Maine confounded much of the country when it re-elected controversial Republican governor Paul LePage four years ago, for the wider populace knew only a caricature of the fiery, occasionally vulgar populist conservative.
The term-limited Trump-loving spitfire is still as popular as ever on his way out. It’s a mystery to outsiders, given New England’s deep-blue leanings. Maine senator Susan Collins and representative Bruce Poliquin are the only Republican members of Congress north of New Jersey. But it makes sense to Mainers.
LePage is rhetorically free-wheeling, but predictably so: In his home state, he is trusted and even beloved by his base. So, for that matter, is independent senator Angus King, who served as the state’s governor for two terms of his own, and 10 years later succeeded Republican Olympia Snowe in the Senate, where he caucuses with the Democrats.
“There are reasons the state will vote for Democrats and Republicans that go beyond party,” summed up Brent Littlefield, a senior adviser to LePage and current campaign manager for businessman and Republican primary candidate Shawn Moody. In Maine, “It’s a different kind of populism,” Littlefield said. “Not fiery rhetoric, moreso personal trust that they’ll get the job done—at a deeper level of emotional thoughtful connection that comes together.”
And so the path to replace him, primary candidates realize, requires less a cult of personality than an appeal to the public premised on personal trust.
“In November, Mainers are going to vote for the person they think is best for Maine, regardless of political affiliation. That means it’s anyone’s ballgame right now,” said Garrett Murch, the communications and policy director for the Maine GOP.
Shawn Moody, who started his first business at age 18 when his mother’s illness forced him to find a way to make a living, runs a regional Maine-based chain of auto-body repair shops. His boot-strapping path to public life is not unlike the outgoing governor’s: LePage ran away from home at only 11, was briefly homeless, and caught the attention of benefactors who bestowed on him business sense and encouragement to pursue college and a career. Like LePage, when Moody tells Mainers—increasingly impoverished, struggling with the statewide scourge of addiction, the death of industry and the rise of real estate costs—that he knows what it’s like to have to fend for himself, they can believe him. The parallels pile on: Including Littlefield, his campaign employs four of LePage’s staff, his daughter Lauren LePage among them. Her mother Ann Lepage, Maine’s first lady, endorsed him at last week’s state convention.
Personal trust may indeed matter most in Maine. But a certain amount of baton-passing probably can’t hurt. Which casts the other three Republican primary candidates as underdogs, not unlike Page himself eight years ago. The candidates are Maine’s former human services commissioner Mary Mayhew, the Republican leader in the Maine statehouse Ken Fredette, and the state senate’s majority leader Garrett Mason. Now that LePage has all but hand-picked Shawn Moody to follow in his footsteps, who will the actual insurgent be?
In a state that reputedly favors person over party and substance over personality, it could be Mary Mayhew—who, if elected, would be Maine’s first female governor. She worked for a Democratic congressman just out college, and then as a lobbyist for many years. And despite political connections across the aisle and in party machines from Maine to Florida, she’s something of an underdog compared to Moody. Maine’s only public poll so far shows him with a healthy lead: In a late April poll of 2,192 Maine residents, Moody leads Mayhew with 34 percent to her 19 percent.
But, in the proto-LePagean position of polling behind an early frontrunner (in 2010’s primary the establishment favorite was Steve Abbott, Senator Collins former chief of staff), Mayhew’s energetic personal appeal recalls the fiery lame duck’s remarkable rise eight years ago. So did her remarks—and her reception—at the state convention May 5, where she won a straw poll of 500 Maine delegates, taking 44 percent to Moody’s 28.
“The feedback and the support statewide has been tremendous,” Mayhew told TWS in a phone interview Wednesday. “We had a huge crowd of supporters within the convention.” Public polls, she hastened to add, “have not been reflective in the past, not in 2016. And they were not reflective in 2014, of the support that Governor Paul LePage had.”
LePage, she reminded me, isn’t going to endorse. Indeed, at the convention he urged Mainers only to vote thoughtfully. Of Moody, she said, “He’s proclaiming himself the anointed one, and the liberal media, I suppose, want him to be—because they don’t want a Republican to win in November, and they know I am the one who can go up against certainly a Janet Mills if she becomes the Democratic nominee.” Mills, Maine’s current attorney general, is the Democrats’ anointed one.
Her decades spent working in politics and government, however, skew the LePage parallels somewhat: Six and a half of those years she served in the governor’s Cabinet and worked to reform the state’s welfare system. “I ran an agency that had been an unmitigated disaster prior to the LePage administration for more than a decade,” she said, referring to her tenure at the helm of the state’s department of health and human services. Mainers indeed supported LePage’s welfare reform efforts by a significant margin. And, Mayhew added, they know where a share of the credit is due. “They know what I have done alongside Governor Paul LePage in terms of turning our state around.”
She’s enough of a known entity that her role in controversially cutting back the social safety net may have a hand in her high unfavorable count in the latest public poll: nearly one-third of those surveyed viewed her unfavorably, while with Moody—who has no such record—it was just a tenth. But a proven reputation for tough-love governance could also win over the flintiest state in all New England. If it does, if Republicans nominate Mayhew next month, she’d likely face off against Mills—and, either way, you’d have a woman in the governor’s mansion. Hey, stranger things have happened in the state of Maine.
