Clash of the Titans in Maine

Janet Mills and Paul LePage are no strangers to political acrimony in a race that is as much about inflation as it is abortion.

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BRUNSWICK, MAINE – On a cloudy and mild Sunday morning, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills stood in front of a gazebo in a small park off Maine Street, where traffic swelled by the last of the weekend leaf peepers sped by. Brunswick is a solid-blue Mid-Coast town, home to Bowdoin College and about 30 minutes north of Portland, Maine’s largest city. Mills came to town to headline the Bowdoin Democrats’ canvassing kickoff, press the flesh, and, yes, take pictures with pouting toddlers.

Before the small group of students and residents left to knock on doors for the governor and state legislative candidates, they listened to Mills tick off how she revived the state health care system after her Republican predecessor Paul LePage left office. She implemented Medicaid expansion by executive order, resuscitated the Maine Center for Disease Control, and rehired dozens of public-health nurses.

“Who doesn’t like public-health nurses?” she wanted to know. “Thank God we had that first year …” Mills got that much out before a slow-moving convoy of bikers roared up and interrupted her flow. The governor swiveled for a look. “My ride,” she said. After engines and the laughter died down, she drove home her key point: “We had that first year to rebuild.”

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Mills spent her first full year in office performing the executive equivalent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation on state government. The state health care system she revitalized played a key role in Maine’s ability to persevere through a global pandemic. During that time, Hawaii emerged as the best-performing health care system in the country; Maine was number two. “I really appreciate [where] she’s taken this state after COVID and the way she’s been able to keep us all safe during that time with her policies,” says junior Eliza Scholten, the Bowdoin Dems communications and finance coordinator.

The Maine governor’s race set up a familiar clash of the titans: Maine’s first woman governor and her Trump-prototype Republican predecessor. Mills and LePage feuded constantly when she was attorney general and he was governor, going mano a mano in the state courts. Today, economy and inflation are top of mind for many Maine voters. But after the Dobbs decision, abortion hovers over everything—and the political toxicity that LePage obviously enjoys has left voters anxious to see Election Day in the rearview mirror.

At the beginning of his term in 2011 and over the course of the next eight years, LePage embraced fiscal austerity. He blocked Medicaid expansion multiple times; went through eight education commissioners; cut programs that provided food stamps, cash assistance to families, along with initiatives that reduced prescription drug costs for seniors; and slashed revenue sharing with cities and towns. And that was just for starters. Like Tom Brady, the former New England Patriots quarterback, LePage lives to call the shots and failed at Florida retirement. Most Mainers had moved on, but he hurried back anyway, eager to muck things up.

DURING HER DOOR-KNOCKING WALKABOUT in the center of Brunswick, state Sen. Mattie Daughtry (D-Brunswick) performed a critical public service. When one voter opened the door to chat with the lawmaker, a small dog took off down the steps, dashing across the quiet street and behind a neighbor’s garage. Daughtry, co-owner of a Brunswick brewery and campaigning for re-election, jogged across the street into the backyard, and emerged with the dog. When the conversation got back to the election, one of the dog’s owners admitted to Daughtry that they were tired of negative politics.

First elected a decade ago at age 25 during Paul LePage’s first term, Daughtry lamented his education record and his record-breaking vetoes, the most of any governor since 1917. She also knows a thing or two about LePage’s negativity. “You know, I’ve seen him literally physically slam the door in people’s faces, unwilling to work sometimes even with his own party,” says Daughtry.

When the mask slips off the kinder, gentler facade of LePage 2.0, there is the same old cantankerous bluster that could heat Maine homes if scientists could figure out a way to harness the relentless negativity. During the first four Mills-LePage debates (with one to go on November 3), the acrimony between the two 74-year-olds has been on full display. LePage has been increasingly hostile, calling the governor “Janet” and smirking and making faces during her answers. A low-key and evenhanded Mills calls him “Mr. LePage” or “my predecessor.” (A little-known independent candidate, Sam Hunkler, a semi-retired doctor, is also on the ballot.)

In last Thursday’s debate, LePage declared that inflation is the most important issue facing the state. (For Mills, it was leadership.) Inflation “started here in Maine and it crept down to Washington,” he asserted. LePage likes to focus on inflation even though a governor can do little about it, because changing the subject leaves the door open for contentious issues like abortion, a key issue for young people, some of Maine’s most engaged voters, and one where the former governor has a surprising amount of trouble articulating a coherent stance.

Unemployment is at 3.3 percent, its lowest point since the beginning of the pandemic. Maine has one of the oldest populations in the country, and the pandemic persuaded workers nearing retirement to be done with the daily grind. The workers who remain have fled low-wage jobs with unreliable schedules. Small businesses that employ more than half of the Maine workforce have been hit hard, especially in the critical tourism industry. Hospitals in rural areas, often the largest employers, also have had trouble finding qualified people.

