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I can only imagine the glee in Republican circles nationwide as Democrats in Maine throw away their best shot at winning a GOP-controlled U.S. Senate seat.

Unless something weird happens during Tuesday’s primary, Graham Platner will be his party’s choice to take on five-term Sen. Susan Collins in the November general election.

Thanks to his growing list of problematic choices in the past, Platner has already lost some of the Democratic and left-leaning voters needed to have any chance of ousting Collins.

Until they learned about him sending sexually explicit messages to women while married, most Platner skeptics were willing to take a chance on him. And now?

“I can’t vote for a candidate I don’t trust or respect,” one woman wrote to me. “I would be ashamed to have him as my senator.”

Stephanie Brock, another progressive Mainer, laid out her take on events and concluded “I am done being told to ignore what I can clearly see. Maine is not a supporting character in Graham Platner’s reinvention story.”

Politics, though, is a long game. So I wouldn’t bet on Collins, at least not yet, in part because she isn’t trying too hard to look like a moderate anymore. Collins has been playing footsie with the MAGA cheerleading website the Maine Wire and continues to fall in line with President Trump’s wishes nearly every time.

Just this week, Collins voted with her GOP colleagues for a 34-year-old lawyer named Katie Lane to serve a lifetime appointment as a federal judge in Montana despite her anti-abortion record and the American Bar Association calling her “not qualified.” 

In the last seven decades, the ABA has rated just 1% of federal judicial nominees so poorly. Lane, senior counsel to the Republican National Committee, hasn’t even had a law degree for a decade and has never tried a case as a lead counsel.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said that picking her for the federal bench was “like hiring an MLB umpire who’s never even worked a Little League game.”

In short, despite almost 30 years in office, Collins can’t bring herself to stand on her own two feet and challenge a president who constantly violates our nation’s laws and norms. It’s hard to believe she’s going to change after all this time.

I wish Maine’s Senate race hadn’t shaped up as it has. Starting out, I thought Gov. Janet Mills was too old for a first-term senator. Be that as it may, at least we know exactly who Mills is and what she stands for.

Because Mills remains on the ballot, I can pick her or maybe the earnest, decent David Costello first in ranked-choice voting and the other of the pair second, formally registering my own discontent with the inexperienced Platner.

Whatever I do, though, Platner is almost certainly going to be the Democratic candidate to take on Collins.

I hope but don’t expect that the many Democrats who are convinced Platner is a good choice are right about him. Just as I wish Collins would break free from MAGA’s grip and become a leader who can help guide her party away from the nuttiness of President Trump.

Politics usually offers disappointment and dashes dreams. Will the outcome here be any different? Hey, you never know.