metaphors there.
- [47:03]
Jon Favreau
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Alex Seitzwald
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- [49:12]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, well it was fairly sleepy, which is why I think you're not getting seeing a ton of coverage of it. The three leading candidates are the runners up from the governor's primary, so That's Jenna Bellows, who's the Secretary of State. Troy Jackson, who we've been talking about, he's former state Senate president and Nirav Shah who was the head of the main CDC during COVID So he was on TV all the time and actually won the governor's primary on the first round. But we have ranked choice voting. So he ended up losing to Hannah Pingree in subsequent rounds. But he's kind of seen as a pragmatic, somewhat non partisan, non political kind of guy. There's Jordan Wood, who had run for Senate and House. And there's Dan Cleveland, the founder of the Main Beer company. There's others. But really this is a weird, unusual race. Like the voters are not the voters here. This will be decided by 601 people. Exactly. Who will be in a room in Bangor at a convention. They'll be, those delegates will be elected this weekend by the people who, you know, decide to turn out to a Democratic Party event on a Sunday in July in Maine. So this process selects for your most committed, engaged, high information voters and it, and it really selects for organizing. It's like who can recruit the delegates and the voters to show up at those county meetings to then elect their delegates to then get them to the convention and vote for them. And right now I think Troy Jackson is in the best position. The state party released a list of all the delegate candidates and Jackson's name. You don't have to be a pledge delegate. You can just say I'm going to go and vote for whoever's best. But you can also say I'm going to go and vote for one of the candidates. And there's something like almost 500 delegate candidates who put Troy Jackson's name and then like 250 for Shana Bellows and like 200 for Narav Shah. So he's on that metric. He's way ahead. And I think for these other candidates who weren't in the governor's race, it's just a much steeper hill to climb. We have 10 days until the convention. So you can't like build a groundswell of support. You need to already have these relationships with the kind of grass tops folks, if you will, to be getting them to turn out to these kind of obscure meetings.
- [51:37]
Jon Favreau
How do you think with this field of candidates the process would be different or the outcome might be different with a primary or a caucus that they did last minute versus I think what you were getting at is you get more committed sort of activists selecting the nominee from this process. Like, how do you think that would shake out?
- [52:00]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, it's a great question, and it's one that's definitely been a kind of, like, fun parlor game in the last few days around here. They just. And to answer the obvious question that you didn't ask but, like, why not do a primary caucus? It was just logistically not feasible. I mean, it's hard to believe that Platner officially withdrew, I think, seven days ago. So. And there's a legal deadline. Under state law, they have to submit a new name by the 27th. So this all had to be compressed into a really tight timeline. And the kind of traditional way would be to just hold a party convention and, you know, the people who are already in party offices would make the decision. So they're trying to open it up as much as they say is feasible, given the timeline. But I think, you know, it's the process, but also the timing, it would just be really hard. Like Dan Cleban, founder of Maine Beer Co. Great Beer Lunch IPA, maybe you've had it. Really compelling candidate. He ran for Senate briefly and then withdrew to support Mills, the kind of guy who, in a vacuum, would be a great candidate, but I think is just not going to have the time to really make anything happen here. So, you know, that might be different in a more open process, but I still think that you're going to favor the people who have just been running statewide campaigns, you know, barely shut down their campaigns a few weeks ago. Our primary was on June 9, so, you know, the lawn signs were still out and people just went out and scratched off for governor and wrote for Senate on top of it on Susan Collins.
- [53:39]
Jon Favreau
Why do you think she survived this long in a blue state, now a blue state? And how do you assess her strength this time around against this non platner, non Mills field of potential challengers.
