Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell.

This is the last time I’ll be in your inboxes before Halloween, so have a great one. My husband and I are dressing up as 6-7. If the parents are doing it, the meme is surely dead.

It’s been a busy 24 hours. Last night, I caught a preview of Ken Burns’s new docuseries, The American Revolution, at the Mount Vernon estate, where it was hard to feel anything but patriotic. Thanks to the Burns team, WETA, and PBS for the invite.

Then today, I spoke on two panels. The first was at the Public Relations Society of America’s ICON conference, alongside former top Republican aide Brendan Buck; former G.O.P. presidential advisor Zac Moffatt; Biden comms pro Robyn Patterson; MSNBC’s Ali Vitali; and moderated by Ray Day. The questions were great, and hopefully the answers were insightful. Then this afternoon, I spoke on a panel hosted by Orchestra, about healthcare coverage amid a changing technological and regulatory landscape, alongside Fierce Healthcare’s Anastassia Gliadkovskaya and Cassie McGrath of Morning Brew and moderated by Orchestra’s Stephanie Fergione and Nichola Page.

More event news: Join me next Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Navy Memorial in D.C., where I’ll be interviewing Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim about their new nuclear armageddon thriller, A House of Dynamite, hosted by Puck and our partners at Netflix. R.S.V.P. here.

Today, my colleague Abby Livingston digs into the generational political stakes—and the tattoo controversy dogging the progressive Millennial candidate, Graham Platner—in next year’s consequential Maine Senate race to unseat Republican Susan Collins.

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But first…

Lawmakers brace for SNAP and A.C.A. tremors: The Senate went home for the weekend with no deal in hand to end the government shutdown, which means the coffers that pay out SNAP benefits won’t be refilled and higher Affordable Care Act premiums will likely be locked in for 2026. It could be a painful weekend for lawmakers of both parties, which might soften them up enough to come back and agree on a path out of the shutdown. If they can get home: Air traffic is snarled across the country, and The Hill’s Alexander Bolton is reporting that Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s plane was delayed after a Thursday groundstop at Reagan National Airport because of staffing shortages.

Vice President J.D. Vance underscored the point today at a news conference with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, attributing flight delays to unpaid air traffic controllers not showing up to work. Whether the appearance signaled that the White House might finally engage publicly with the shutdown, we’ll see.

Thirty days into the shutdown, a new Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that respondents are still blaming Republicans and President Trump over Democrats, by 45 percent to 33 percent—fodder for Democrats determined not to reopen the government without a negotiation about Obamacare costs.

Now to the main event…

Maine Clown Posse

What was once a sleepy Democratic primary for a winnable Senate seat has transformed into a raging morality play between a way-too-online oysterman and a 77-year-old safe bet. “This is a layup Senate seat,” said one Democratic strategist. “Instead, our choices are a loose cannon and a grandmother.”

Abby Livingston

Last week, the Democratic operative world erupted over revelations that Graham Platner—the 41-year-old oysterman and Democratic Maine Senate hopeful—had not only made racist and misogynistic comments on Reddit but also sported a tattoo associated with… the Nazis. Platner, a veteran who did three tours in Iraq, got ahead of the news with a friendly appearance on Pod Save America, in which he said that he’d drunkenly gotten the tattoo while on leave in Croatia and had no idea about the affiliation. Nevertheless, the timing was explosive: Two days later, the University of New Hampshire released a poll, conducted pre-tattoo-gate, showing Platner 34 points ahead of his opponent, the establishment-tested, Chuck Schumer–backed state governor, Janet Mills.

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It practically goes without saying that the stakes of the Maine primary are enormously high. Democrats are facing long odds to retake the Senate, which will require picking up at least four seats. And blue-ish Maine, which has sent moderate Republican Susan Collins to the Senate for five terms straight (even while picking Democrats for the White House throughout), has become a rare pickup opportunity for Democrats in the second Trump era—assuming they send the more electable candidate to the general.

Superficially, at least, Platner’s unsavory past would seem to put him at a disadvantage. But as with so many Democratic identity crises these days, the Platner–Mills battle is generational and ideological, too. Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, and the Pod Save guys all believe Platner is the future: a rough around the edges, young-ish, working class–coded Mainer who could plausibly win over exactly the sort of Trump-curious men who have been abandoning the party in droves.

“He sounds like a human being to me, who made mistakes and recognizes them and is very open about it,” Sen. Chris Murphy said after Platner apologized for his old Reddit posts, which he characterized as the ranting of a disillusioned military veteran who didn’t know what to do with his anger. “Some of that stuff was crude, and discriminatory, and needs to be condemned,” Khanna told my colleague John Heilemann last week. “But we have to extend people grace for the culture that they’re part of.” He went on to argue that Democrats need more “normal people,” who didn’t go to elite institutions and keep a squeaky clean online profile in hopes of one day running for office.

Mills, by contrast, is the consummate politician. She rose up the ranks as a prosecutor, served in the state legislature, became the first female attorney general of Maine, and has been involved in state politics for more than 25 years. She won the endorsement of EMILYs List, traditionally the most consequential interest group in a Democratic primary; has the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; and has a strong hand to play with the sort of moderate women who have supported Collins in the past.

Mills isn’t a pushover, either: At the White House in February, when Trump threatened Mills in front of a roomful of governors that he could pull federal funding over Maine’s transgender policies, she immediately shot back, “I’ll see you in court.” (And she did.)

But the optics for both candidates are more complicated than the soundbites, and operatives confess there’s no escaping that Mills is nearly 78 years old—which was Joe Biden’s age when he entered the White House. Platner, while problematic, clearly got a lift from his youth and energy. “Our choices are a loose cannon and a grandmother,” lamented one Democratic strategist. “This is what being a Democrat in 2025 is.”

“A Layup Senate Seat”

On paper, at least, Maine should be among the easiest of the seats that Senate Democrats need to flip. While Collins cruised to a nine-point victory in 2020, despite being outspent $76 million to $31 million, Democrats argue that this is the year she will falter. Maine is a reliable blue state at the presidential level, and while voters tended to appreciate Collins’s moderate conservative politics, that big “R” around her neck is already weighing her down with Trump back in office. According to at least one recent poll, Platner and Mills are both ahead of Collins, with Platner ahead by 14 points and Mills ahead by seven. “This is a layup Senate seat,” said the Democratic strategist, comparing Collins to Jon Tester—the longtime senator from Montana who lost his fourth term in 2024 as the state’s voters soured on the notion of a conservative Democrat representing them.

The question for Democrats is simply which of their two leading candidates can most credibly knock out Collins. “This isn’t a question of whether the comments he made were offensive, or represent his current views. The question is really, how are Republicans going to weaponize them in an ad campaign, and how will voters respond to that?” said Democratic consultant Caitlin Legacki. “If he makes it [out of the] primary, Republicans are going to drop a neutron bomb on his head.” The Platner camp, for its part, argues that Democrats can’t beat a 72-year-old incumbent with an even older candidate of their own. “I don’t believe that a 77-year-old can run on change and win this election in a general,” said a source close to Platner. “I think this is a concern.”

Other Dems say that whoever dumped the online oppo file did both Platner and Democrats a big favor, arguing that it’s better to get the information out and let voters decide if it is disqualifying. “Maybe the voters of Maine don’t give a shit, and this is a new era in politics,” said the Democratic strategist. “But people should be informed in a primary. This would be a killshot if this was September of next year.”

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