Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
Former Gov. Paul LePage leaves a rally against the executive orders by Gov. Janet Mills to keep some Maine businesses closed to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, May 16, 2020, in Augusta, Maine. LePage announced this week that he intends to run for a third term.
A year or so in Florida’s fantasyland of low taxes and sunshine cannot compete with the memories of past glories and expectations of future success. For Paul LePage, the gravitational pull of spending the 2022 midterm election season trying to knock Gov. Janet Mills out of the Augusta orbit is too tempting to spend in snowbird retirement. The 72-year-old former governor got back in the political game Monday, announcing his candidacy for a third term.
LePage has been sniping at Mills, a Democrat, since she was elected in 2018, so the long-expected announcement prompted replays of LePage’s back catalog of greatest hits, the racist comments and petty insults lobbed at political enemies, each one more outrageous than the last—and most of them followed by pro forma mea culpas before the next broadside.
The Maine constitution stipulates that a governor can serve for an unlimited number of terms, though they can’t serve more than two successively. LePage vowed to run against Mills before his 2018 exit. Mills is expected to pursue a second term, though she has yet to declare her intentions. LePage will find that taking on Mills won’t be easy.
LePage spent the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in familiar territory criticizing the first female governor’s decision-making as “authoritarian,” “insane,” and “terrible”—gaslighting at its finest. Those weren’t characterizations that most Mainers shared. A Digital Research, Inc., March and April poll of nearly 800 voters found that Mainers’ favorable perceptions of Mills’s stewardship have fueled her high approval ratings, 57 percent in late spring (down from 62 percent last fall). Mills emerged as the most popular Maine politician in the survey, which also measured public approval of the Maine congressional delegation and the state legislature.
Maine is a coronavirus success story: 72.5 percent of the adult population 18 and over is fully vaccinated, the fifth-highest percentage in the country; nearly 80 percent have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Like many of the Northeastern states prior to the reopening, compliance with mask mandates has been strong and did not devolve into the bizarre tussles seen in other regions of the country
There are regional disparities in vaccination rates that mirror Maine’s political map, which is divided between conservative rural strongholds in northern Maine that have gone for LePage and more liberal communities along the southern coast that went for Mills. Southern Maine’s Cumberland County, which includes Portland and is a Democratic stronghold, has the highest vaccination rate in the state at 80 percent. In central Maine, Somerset County has the lowest rate, 53 percent. Mills set up a mobile vaccination program to reach rural areas and tried to cajole more Mainers into getting shots with the “Don’t Miss Your Shot: Vaccinationland Sweepstakes.” (One woman ended up with $900,000.)
Mills has spent much of her term picking up the pieces after LePage’s disastrous assault on Maine’s health safety net. LePage purged the state Department of Health and Human Services of committed and well-regarded health care professionals and installed lobbyists and other cronies who proceeded to throw both children and adults off existing programs. LePage ignored the successful ballot measure that would have expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
Health care was the top issue in the 2018 governor’s race, and Mills’s first executive order, signed on her first day in office, implemented Medicaid expansion that voters had approved in November 2017. She also ditched LePage’s plan to require employment as a condition of receiving that aid and hired Jeanne Lambrew, a former Obama administration health care official, to run the state’s demoralized Department of Health and Human Services.
The trouble for LePage is that Mills, who was Maine’s attorney general when he was governor, has an excellent track record of dealing with his tantrums and litigious inclinations. LePage sued her office when she refused to represent the governor in cases involving Trump’s executive order banning immigration from a handful of Muslim countries. He lost. Mills threatened to sue the governor to force him to release funding to run her office that he had withheld because he didn’t approve of the office’s invoicing methods.
LePage’s Monday statement—he did not make a public appearance—featured this unsurprising nugget: “We simply cannot continue to look to Washington, D.C. for bailouts, subsidies, or leadership,” a commentary on Maine’s receipt of $1 billion in CARES Act funds and $4.5 billion from the American Jobs Plan (with $1 billion freed up for allocation at the discretion of Mills and the legislature), an incredible amount of funding for a poor state of 1.3 million people. How the Maine electorate responds to Republican anti-Washington messaging on wasteful government spending during the worst health crisis in American history will be an important indicator of the long-term durability of Trumpism.
The former governor, who has called himself “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” has never wavered in his fidelity to the former president, and after a year of police protests and post-election MAGA insurrections, there is no sign that that bromance has faded. If his 2020 commentary on Mills is any indication, it won’t be long before his trademark incendiary rhetoric surfaces despite his promises of a more measured “LePage 2.0.”
Donald Trump built up a core group of Republican governors—LePage, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, Texas’s Greg Abbott, and Florida’s Ron DeSantis immediately come to mind—that he transformed into faithful foot soldiers in his war on political norms, social programs, and multiculturalism. Yet even among this peer group, LePage is unmatched for his fidelity to Trump and Trumpism, long before the rest of the Republican Party lined up to kiss the Donald’s ring. Half a decade before Trump even declared his candidacy in 2015, LePage was an exemplar, tossing red meat to his base that distracted them from his crony takeover of state government. His bluster and the damage that he did became a national embarrassment for a state that cherishes its reputation as a reasonable place. There is no denying that his constant harping on “moochers and petty criminals,” often Black or Latino people (of which there are precious few in Maine) in his tales, appealed to the very whites who most needed the state’s services. His rants somehow made the disappearance of sorely needed health care benefits more acceptable.
The trouble for LePage is that Mills, who was Maine’s attorney general when he was governor, has an excellent track record of dealing with his tantrums and litigious inclinations.
Despite Mills’s popularity, LePage cannot be underestimated. Just as Trump has a stranglehold on the national GOP, the Maine Republican Party is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the former governor. He has embarked on a listening tour around the state and has vowed to keep his head down until the fall.
The bigger problem may be Maine’s electoral scaffolding. A gubernatorial candidate only needs a plurality of the popular vote to win, a feat that LePage accomplished in 2010 and 2014. Former state Sen. Tom Saviello, a Republican from the central Maine town of Wilton, is threatening an independent run to counter Mills’s and LePage’s support for the New England Clean Energy Connect Corridor, a Central Maine Power (CMP) project to build a transmission line through western Maine to funnel Quebec’s hydroelectric power to Massachusetts. Saviello calls it “a bad deal for Maine.”
Mills signed on to the $1 billion CMP deal after securing electricity benefits for Maine customers. Environmentalists and communities along the route are irate, and the controversy promises to be a key issue in 2022. Mills, a centrist, also has stoked progressive discontent for not moving ahead forcefully on issues like tribal sovereignty, paid family leave, and consumer-owned utilities.
Enacted in 2016, ranked-choice voting (RCV) will not necessarily solve the thorny problem posed by the independent candidates who often emerge in statewide races alongside the Democrats and Republicans. RCV applies to the gubernatorial primaries only, not the general election, which makes the LePage-Mills race ripe for an independent who can muck things up. The Cook Political Report rates Maine a “likely ‘D’” in next year’s gubernatorial contest, but anything can happen in the 16 months between now and November 2022.
This post has been updated.
