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Oh, hey, looks like we forgot an important item in our Wednesday roundup of failed gubernatorial runs by MAGA candidates in the midterms. As we noted, MAGA Chuds already in office generally held on, but most bids by MAGA newcomers flopped badly with voters. Maybe that’s why we forgot to include former Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s big loss in his attempt to unseat current Maine Gov. Janet Mills: LePage wasn’t a new MAGA jerk, he’s a proto-MAGGOT who liked to brag that he was Donald Trump long before Trump ran for president. In any case, Mills stomped LePage flat, 56 percent to 43 percent, and all around Maine there was much rejoicing.
As Gabrielle Gurley put it at the American Prospect, Mainers knew Paul LePage all too well, and they didn’t get fooled again. Add your own Pete Townshend Roger Daltrey YEAAAAH! scream. (Corrected; serves me right for accepting the first thing I saw on Google!)
Gurley notes that 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.
Gee, what a coincidence: Those were the parts of the state that LePage most frequently demonized as Not Really America while he was in office, contemptuously explaining that they were full of welfare cheats and addicts who deserved to die rather than getting overdose meds, because the life-saving overdose treatment Naloxone “does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose.”
Read More:
Maine Gov. Paul LePage Explains Death Is Most Effective Overdose Treatment
Maine Gov. Paul LePage Sure Black Men Go To Maine To Sell Drugs, Sex Up White Girls
Racist Maine Gov. Paul LePage Decides It’s The Blacks Dealing Drugs After All
Most notoriously, LePage came up with an openly racist explanation for the state’s opioid epidemic, explaining that the drug problem in Maine involved drug traffickers who weren’t from Maine at all. At a town hall, he answered a constituent’s question about how he’d address drugs thusly.
These are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” LePage said […] “These type of guys that come from CT and NY, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home.”
“Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave,” LePage added. “Which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we’ve gotta deal with down the road. We’re gonna make ‘em very severe penalties.”
After a few days of fumbled attempts to explain he hadn’t necessarily meant those guys were Black, because after all Maine is mostly white anyway, he eventually confirmed that Black people were who he’d had in mind because they were such a menace.
After four years of Janet Mills being sane and kind of progressive and not getting Maine in embarrassing headlines every few weeks, you can see why Mainers were happy to send LePage packing, so he could enjoy his retirement in Florida — where he’d moved to avoid property taxes after he was term-limited out of office. As we said when he announced his comeback bid, we thought he’d make a fine Florida Man, since he could probably have managed to eat someone’s face without even being on bath salts.
The guy who bragged about how extremely Trumpy he was never got any traction, especially not two years after Mainers thoroughly rejected the real Trump by 53 percent to 44 percent in 2020. Most Mainers weren’t just over him, they were more than ready to move on from his style of “governing” by bullying and trolling.
As Gurley notes, abortion was central to the election. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Mills promised to pursue a state constitutional amendment that would protect abortion rights. LePage’s attempts to suggest he wouldn’t support any new restrictions on abortion were undercut by his own history of calls for Roe to be reversed, and by his refusal to give straight answers when the question came up. Here he is trying to avoid being pinned down to a specific position in his first debate with Mills in October. Notice how Mills pounces on his claim that he “would not sign” any new abortion restrictions the legislature might pass — as she points out, he knows very well that any bill Maine’s governor doesn’t sign and doesn’t veto becomes law 10 days after the legislative session ends.
In the same debate, LePage also waffled about whether he would support a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, sputtering, “I don’t know what you mean by 15 weeks or 28 weeks. […] I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure I understand the question.”
Although she’d led in polling the entire way, Mills might have sewn up the election when she jumped in to say, “I understand the question. I would not let such a law become effective. My veto pen will stand in the way of any restrictions on the right to abortion.”
LePage probably wasn’t helped by a statement from Maine’s “Christian Civics League” that insisted that no matter what LePage said, he was definitely on their side and would absolutely help pass strict restrictions on abortion.
Mills now has a second term, and LePage can head back to Florida and fail to get a job in Ron DeSantis’s administration, just as he never got an appointment from Trump, how sad GTFO loser.
[American Prospect / Maine Public Radio]
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