Chuck Schumer recruited Maine Gov. Janet Mills, endorsed her campaign and touted her as a centerpiece of his strategy to win a Senate majority this year. Her decision to drop out of the Senate race before the primary has left Democratic Party leaders wondering: Why did Schumer push so hard for a candidate who ran such a lackluster campaign?

“Schumer clearly went all out to try to recruit her. Clearly, what he thought was going to be a big thing in Maine was not,” said one Senate Democrat, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

“There have been a lot of questions raised about the decisions, his choices about who he thinks is most electable and is going to be the best candidate,” they added. “And obviously, not everybody shares, not everybody sees it the same way that he does.”

Mills’ sudden exit from the Maine Senate race on Thursday has left some Democrats worried about their party’s chances in the must-win general election contest against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Schumer and Democrats will now try to defeat Collins with political newcomer Graham Platner, an attention-winning but controversial candidate whom the Senate majority leader publicly snubbed for months.

The two sides are already moving to mend fences with each other after Mills’ announcement: Officials from Platner’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee were in communication with each other Thursday, according to an adviser from Platner’s campaign. Democratic groups praised the military veteran’s campaign, and Platner himself said he was “eternally grateful” for Mills’ service to the state.

“After years of allowing Trump’s abuses of power, Senator Collins has never been more vulnerable and we will work with the presumptive Democratic nominee Graham Platner to defeat her,” Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who chairs Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, said in a statement.

Many Democrats in Washington maintain that Platner can defeat Collins in the fall, thanks in part to a sharp electoral backlash to President Donald Trump that they say is endangering Republican candidates all over the midterm election map.

But as the party moved on from a Mills campaign that insiders say failed to launch and in the end met dire financial straits, Democrats are questioning Schumer’s strategies.

Schumer “has an idea of what voters want that’s stuck in 1996,” and he’s “deeply removed from the anger that people feel,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of the progressive candidate recruitment group Run For Something.

Litman said Schumer’s primary interventions are “sowing dissent” because putting “your thumb on the scale, and to do it so incorrectly, undermines that institution’s relationship with voters.”

Schumer’s position within the party has grown more tenuous. Some Senate Democratic candidates have said if elected, they would not support him as Democratic leader. Other members of his caucus have conspicuously endorsed candidates who are running in primaries against Schumer-aligned competitors.

But even some critics concede that the longtime Democratic leader deserves credit for recruiting candidates like Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Mary Peltola in Alaska, all of whom are viewed as formidable general election candidates. Schumer didn’t have the same success with Mills, his supporters concede, but recruiting a sitting governor into a Senate race has traditionally been a winning strategy.

Mills’ departure was sudden — even some allies appeared caught off guard by her announcement — but not entirely unexpected. The governor had stopped running campaign ads for nearly the past three weeks, she trailed badly in polls, and even supporters had begun to lose hope after a planned negative ad campaign against Platner last month did little to slow his momentum.

Platner’s campaign told donors Monday that the general election in Maine had begun this week, after a super PAC aligned with Collins launched its own ad blitz against him.

Mills pointed to financial difficulties as one of the reasons she is suspending her campaign. Her statement said, “I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources.”

Mills entered April with $1 million on hand, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Mills couldn’t keep pace with the Platner fundraising machine, which pulled in over $4 million in the first quarter of this year. He’s raised over $12 million for his campaign.

“She did run out of money,” said one Mills supporter, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I think that was by far the most compelling reason. She just couldn’t make payroll any longer.”

By the spring, her campaign was being badly outspent by Platner’s. And the fact that her own campaign aired a pair of negative ads against Platner, instead of letting an outside group do it and absorb any potential backlash, was a red flag for many supporters, who had expected that she would receive help from an outside group at Schumer’s behest.

The lack of support from Schumer was conspicuous, some Maine Democrats said, especially after he had recruited her into the race.

“She got utterly fucked over by Schumer,” one Democrat said.

“She never should have had to go negative on [Platner] on her own,” they continued. “That is insane. He abandoned her after begging her to run. Shameful.”

Multiple sources close to Schumer made the case against a rescue mission. Aggressive intervention would have been politically controversial and, based on Mills’ polling, there was no guarantee a push from Washington would have saved her campaign, they said. Plus, a sitting governor shouldn’t need to be bailed out, the sources said.

A Democratic operative with connections to the race told NOTUS that Mills would have “needed significant money” to blanket the airwaves before the primary and “didn’t have it.” On why support from Democratic leadership committees and PACs didn’t jump in to help Mills in the primary: “You need to show life if you want a lifeboat.”

Democrats need to gain four members in the Senate to win a majority this year. Of all the party’s opportunities to flip a Senate seat, the Maine race is the only one in a state Trump lost in 2024, which is why many party strategists consider it a must-win if Democrats have any chance to win the majority.

Some Democrats fear Platner’s personal scandals — denigrating police and minimizing rape in the military in now-deleted posts on Reddit, and a Nazi-symbol tattoo that he has covered — may now complicate their path to retaking the Senate. Republicans have already pounced on the baggage, posting an AI-generated video of Platner reading some of his offensive posts.

“It’s going to be a lot harder to flip now. The only path we have, in a state with that age demographic, is having someone who can compete in that demo with Susan Collins, and I think Platner has a lot of energy in a Democratic primary, but I do not see, yet, his ability to peel off enough older voters from Collins,” said Kevin McKeon, a Democratic consultant who is not working on the Maine Senate race. “Janet Mills was perfect for that.”

But Democrats say her age — Mills is 78 and would have been the oldest freshman senator in recent memory — was a turnoff for some Democratic voters after Joe Biden was forced to end his presidential reelection campaign in 2024 because of age-related concerns. And her decision not to announce her campaign until October, after having to be talked into running by Schumer, gave Platner an opportunity to build considerable momentum while the governor was on the sidelines.

Schumer spent more than a year recruiting Mills, urging her to run for Senate well before Platner launched his campaign.

“I understand why, in January 2025, she was a recruit we wanted to get,” said one national Democratic operative. “But the minute she started dragging her feet, it’s too important to have someone who didn’t want it. That, and her age, was a recipe for disaster.”

Platner, meanwhile, who launched his bid last summer — two months before Mills — has only seen his momentum grow.

“Democrats really, really like Platner in Maine, but the Republicans fucking love him,” said Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. “If Maine wants an asshole with a Nazi tattoo on his chest, they get him.”