- [53:53]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah, I mean, underestimate Susan Collins at your own risk. Absolute. If you remove the partisan hat and you just look objectively like a political animal. I mean, just incredible track record. In 2008, when Barack Obama was winning Indiana, and I can't remember, he ended up winning Montana or not, but coming close. We were close. Close, yeah. There. Yeah. Yeah, you would know. You were there, you know, putting up just like historic monster numbers. 60, 60 senators, big majority in the House. Collins won against a sitting Democratic congressman who. Nothing weird in his past, you know, totally fine candidate. She won by 34 points. Just insane. Yeah. And in 2020, she won by nine points against, again, like a. Well, a candidate who Sarah Gideon who outraised her and outspent her two to one. She, she doubled Collins spending and still lost by nine points. So this is one of the last bastions of ticket splitters. A lot of independence in Maine. There's a long track record there. People like the, even Democrats, even like your resistance lib folks like to imagine themselves as the kind of people who would vote for the right Republican and a lot of them have voted for Susan Collins in the past. So there's that kind of track record. She's viewed as a moderate. People dispute that, of course. And she's also just been really effective at the kind of old school, bring back the money game. She's the chair of the Appropriations Committee and every town you can point to a bridge or a library or historical society that she has helped fund. She's been very savvy in what projects she funds. Her constituent services are famous. You know, if you have an issue with your VA check or your Social Security or whatever, her office will help you make it happen. That like everyone knows that of the four members of the main congressional delegation, you go to her first. Like she, like her office is going to be the one that's going to help you out the most. She's just a total workaholic. She is constantly texting, calling with people. I talked to Paul of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose real name is Noel the other day for unrelated story and he mentioned how he emails with Susan Collins. So because he lives in Blue Hill, so like, you know, that's her level of penetration into the state. We keep waiting, since I've been in politics since 2008, we keep waiting for partisanship to catch up with Susan Collins, but it keeps feeling like Charlie Brown with the football and she keeps winning. This might be the year maybe regardless of the platinum stuff and everything else, just where partisanship finally catches up, the nationalization of politics finally catches up. But a lot of voters I think are torn between a feeling that Susan Collins is good for Maine but bad for the country. Like they like what she's doing here, but they think about control of the Senate and Supreme Court and all that. So she wants to keep the focus on Maine, not talk about Donald Trump, not talk about ice, which this horrible shooting in Biddeford makes much tougher. She wants to talk about as if she's a non part, as if she's the governor. And the more attention has been on Platner and all these scandals, the easier that's been for her. But of course that will change once we actually get A Democratic nominee.
- [57:25]
Jon Favreau
Last question. Since everyone's doing lessons learned from the Platner debacle, what are yours?
- [57:31]
Alex Seitzwald
Well, that's a good one. I mean, you know, dig, dig into people's past more obviously, but there's a lot of lessons. I have a lot of personal lessons in the way the coverage is partly, like, believe my eyes and ears more, but also hold views strongly but lightly, like, be willing to change your mind when evidence changes things. And I think that Platner took his voters on a ride. I don't think we can blame the voters for that. But I think we need to be as much as we want regular people, quote, unquote, to get more into politics and have fewer, you know, fancy Harvard, Yale lawyers in office. If you're pulling somebody out of nowhere who hasn't had any kind of track record, that also means that, you know, there's some issues in the past. Nothing surprising there. That should be obvious, but I think it will make everybody second guess the kind of next viral candidate that comes out of the nowhere.
- [58:40]
Jon Favreau
Yeah, it's obviously the national discourse doesn't allow for this, doesn't allow for nuance very well. But it is possible that what he had and what he did was real and the enthusiasm was genuine and people really did think he was talented and that he wasn't vetted, and that was a failure. And that's why we've ended up with this mess. So two things can be true.
- [59:05]
Alex Seitzwald
Yeah.
- [59:05]
Jon Favreau
Alex Heitzwald, thank you so much for joining Offline and for all you're doing up there with the Midcoast villager. And enjoy the rest of the Senate race.
- [59:16]
Alex Seitzwald
Thanks so much.
- [59:17]
Jon Favreau
Take care.
- [59:18]
Alex Seitzwald
Thanks.
- [59:30]
Jon Favreau
Offline with Jon Favreau is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Emma Ilik, Frank and Anisha Banerjee. Our team includes Delon Villanueva, Mia Kelman, Charlotte Landis, Eric Shoot. Rachel Gaeski and Will Jones with support from Adrian Hill and Matt De Gro. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Sam.