Presidents may have tools to beat back inflation, but governors have to get creative. Mills points out that she cannot do anything about avian flu, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, China’s factory shutdowns, or OPEC’s refusal to increase production, but she did follow through on sending out $850 relief checks this summer, totaling about $730 million, thanks to the $1.2 billion state budget surplus. LePage has slammed the checks as a “gimmick” that would increase inflation, ignoring the fact that Republican state senators first proposed the idea.

At last Thursday’s News Center Maine/Maine State Chamber of Commerce debate, the moderator asked if the candidates had received and cashed a relief check. LePage did; Mills did not.

Home heating costs (primarily from oil) are a prime conversation starter in a state where households spend between $4 billion and $5 billion to fend off reliably frigid winter temperatures. Mills has pushed for new emergency funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), and offered credits to small businesses for electricity costs as well as heat pump rebates and incentives.

Mills told the Prospect that she plans to “sit down and draft some emergency legislation to address the immediate issue of people staying warm this winter” when the new legislature convenes in December. LePage has proposed capping home heating oil prices and suspending gas and diesel taxes. He has also proposed eliminating the state income tax as an inflation-fighting measure, pointing to neighboring New Hampshire as a model—but neglecting to mention that as a consequence of ditching that tax, the Granite State has the fourth-highest property tax rate in the country. (How giving residents a one-time cash rebate will increase inflation, but cutting taxes by a much larger amount won’t, is a mystery known only to LePage.)

LePage continues to wage his own personal disinformation campaign, declaring that the state has a grocery tax (it does not) and accusing Mills of planning a gas tax hike. (She is a longtime opponent of gas tax hikes and has not raised any taxes during her first term.)

“They have nothing else to talk about,” says Mills. “Nothing positive, no plan, no benefits to the people of Maine. Simply lying.”

IN NEW ENGLAND, FALL DECORATING is a to-the-nth-degree exercise. Displays of skeletons, carved pumpkins, many pots of chrysanthemums, fake gravestones, and witches crashing into trees are everywhere. Gray, a rural suburb of Portland, is no exception. The town is the kind of place where large immaculate colonial homes sit with impeccable landscaping on wide tree-lined roads, a few minutes’ drive from repair-challenged ranch houses that sit at the end of unpaved driveways.

About 20 people met up in Gray the day before the Mills appearance for a Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund PAC canvassing event. With roughly equal numbers of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, Gray is considered a “flippable” town.

One canvassing team heard out a straight-ticket Democratic voter corralling pets in the front yard, who hopes for a Janet Mills victory but is worried about the outcome of the governor’s race. Peering from behind a mostly closed front door, another voter supports abortion if the life of the mother is at stake or if the child was in danger of having serious birth defects and questionable life expectancy, and adds that women should have all the same rights that men do.

Yet some voters harbor a common misperception that, because abortion is legal in Maine, future access is guaranteed. A governor like LePage, backed by an anti-abortion majority in the legislature, could change the law that now protects “a woman’s exercise of her private decision to terminate a pregnancy before viability.”

“They feel like they are in a safe state because we’ve had a governor who has protected abortion access for the time that she has been in office,” says Katie McClelland, a public affairs organizer for the Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund PAC. “They don’t realize that it is not codified in our constitution.”

In July, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey announced plans to study and issue a determination on whether the Maine Constitution protects the right to abortion. The state constitution does not explicitly mention abortion; however, an abortion note in a 2013 case may provide the necessary protections. If it does not, Mills plans to propose a constitutional amendment to provide them.

As governor, LePage opened up the far-right playbook, slashing family-planning programs and reproductive health services to low-income people. He went to pro-life rallies to declare that “we should not have abortion.” When asked if access to abortion should be restricted, he checked “yes” on a candidate questionnaire offered by the Christian Civic League, an anti-abortion group.

Claiming that Mills “has no policies,” LePage said that he did not need to prepare for his first televised debate, a serious mistake that has plagued him ever since. When he tried to get ahead of a question about fetal viability, he engaged in an excruciating series of verbal contortions and failed to take a definitive stance, admitting only that he “believed in the viability.” He finally said that he would veto a 15-week abortion ban proposal, if one came to his desk. Last week, he claimed he was fine with state funding for abortions while also saying again that he would not change Maine law.

After the Dobbs decision, Gov. Mills signed an executive order to insulate Maine from probes by states with the tightest abortion restrictions. It prohibits state agencies from cooperating with states that try to investigate or prosecute people, providers, or organizations; prevents extradition attempts against abortion seekers and providers; and orders a review of abortion-related laws to remove remaining barriers.

Mills might have nothing to worry about with an opponent who clearly has trouble making a credible case for a comeback. But Democrats have misjudged LePage before, and this being 2022, the word on Maine Street is that the race is much closer than the latest poll (showing a ten-percentage point spread) might suggest. Asked about the economy/abortion dichotomy, Mills leaned into her reproductive rights record: “It’s a significant contrast,” she told the Prospect. “People need to be thinking about that all the time.” Then she launched into a detailed discussion about heating homes and busineses. Winter is coming.

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