Maine Gov. Janet Mills launched a statewide negative ad this week targeting Graham Platner, her rival for the Democratic Senate nomination, dredging up deleted Reddit comments and a tattoo controversy as the party's internal battle for the right to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins turns increasingly bitter.

The ad, running on broadcast and cable TV and streaming platforms, features four women reacting to Platner's past online comments. An actor reads snippets of those comments aloud while the women call them "a horrible thing to say," "disgusting," and "disqualifying." A narrator closes with the line: "The closer you look, the worse it gets."

Mills' campaign says it is spending six figures on the buy, Fox News reported. The primary is less than three months away.

What the ad actually targets

The centerpiece of the attack is a 2013 Reddit comment, since deleted, in which Platner wrote that people concerned about rape should not "get so f---ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don't mean to." The ad also references a skull and crossbones tattoo Platner says he got in 2007 while drinking with fellow Marines stationed in Croatia. He has said he later covered it up after learning it resembled a Nazi symbol.

None of this is new. The Reddit posts made headlines last fall, soon after the 41-year-old Marine and Army veteran and oyster farmer launched his Senate campaign. He apologized in a video that went viral.

"For those of you who have read these things and been offended, have read these things and seen someone that you don't recognize, I am deeply sorry."

That video, and the story behind it, clearly didn't end his campaign. If anything, Platner has campaigned in front of large and energetic crowds since jumping into the race. He holds a large lead over Mills in recent polls.

A 78-year-old governor versus a populist insurgency

That polling gap explains the timing. Mills, the 78-year-old two-term governor and former Maine attorney general, has the tacit support of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Platner has the backing of progressive champion Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and is being advised by Morris Katz, a top consultant last year on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's historic campaign.

This is a familiar pattern in Democratic primaries: the establishment candidate, backed by Washington leadership, trying to kneecap the insurgent before the base can consolidate around him. Mills isn't running against Platner's policy positions in this ad. She's running against his internet history. That's a tell.

Platner's campaign manager, Ben Chin, framed it exactly that way:

"This is nothing more than a desperate attempt for relevance from the governor, who is trailing an oyster farmer in every recent poll."

Chin went further, calling the ad a symptom of a broken political culture:

"It's why people hate politics and why not enough real people run for office: DC insiders who are so obsessed with their own power and threatened by someone who is building an actual movement of working people, that they launch a barrage of attacks to try to tear Graham down."

He added that "Mainers know that Graham should not be defined by the worst thing he said on the internet over a decade ago."

What conservatives should actually watch

For conservatives, this race matters for one reason: Susan Collins. The Republican senator is seeking a sixth six-year term, and Democrats view this seat as a must-win in their fight against President Donald Trump's second-term agenda. Whoever emerges from this primary will be Collins' opponent, and the uglier the Democratic fight gets, the better it is for her.

Consider what's happening here. The Democratic establishment's preferred candidate is a two-term governor who can't lead in her own state's primary polls. The insurgent is a Sanders-backed populist with a consultant fresh off electing a far-left mayor in New York City. Mills is now burning six figures not to make the case for herself, but to make the case against him.

That's not a party unified for a general election. That's a party trying to decide whether its future belongs to Chuck Schumer or Bernie Sanders, and discovering that neither faction particularly likes the other.

The Reddit comments and the tattoo are legitimate questions for Democratic primary voters to sort out. But what's more revealing is the structural dynamic: Mills can't win on enthusiasm, so she's trying to win on opposition research. Platner can't escape his own digital footprint, so he's trying to win on momentum and grievance against the machine.

Both of those strategies leave marks. And Collins, who doesn't have to spend a dime while her opponents bloody each other, is the only candidate in this race whose path gets cleaner by the day.

Democrats wanted this seat badly enough to recruit a sitting governor. Now that governor is trailing an oyster farmer and spending six figures to remind voters he once posted something ugly on Reddit. Maine's Democratic primary isn't a launching pad. It's a demolition derby.