Gov. Janet Mills sailed into Augusta after eight disastrous years of former Gov. Paul “Trump before Trump” LePage. That Maine had been deflated and disillusioned by her Republican predecessor—now running for Congress as a reformed man in Maine’s Second Congressional District—would be a colossal understatement. LePage force-fed Mainers a daily diet of heinous smears, vetoed more bills than every previous governor in state history put together, and capsized the state’s public health care system, right along with multiple other state institutions. For most people, but particularly the poorest, every day was a quest to survive LePage until term limits took over in 2018.

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Mills easily won that year’s governor’s race and made quick work of LePage’s legacy. She implemented Medicaid expansion by executive order, which voters had passed and LePage had ignored, on the first day of her first term. It was an almost prophetic decision in the last year of the Before Times—then COVID-19 hit. And that in turn was a good time to have a competent chief executive in the chair. The adults were back.

Sure enough, Mills beat LePage in a 2022 rematch and personally tangled with President Trump in the White House. When he attempted to ban trans people from Maine sports, she retorted that she’d “see you in court” and won, one of the high-water marks of her second term.

Two terms of distinctly moderate governing had dulled Mills’s shine.

Which makes Mills’s recent withdrawal from the primary election for the Maine Senate seat currently occupied by Susan Collins a bit mysterious. Saving Maine and America by finally ousting Collins, the Republican senator who is preternaturally concerned about various Trump misdeeds and nominees, only to vote for them anyway, was nothing short of a mission from God—if not Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader searching obsessively for candidates who could win statewide in key races. It proved irresistible. Surely Mainers would rally around her to deliver them from Collins.

But Maine Democratic voters had already been looking over Janet Mills’s shoulder to see who else was out there. The prospect of two women in their late seventies—Mills would have been 79 when she took office, making her the oldest freshman senator in American history—battling it out thrilled exactly no one, including older voters.

There voters saw Graham Platner. The oysterman and Marine Corps veteran stamped out his Reddit-posting negatives and his suspect tattoos with pure Maine appeal. By the time Schumer shunted an unenthusiastic Mills into the spotlight, other possible candidates anticipating her entry had already hustled over to the governor’s contest or had moved on. So much for a seasoned politician with statewide victories in her pocket.

The warning signs had been there for any Senate leader looking for them. Two terms of distinctly moderate governing had dulled Mills’s shine. Last year, the Maine People’s Alliance gave Mills a 70 percent grade on its 2025 legislative scorecard. At the top of that list was a veto for what she termed a “complicated” suite of labor-management provisions; the governor believed that they would burden the family farmers that dominate the Maine farming sector. She nixed a law curbing local law enforcement cooperation with ICE, which dismayed Mainers repelled by the federal excesses, though she later allowed the bill to become law without her signature.

This year, some of those tussles continued. Confusion over agricultural wage laws led to a Mills veto, as did a criminal justice measure that aimed to allow sealing records for selected low-level offenses. Mills dispensed with a measure that would have given the Wabanaki Nations—the Mi’kmaq Nation, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, and the Penobscot Nation—the ability to operate like any other federally recognized tribe and work with the state as government-to-government entities, a long-standing issue.

Needing a two-thirds majority in a closely divided legislature to overturn vetoes meant that state lawmakers never did. The mixed messages coming out of the state capital led voters to wonder about the value of a Mills candidacy long before Platner showed up to dazzle Mainers unaccustomed to high-voltage candidates. By October last year, when she finally succumbed to Schumer’s pressure campaign, Mills’s job approval ratings had already eroded as Platner’s popularity continued to soar after two months on the campaign trail.

Mills’s veto of a data center moratorium was a strange hill to die on. Several communities— Sanford, Lewiston, and Wiscasset—had all rejected data center proposals. When you stop to consider that Maine has some of the highest electricity rates in the country, it was all but guaranteed that the data center debate roiling the country would be a potent campaign issue for Democrats. But signing the legislation would have been a weather-vane moment, leaving the business-friendly Mills open to anti-competitiveness attacks from the right. (It was clear that she had decided to cash out, almost literally, at that point. Mills only had about $1 million in cash to spend; Platner has $2.5 million. Collins could lay low with $10 million.)

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The lack of an exemption for Jay, the depressed mill town near Augusta that had scored the dubious honor of a data center proposing 100 jobs, was a nonnegotiable for the Democratic- controlled legislature. And even now, with the go-ahead in hand, the data center is already attracting disagreements over whether the proposed facility might exceed electricity constraints for the existing site at some point in future.

Lost in the tumult of her departure from the race was Mills’s executive order to establish a Maine Data Center Advisory Council, a 15-person study group essentially, to focus on the questions surrounding large-scale data centers (which was also a feature of the vetoed legislation). It’s a small, rather plaintive coda to the Medicaid expansion order that Mainers had celebrated eight years ago.

Will Mills step out of her “hear and watch” mode to full-throated support and hit the campaign trail with Platner? Mills is nothing if not gracious and feisty, and Platner at this point is nearly certain to win the primary: A united Democratic front would be a tremendous asset for the general election. But her decision will likely hinge on some very practical considerations about whether Platner can continue to handle the blizzard of hazards, from potential AI slop negative ads to whatever mounds of dirt Republicans plan on shoveling in his general direction as the campaign progresses. In the meantime, sorting through the 13 gubernatorial candidates, five Democrats and eight Republicans running for their respective party nominations, could be a welcome diversion for the chastened Mills.

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Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis.