Planned Parenthood backs Platner, blasts Collins over Kavanaugh vote

Planned Parenthood Action Fund put its weight behind Graham Platner in Portland, sharpening a fight over whether Susan Collins can still claim a post-Roe mantle in Maine. The endorsement came with Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Alexis McGill Johnson standing beside Platner, and it put Collins’s 2018 vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh back at the center of a race that could decide whether abortion-rights groups are still trying to pressure the Republican senator or now trying to replace her outright.

Collins has faced that criticism before, but the stakes have grown since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade and let states restrict abortion access. Collins told local reporters on June 12 that she still believes she cast the right vote for Kavanaugh, a position she has repeated in interviews. Platner, the Democratic nominee, said he would not forgive Collins for the confirmation and argued that abortion rights should be written into federal law rather than left to the views of one justice.

Johnson said the post-Dobbs landscape has already reshaped access across the country, with more than 20 states fully or partially banning abortion rights. That reality is driving the political argument in Maine, where Democrats are again making abortion a central line of attack. The party is airing new ads that feature Collins’s own recent remarks that she does not regret confirming Kavanaugh, and it planned a news conference with reproductive rights advocates around the four-year anniversary of Dobbs.

The endorsement also reflects how far Collins has moved from the version of Maine politics that once let a Republican senator survive by projecting moderation on divisive social issues. First elected in 1996, Collins is seeking a sixth term after winning reelection in 2020 by roughly nine percentage points over Democrat Sara Gideon, even as abortion and Kavanaugh were already major campaign issues. This time, the attack is more direct: not just that Collins made a bad vote, but that her vote helped produce the legal upheaval now defining the national abortion debate.

Planned Parenthood is not the only Democratic-aligned group still calibrating its next move. Reproductive Freedom for All had not immediately endorsed Platner after his primary win, and EMILY's List did not comment on the record in the coverage cited. But the direction is clear in Maine: abortion-rights leaders are no longer only asking Collins to move. They are helping build the case that her era of political survival may be ending.