Update: As of April 30th, Janet Mills has suspended her campaign for United States Senator.

Maine midterm primaries are set to take place on June 9th. The contentious Democratic primary looking to oust Senator Susan Collins, the race for governor, and ballot measures around transgender students competing in high schools sports have all made national news.
What do all three of these races have in common? They are all receiving massive amounts of out-of-state funding.
Since October of last year, incumbent governor Janet Mills has been battling Sullivan oyster farmer and veteran Graham Platner in the democratic primary for Susan Collins’ senate seat. Collins, who has held her senate seat for three decades, is up for reelection in the 2026 general election. Platner and Mills have pounced on this opportunity, each hoping to flip Collins’ Republican seat to the Democrats in the middle of the second Trump administration.
Platner has been remarkably consistent in fundraising, receiving most of his campaign funding from grassroots, in-state donations and organizations like the United Auto Workers. Mills, however, has relied heavily on Washington-backed Democratic political action committees (PACs) to fund her campaign. The PAC, Maine Senate Victory 2026, is headquartered at 120 Maryland Avenue in Washington DC, according to the FEC.
According to the FEC, by the end of 2025 Mills had directly received over $100,000 from PACs, and had reimbursed none of it. This money likely went towards Mills’ surprise campaign announcement in October of 2025. In the month of March, the Bangor Daily News reported that Mills had spent or had organizations spend over a million dollars in attack ads against Platner. These attack ads have since been halted, with no new Mills ads scheduled.
Out-of-state funding is not only relegated to the Democrats. Incumbent Susan Collins has received more than $25 million in funding from One Nation—an organization which distributes “dark money” where the source is undisclosed to the public—for the distribution of pro-Collins ads, according to Maine Public.
Mirroring the senate race, the gubernatorial race has also become flooded with out-of-state money. Mills has been one of the most outspoken Trump critics, with a confrontation between her and the president going viral at the beginning of 2025. Democrats, including the current secretary of state Sandra Bellows and former Maine CDC director Nirav Shah, hope to keep the state blue, while Republicans hope to flip a valuable gubernatorial seat.
One of these Republicans, Garret Mason, has received immense donations from Richard Uihlein, a billionaire from Illinois. The Maine Democratic Party reported that Mason had received $1.3 million (now $1.7 million) from Uihlein through Uihlein’s Restoration of America PAC. The Maine Democratic Party asserts that Uihlein is funding Mason due to Mason’s anti-choice policies. This assertion holds water when looking at Uihlein’s similar contributions to candidates like Ted Cruz and Lauren Bobert, as well as his $49 million contribution to the 2024 Trump campaign. In a News Center Maine candidate interview, Mason said he was “grateful” for Uihlein’s contributions.
In a town hall on March 10, 2026, the Bangor Daily News reports that Mason was attacked by other Republican gubernatorial candidates over his out-of-state funding. They reported that a verbal altercation took place between Mason and David Jones over the $1.7 million Uihlein had used to fund Mason’s ads.
Mason is the former majority leader of the Maine Senate and hasn’t held statewide office since 2018.
Gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson is urging other candidates to take Elizabeth Warren’s “People’s Pledge.” The People’s Pledge, as reported by the Portland Press Herald, is an initiative started by Warren and her opponent in 2012 that rejects “dark money” spending on candidates’ behalf. Jackson is the only candidate to take the pledge, with other candidates calling the pledge unenforceable.
After the primaries in June, the Democratic and Republican candidates will face off in general elections in November. In addition to the senatorial and gubernatorial elections, as well as Jared Golden’s house seat, Maine will see the inclusion of a ballot initiative that seeks to ban transgender high school students from playing on high school sports teams.
This initiative is also being funded by Uihlein’s PAC from Illinois. The initiative seeks to require schools to designate sports teams as male, female, or coeducational. Only students with the corresponding sex at birth would be allowed to play on the respective teams, with girls being allowed to participate in male sports if no girls teams were available. This initiative is a result of a movement that has been gaining traction in the Republican party to ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports.
Proposals similar to this initiative have already failed in the Maine congress, including proposals to rewrite the Maine Human Rights Act. According to the Maine Morning Star, the initiative was forced to a vote by Leyland Streiff. Streiff collected 87,000 signatures on a petition, of which the Morning Star reported 67,682 (20% of the state’s population) were valid.
If passed, this would be the first initiative of the kind to succeed nationally. This may be why Uihlein, his PACs, and others like him are pouring money into the state to back it.
In an anonymous survey, 148 UNE students were asked about whether out-of-state money should be allowed in Maine politics. Nine students (6% of the total respondents) responded that they approved of out-of-state money in Maine elections. Seventy six students (51% of total respondents) responded that they disapproved of out-of-state money in Maine elections. Sixty three students (43% of total respondents) responded that they had no opinion on the matter.