Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills dances at her election night party, Tuesday, November 8, 2022, in Portland, Maine. Mills defeated Republican Paul LePage and independent Sam Hunkler.
The day after Gov. Janet Mills’s decisive re-election victory, more than a few commenters on Maine-centric sites expressed the hope that former Republican Gov. Paul LePage packs up his bruised snowbird ego and slinks back to the ideologically more hospitable climes of Ron DeSantis’s Florida.
That departure would be a welcome development for many Mainers eager to see the back of him. Mills now settles down in Augusta for a second term with a granite-made mandate after beating LePage 56 percent to 43 percent in a race called shortly before midnight on Tuesday. As one might expect in polarized America, LePage registered his most embarrassing numbers in southern Maine’s prosperous, urbanized communities. Mills captured the Democratic bastion of Portland by 67 percentage points, 83 percent to 16 percent, and throttled him in suburbs like South Portland and Westbrook. She narrowly won in Gray, a swingy, rural Portland suburb, and delivered another beatdown in Brunswick, a Democratic college town.
LePage suffered the added indignity of being repudiated by Waterville, the city where he once served as mayor, and Lewiston, where he grew up. He did very well in the more conservative rural reaches of northern Maine and in tinier towns.
It is difficult to overstate the widespread relief that greeted the win by a decent politician with old-school, good-government cred. Mills’s empathy and professionalism, plus her four years of substantive accomplishments—her health care sector rebuild, her pandemic stewardship, and her clear explanations of what a governor can and cannot do to move the needle on inflation—all combined to boost her appeal.
Maine is very much a live-and-let-live place where the bluster that LePage brought back with him raised political temperatures that had cooled down after he left office in 2019. Some voters expressed real fears about the further degradation of American politics if LePage had won a third term and if MAGA politicians had swept Congress. LePage himself seemed to realize that his reputation as a MAGA crazy was seriously out of step with the Maine zeitgeist in 2022. Yet he did nothing to dispel voters’ fears that the degraded political discourse and the cantankerousness that he specialized in would disrupt the state if he got the nod.
Mills’s support for abortion was central to her victory. Like MAGA Republicans and their cocksure ideological compatriots in the male-dominated national punditocracy, LePage misread, underestimated, and dismissed the white-hot wrath of women scorned after the Supreme Court turned abortion into an instrument designed to send states back to the 1600s that Justice Samuel Alito pined for in his majority opinion in Dobbs. LePage never recovered from an abortion question on fetal viability he should have been prepared for in the first of five debates. Abetted by Mills’s pledge to pursue a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion protections, voters’ commitment to reproductive rights did him in. He even conceded that abortion overshadowed his focus on inflation and the wider economy after the contest was called. “I failed to make the message. It’s about abortion, not heating oil.”
LePage conceded that abortion overshadowed his focus on inflation and the wider economy after the contest was called.
Mills is not in a position to coast. Delivering on abortion protections is next up on her agenda, along with a plan to deliver heating oil relief to Mainers this winter, two issues that will be a bit easier to craft with Democratic majorities in the legislature. But lobstermen are mad as hell over right whale protections that they fear will undermine their livelihoods. Environmentalists will keep the pressure on trying to stop a controversial hydropower project that threatens the old-growth forest lands in western Maine—a project that both Mills and LePage have supported. The longer-term challenges of employment shortages and job creation in a state with an aging population are also front and center.
The governor’s victory sets up Maine for a smooth working relationship with Massachusetts, the economic engine of New England (and as such, the region’s often despised bigfoot). Mills told the Prospect last month that she looked forward to serving with Maura Healey, now governor-elect of Massachusetts, the first lesbian governor in the country, and the second woman governor in the region, describing her as “a good friend.” Both women launched their statewide careers as attorneys general and are the first women to serve as governors of their respective states.
In the region’s congressional races, Democratic women did well. Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree trounced her Republican challenger Ed Thelander, who professed to be “neither goofy right or goofy left.” Vermont elected its first female and LGBTQ member of Congress, Becca Balint. And New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan pummeled Trump-backed Republican Don Bolduc despite late-in-the race concerns about a narrowing contest.
