Pine Tree State Polls are rarely as interesting as the most recent one. As the current occupant of the Blaine House is gobsmacked with the uncomfortable truth that Chuck Schumer lied to her, oysterman and political neophyte Graham Platner’s commanding lead among Democrats for the nomination to take on incumbent Senator Susan Collins next year suggests the old tricks just don’t work anymore.

Perhaps the only way left for Governor Janet Mills (D) to re-boot her campaign by projecting vigor and fresh thinking would be to – Titan Cronus style – eat Hannah Pingree whole, but that would probably not only fail to do the trick, it would also upset her affluent mother First District U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME), with whom Mills is quite tight. In other words, even the most desperate measures are now off the table.

A quick recap for anyone who’s been living under a rock for the last week:

On October 14, one day after “Indigenous Peoples’ Day”, Mills – who has denied Maine’s Native Americans tribal sovereignty – announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Within 24 hours, a torrent of opposition research about old Reddit posts by Platner, who’d been in the race nearly two months by then, hit the streets.

These came to us courtesy of CNN, and included such unsavories as Platner calling himself a communist, saying unpleasant things about police officers, wondering why black people don’t tip, suggesting all rural whites are stupid and racist, and appearing to minimize blame for those who commit rape in the military. Quite a foul stew, really, surely it would knock the wise-ass kid out of the running.

But it didn’t. Unlike a Bill Clinton or an Anthony (Carlos Danger) Weiner, Platner apologized for his errant postings and said they do not reflect his evolved thinking. The UNH poll that gives him the support of 58 percent of Democrats was still in the field then, so its findings take this salvo into account.

Then came the Totenkopf-looking tattoo imbroglio, suggesting Platner might have Nazi sympathies. As he told bro-podcaster Tommy Vietor (who himself had paraded around Georgetown bars topless back when his old boss Barack Obama was king), the supposition that he could be both a communist and a fascist was kind of amusing. After a day’s Sturm und Drang, he had the skull and cross-bones morphed into some sort of warlock-inspired wolf (though some on X joked it still looked like Hitler’s German shepard, Blondi).

In other words, Platner weathered that about the same as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth survived the controversy about one of his tattoos looking Nazi-esque, even though it wasn’t.

Then our own Steve Robinson broke the story about Platner’s having trained Antifa-like leftists extremists on how to use firearms back in the COVID days. While Mills and her odd henchman and now gubernatorial candidate in his own right Dr. Nirav Shah might point out this was a potential violation of the lockdown order of the day, it did at least involve guns – and remind of the combat vet’s expertise in handling them, even if he was training some militant weirdos.

While the tattoo and the leftist militia training scandals broke only after the Pine Tree State poll was in the field, my bet is neither will move the needle much either. In fact, the same night the tattoo story broke, Platner asked a crowd of 600 in Ogunquit if they wanted Washington, DC to pick their candidates for them. And the gentle people of Ogunquit shouted they did not.