Alex Smith, from Holden, attended Brewer High School and Hampshire College, and earned a law degree from Northeastern University and a master’s degree in public health from Tufts. He has worked for UNHCR, UN Women and the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He lives in London.

To win the progressive vote and have any chance of beating Susan Collins, Democratic candidates must speak with conviction and moral clarity about the defining human rights violations of our time: Israel’s genocide, apartheid, systemic torture, occupation and other crimes against Palestinians. Those who don’t need not apply.

I grew up on Holbrook Pond off Route 1A near Bangor. Today, I’m a lawyer and global health specialist with more than 25 years of experience. In 2024, I resigned from my senior advisor role with USAID in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policies.

Since then, I’ve joined a legal team investigating Israel’s crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and have continued my advocacy through research, media appearances (e.g., CNN ,  Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera Arabic, AJ+  and TRT World ), lecturing and publishing with  Cambridge University (UK), DAWN and other universities and think tanks.

I’ve traveled to the West Bank twice in the last year, investigating ongoing sexual violence and other human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank and coordinating legal research with human rights organizations, lawyers and survivors of torture.

With the rise and fall of the Platner campaign, I was encouraged to see my fellow Mainers elevating human rights in Palestine to a major concern and not a fringe issue. This concern mirrors broader national trends.

Among voters who supported Joe Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, the single most important issue was ending Israel’s violence in Gaza (29% ), surpassing even inflation and the economy (24%), Medicare and Social Security (12%) and immigration (11%). Nationwide, a majority of Democrats have correctly identified that Israel is committing genocide, with 83% supporting a permanent stop to the killing and 75% opposing U.S. military aid to Israel (compared to just 18% in favor).

Taking a moral stand is clearly popular with Democratic voters, as we’ve seen in New York and Colorado, where voters treated opposition to Israeli crimes like a basic moral litmus test. The saying goes: “If you won’t stand against genocide, why would I trust you to stand up for universal healthcare?”

Condemnation of Israel’s crimes comfortably puts candidates on the right side of history and in good company with the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Save the Children, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the International Court of Justice, Nick Kristof and Israeli genocide scholars and organizations, including Omar Bartov, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel .

With voters showing such moral clarity and focus on this issue, it is striking that so few candidates have spoken clearly about it. To date, Jordan Wood , Shenna Bellows and Nirav Shah have publicly stated that they believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and have called for ending U.S. support for Israel’s military campaign.

The remaining potential Democratic nominees, including Troy Jackson, Dan Kleban, Paige Loud, David Costello and Andrea LaFlamme, have either taken more limited positions or have not publicly condemned what many international organizations, legal experts and human rights groups have described as genocide, nor have they called for ending U.S. arms transfers to Israel.

When Gov. Janet Mills was asked about the Gaza genocide, she gave an incoherent answer, deflecting to other humanitarian crises, listing Sudan, Somalia and the Rwandan genocide, which was over 30 years ago. Instead of naming specific actions to stop genocide and other crimes, she said vaguely, “There’s a lot we have to be concerned about.” She went on to lose the primary battle. That kind of wavering on an issue as serious as genocide won’t cut it.

Graham Platner, who openly opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank, received more than 150,000 votes, the highest total ever won by a Democratic U.S. Senate primary candidate in Maine. Those voters weren’t simply looking for another Democrat. They wanted someone willing to challenge corruption and the bipartisan abandonment of principle on important issues, including Gaza.

The last thing voters want is more invertebrates in Congress. Anyone not taking a moral stand should therefore stand aside.

“Do we accept the idea that innocent, loving partners and loving and devoted fathers of 3-year-olds can be collateral damage to this government’s policies? Do we agree that this is just an acceptable cost of doing business?” Gideon said. “We truly believe that people need to understand what the real costs are.”

“I want to be clear about something. Johan Sebastián, before he was shot to death, had been accused of committing no crime. He was in this country lawfully, and he was following a lawful process that’s prescribed by our federal government,” the attorney said, adding that Durán had been issued a work permit and a Social Security number under the Trump administration.

ICE has said it was conducting “targeted surveillance on the last known address of an illegal alien with a final order of removal” around 7 a.m. Monday, an agency spokesperson said.

“The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon,” the ICE spokesperson said.

Durán, who was born and raised in Bucaramanga, Colombia, had come to the U.S. in 2023 to seek better opportunities for him and his family, relatives said.

A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security told NBC News in an email that Durán “illegally entered the United States” through the southern border nearly three years ago “and was released into the country under the Biden Administration.”

