Dan Shea is the Marson-Moller-McNulty Professor of Government at Colby College and a selectman for the town of Mount Vernon. All views are the writer’s own.

Maine politics just took a punch to the gut.

Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, faces an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies. Whatever happens between now and the July 13 withdrawal deadline — whether he stays or the party names a replacement — Maine Democrats face a decision about what comes next.

As someone who studies campaigns for a living and is a local elected official, I’d argue that decision is bigger than picking a name. It’s about picking an argument.

Call it a reset. And it’s worth thinking through what a reset would actually sound like — not as advocacy, but as analysis. Because Maine voters, whatever their party, are telling pollsters and anyone else who will listen the same things.

They’re worried about housing costs that have pushed young families out of the towns they grew up in. Property tax bills that climb while paychecks don’t. Rural hospitals cutting services or closing outright, leaving people to drive an hour for a birth or an emergency. Electricity rates among the highest in the nation. A lobster industry squeezed between regulation and warming waters. An overdose crisis that has touched nearly every family in every county. A workforce aging faster than almost any state’s, with too few young people staying to replace it.

And they’re angry. But Maine anger is a particular thing, and candidates who misread it lose. It isn’t the performative rage of cable news. Mainers don’t want a brawl; they want somebody to fix the furnace. This is a state that prides itself on pragmatism and honesty — on judging people by their work rather than their tribe. Any campaign strategy has to start there.

So what would a smart challenge to Sen. Susan Collins look like?

Here’s what it wouldn’t look like: calling her corrupt or dishonest. Mainers have heard 30 years of attacks on Collins’ character, and they have rejected them every single time — because those attacks insult the voters who backed her.

Collins’ seniority is real. Her Senate Appropriations Committee chairmanship is real. Anyone who pretends those things don’t matter to Bath Iron Works, rural health funding or to small fire stations across the state isn’t being straight with voters, and Mainers can smell that from a county away. Her care for Maine is genuine, and voters on both sides of the aisle know it.

But that doesn’t mean she’s safe. The argument that could actually work is gentler and, for that reason, more dangerous. It sounds something like this: She’s Susan — and we know her well. She has served this state honorably for 30 years. But 30 years is 30 years. Every problem on the list above got worse on her watch. In the moments that mattered most, she veered too close to Donald Trump and the politics he represents, and her trademark concern too often arrived after the vote was cast.

It’s not that Collins has failed Maine. It’s that Maine’s problems need fresh eyes, new ideas, new modes of thinking — and after three decades, no one has fresh eyes.

Notice what that framing does. It thanks the Collins voter instead of shaming her. It says: you were right about Susan then, and you’re right about wanting a change now. That’s persuasion — the patient work of giving a neighbor permission to reconsider — and it’s a discipline both parties have largely abandoned in favor of inflaming their own bases.

Campaigns can win by mobilizing their base or by persuading the unsure. For a generation, both parties have chosen the first because it’s easier. Maine is the place to choose the second.

To be fair, Collins has a counter-move, and it’s a strong one: her occasional breaks with Trump are exactly the independence Mainers say they want, and trading an Appropriations chair for a freshman senator is a concrete loss no slogan can paper over. If her campaign is smart, that’s the race she’ll run. Which means the challenger’s case can’t rest on biography alone; it has to be won on the substance — housing discussed the way a carpenter would, healthcare the way a nurse in Calais would, energy costs the way anyone opening a January CMP bill would.

Honestly, it might be won by keeping the very theme that propelled Platner’s candidacy — affordability, and taking on concentrated economic power — because whatever voters decide about the messenger, more than 70% of primary voters just endorsed the message.

But the biggest opportunity in this race may have nothing to do with either candidate. Consider what American politics looks like beyond our borders. Members of Congress need security details to hold town halls. School board meetings end in shouting matches and threats. Families skip holidays rather than sit across the table from a relative who voted the other way. Political violence, once unthinkable, has become a grim recurring headline.

Whole media ecosystems now exist to convince Americans that their fellow citizens are not opponents to be persuaded but enemies to be destroyed. Hate has become a business model, and nastiness a career path. Most Americans say they’re exhausted by it — and nobody in either party seems able to turn it off.

Maine can. That’s what a real reset would remind us: we are different here, and not by accident. This is a state where the hunter and the environmentalist share the same woods, where the lobsterman and the professor share the same town meeting, where you wave to the truck with the other candidate’s bumper sticker because it belongs to the guy who plows your driveway.

We disagree plenty — about wind power, about lobster regulations, about taxes — but we’ve mostly kept hold of something the rest of the country is losing: the conviction that the person across the argument is still a neighbor. A campaign that runs on that conviction, and means it, wouldn’t just win an election. It would show the rest of the country what an exit from the ugliness looks like — and voters here are hungry for exactly that.

That’s the reset. Maine could use one. So, frankly, could the country — and it would be very like Maine to go first.