Democratic incumbent Janet Mills is projected to win Maine’s race for governor, defeating Republican former Gov. Paul LePage in his attempt to make a comeback.
In her first term as governor, Mills expanded health care and pre-K programs for Mainers, embraced renewable energy as a way to fight climate change, and delivered relief checks to residents to fight inflation. The incumbent campaigned on protecting abortion rights, investing in education, and making health care affordable.
LePage, who previously led the state from 2011 to 2019, has frequently made national headlines for his inflammatory comments on a range of issues including the LGBTQ community, immigrants and race.
In 2012, LePage compared the IRS, in its enforcement of Obamacare, to the Gestapo, the secret police force of Nazi Germany. He later said he didn’t mean to insult anyone, but added, “If someone’s offended, then they ought to be goddamned mad at the federal government.”
At a town hall meeting in 2016, LePage drew criticism from both sides of the aisle after implying that drug dealers with names like “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” were traveling to Maine and impregnating young white women. He later denied that his comments had anything to do with race.
However, several months later he said he had a binder full of drug dealers and that more than 90% of them were either Black or Hispanic. When a local reporter asked to see the binder, LePage responded with, “Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers. You ought to look into that. You make me so sick.”
The saga continued when a reporter implied that Democratic state Rep. Drew Gattine said LePage was a racist. He proceeded to leave Gattine a voicemail saying, “I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping Black people and you little son of a bitch, socialist cocksucker.”
At another town hall in 2016, LePage baselessly claimed that asylum-seekers were bringing diseases to Maine. “Asylum-seekers — I think the biggest problem in our state — and I’ll explain that to you,” he said. He added that asylum-seekers do not get any medical screenings. “And what happens is you get hepatitis C, tuberculosis, AIDS, HIV, the ‘ziki fly,’” he said in a reference to Zika, “and all these other foreign type of diseases that find a way to our land.”
LePage opposes same-sex marriage, banning “conversion therapy,” and allowing transgender students to go to public schools. During this most recent election cycle, he vowed to implement a parental rights bill, a thinly veiled attempt to attack trans parents and their families.
“It is child abuse to take a 14-year-old and try to put him into a transgender reform without the parents’ knowledge,” he said in September.
Though LePage lost, his extreme beliefs about LGBTQ people and transgender students have only become more mainstream in the GOP. The party has made the culture wars and right-wing extremism its main talking points. Across the country, many midterm candidates focused on parental rights, code for exclusively catering to conservative parents, as the cornerstone of their campaigns.