Entering the U.S. without proper authorization is a misdemeanor, but living in the country without legal permission is a civil violation and not a criminal offense.

At work, and everywhere he went, Durán carried an infectious joy, Rojas said.

As a father, he was devoted. Aside from working cleaning and delivery jobs to provide for his family, he took their daughter, Dulce — or “gordita” (chubby) as he lovingly called her — to the park every afternoon, Rojas said.

Durán always indulged his little girl whenever she had a craving for nuggets and fries, Rojas said, adding he would often marvel in tears every time he realized his daughter “was getting bigger.”

Rojas recalled a conversation she had with Durán a few months ago, wondering who their little girl would grow up to be. Durán said he would have a hard time sending off his daughter to school for the first time, she said.

Dulce now asks for her father every night, Rojas said, breaking down in tears. “And I don’t have the strength to tell her that dad isn’t coming, that she can’t give him a hug and tell him ‘I love you.’”

Gideon said that “there will come a time when those responsible for Johan Sebastián’s needless death will have to answer for what they did. But today is not that day. … Today is about Johan Sebastián and who he was as a person.”

Ralph Benko served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House and worked closely with the George W. Bush administration as a contractor in its domestic policy initiative to find and rescue human trafficking victims. He lives in Maryland.

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation” was, for about a century, a political maxim. Recently, the political junkies in the capital were obsessing about the Platner vs. Collins race.

Wrong race!

Understandable, for those card-carrying members of the Columnist Party. The U.S. Senate majority, a very big deal, may hinge on that race. And that race was spiced up by the salacious and unseemly stories about the winner of the Democratic primary.

With that said, hey, junkies? Platner vs. Collins always was the wrong race to put on the marquee of your political theater. The real bellwether race  is the governor’s contest between Bobby Charles and Hannah Pingree.

The political dynamics that have emerged or are emerging is less Republican vs. Democrat and more establishment insiders (Hannah Pingree, former speaker of the Maine House, whose family name has been a prominent fixture in Maine politics for over 30 years) vs. popular insurgents (Bobby Charles, on his first electoral foray).

Charles is fashioning his affordability program via a classic center-right Republican free market platform. Pingree is fashioning her affordability solution via a classic center-left Democratic public works and pro-regulatory platform.

Full disclosure, as chairman of the 190,000-Facebook follower Capitalist League, I lean center-right. My own preferences revealed, there is more to this race than programmatic preferences.

The Charles vs. Pingree race is the perfect microcosm of the national political culture.

I was a lifelong Democrat until the sensible Democratic Party left me for left field. And there they go again. The progressive Mills-Pingree-Platner party ghosts the FDR/JFK/Bill Clinton Democrats. 

Bobby Charles — who worked in the Reagan White House and later directly for Colin Powell —  is a modern Reaganesque figure, aligning himself with the sensible Maine population, including independents and traditional Democrats, offering common-sense policies.

Charles is running on the Republican line. Yet he has the kind of “man of the people” values that FDR embodied and Middle America embodies. 

Yes, there is a lot of crazy going on in the GOP now. Charles, however, embodies classical Republican radical pragmatism. He’s not an ideologue, and is exempt from the fanaticism that so plagues our politics today. Charles is neither a zealot nor a moderate. He’s simply … capable.

Meanwhile the Democrats now, wholesale, are nominating “democratic socialists.” Wait, what? History has repeatedly shown that socialism doesn’t work, locally or nationally. 

The further left you move, the more it never works. Remember Jimmy Carter’s misery index? (That’s what forced me out of my once beloved Democratic Party.) 

Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. Let’s do sane for a change.

Hannah Pingree presents as an honorable and capable public servant. That said, she will, if elected, be badly constrained by the romantic-but-dysfunctional emerging narrative of her party, now in thrall to its fanatical base, listing so far to portside that it is about to capsize the ship of state.

Maine is one of the states most guided by common sense. Its voters will embrace the candidate with a proven agenda for affordability and security rather than a member of the party who is admittedly charming but impractically romantic (Bernie, AOC, Zohran, etc).

While the nation scratched its head at Maine’s oddly out of sync “oyster farmer” there was, and is, a more meaningful race afoot. Many who have known Bobby Charles for decades and watched him serve his country unflinchingly think he, considered a dark horse, is the odds-on favorite to pull an upset and bring common sense and real management skills to Maine’s governance.

So, political junkies? Now that Platner vs. Collins has ended, please turn your attention to the true marquee Maine race, Charles vs. Pingree. For as Maine goes, so goes the nation.