Siobhán Brett is the opinion editor at the Maine Trust for Local News.

I recently listened to a fantastic interview with Chris Christie.

Over the course of a couple of hours on The Fifth Column podcast, the former governor of New Jersey and one-time U.S. presidential candidate cantered merrily over a lot of ground. It helps for a political figure to occupy “former,” I find. It tends to make the exchanges better, sharper, more entertaining.

Among several choice anecdotes, one stands out. An energized Christie recalled the particular rigor of “debate prep” with President Trump in 2016 and again in 2020.

Christie was selected to play Hillary Clinton in 2016 (“I want you to go home tonight, when you go to bed, close your eyes and picture me as Hillary Clinton and see if you can go to sleep,” he said, clarifying that he did not feel the need to wear a wig) and Joe Biden in 2020.

“I would get in character and soup them up by a multiple of four or five,” Christie recalled with no shortage of glee, “and really go after him. And [Trump] liked it, because it got him prepared — you could argue overprepared — for what he was going to confront on the stage.”

Last Thursday night in Maine, Graham Platner, Janet Mills and David Costello (not, as evinced in a recent op-ed, backing down) were due to have their first debate. As soon as Mills dropped out, Platner withdrew from debating. The anticipated schedule of events was undone.

Locally, use of the term “presumptive nominee” has shot up. Like the new shape of the Democratic primary race or loathe it, I’d like to think that easy consensus can be reached on the benefit of a live debate — and the poorer this contest and these contestants are without it.

Which leads me to the following proposal: Gov. Janet Mills should make herself available to debate Graham Platner and David Costello. Ding, ding, ding.

Unorthodox? It would be. Unproductive? I cannot see how. 

In Mills, we have an old, deft hand and a formidable knowledge of both Maine and the workings of government. The governor is widely appreciated for scrappiness and scrapping. She’s been preparing to debate, surely. And, tantalizingly, she has nothing to lose now.

As voters continue straining to distinguish between what Platner has done and what he professes to be committed to doing, getting him under lights seems imperative. 

In Costello’s case, a run for U.S. Senate is immediately less interesting without the chance to debate. Anybody in his position deserves an opportunity to register with voters; those voters deserve an opportunity to see what an ambitious political hopeful has got.

Several of our readers have written urging Mills to drop everything and endorse Platner, something the governor has been reluctant to do. What would be far more valuable, would afford the Maine voter more respect than a rote endorsement? A rigorous, sportsmanly stress test. 

Pressing ahead with debate would be good for the candidates, good for the public and good for the race.

I began socializing my left-field idea last week and was interested to find nobody ready to dismiss it. Over the weekend, however, a number of letters to the editor started interfering with the vision. 

These writers announced their intention to vote for Mills all the same (“Her supporters can return the favor by stepping up to the ranked choice voting plate and still save the game for her,” wrote one, however improbably; “I’m voting for Janet Mills, who didn’t drop out but suspended her race” was the somewhat desperate distinction of another).

Any three-way primary debate would, it seems, need to go to pains to impress upon the public that Mills is no longer in the running. As I sat with this pesky messaging challenge, I started to see it as an opportunity. My mock trial could serve yet another purpose: artfully produced, it could make the new reality of the primary ballot unambiguous.

National news would be all but guaranteed to cover this inventive, novel debate-as-exercise. Broadcast ratings (I’m sorry, I live under Trump) would be robust.

Why wring our hands about democratic participation when we can still have fun with it, when, calling on various strengths and lateral thinking, we can turn it to our collective advantage?

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