State Senator Rick Bennett (R-Oxford) announced on Tuesday that he will be running as an independent for Governor of Maine in a clear departure from GOP he once chaired. His gambit comes with a rejection of partisan politics and is an apparent effort to follow in the footsteps of two men who managed to win the Blaine House without a party label in 1974 and 1994 respectively.
“A lot of the energizing elements in the Republican Party are not what I think respond to the needs of a lot of Maine people,” Sen. Bennett told the progressive Maine Morning Star.
The liberal outlet’s parent company has been funded by the Swiss national progressive oligarch Hansjörg Wyss—whose very participation in US politics is the sort of thing Bennett has repeatedly said he opposes—and, according to Influence Watch, has ties to the Democrat dark-money group Arabella Advisors via the Hopewell Fund, which it manages.
“There’s an element in the Republican Party and the Republican caucuses that is sort of feeding off the chaos and disruptive energies of Donald Trump, and it’s really not a good thing to see,” he added.
Despite criticizing Trump and the “energizing elements” of the Republican Party, Bennett claimed that his decision to run as an independent is an indictment of the party system in general rather than one specific party.
“My candidacy is not an indictment of either party. It’s an indictment of the party structure and parties as the solution to solving our problems,” he told the leftist outlet.
That said, his recent votes on such key issues as whether local and state authorities should cooperate with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), whether biological males should be barred from playing on female sports teams, and expanding the Ranked Choice Voting mechanism (RCV) that effectively elected a Democrat to represent Maine’s Second Congressional District.
Bennett has a long history as a Republican legislator in Maine, including a stint as Senate President. He chaired the Maine Republican Party and has run as a Republican for Maine’s Second Congressional District House seat and a seat in the U.S. Senate. Yet, he is far from being a staunch conservative.
In the current session, he has voted with Democrats on key issues.
He voted on June 12 against Sen. Susan Bernard’s (R-Aroostook) LD 1134, which would have barred transgender-identifying males from participating in girls’ sports or using restrooms and locker rooms meant for girls.
He was the only Republican to oppose the bill, expressing support for a “proud trans woman” and claiming his daughter’s emotional response informed his decision on the bill.
“Her feelings gave me permission to be honest about mine too. I too feel sadness that these bills are before us, sadness that in a moment when we could be lifting up young people, we are entertaining proposals that single some of them out setting them apart as other,” said Bennett.
That vote could arguably have been calculated to make him appeal more to progressive Democrats during his newly announced independent gubernatorial run.
Allowing trans-identifying males to compete in girls’ sports is extremely unpopular nationwide among both Democrats and Republicans. Polling from January found that 79 percent of Americans, including 67 percent of Democrats generally and 94 percent of Republicans, oppose males in girls’ sports.
Just days after voting to keep males in girls’ sports, Bennett joined with Democrats again in support of Rep. Deqa Dhalac’s (D-South Portland) LD 1971, which severely hampers local law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officers and operations.
That bill, which has now passed through both the Senate and the House, will essentially turn Maine into a sanctuary state for illegal immigrants.
Bennett was the only Republican in either the House or the Senate to vote in favor of the sanctuary policies.
He also voted for a Democrat bill that would expand ranked-choice voting to apply to state legislators and the governor. That bill, which has passed through both the House and the Senate, has the potential to significantly impact his success as an independent gubernatorial candidate, possibly allowing him to win even if he receives fewer votes than other candidates.
This legislative session, Bennett also sponsored a bill aimed at creating a four-day work week through a tax-incentive pilot program for businesses.
In 2023, Bennett was among a group of Republicans who stood behind Gov. Janet Mills (D-Maine) and applauded as she signed the largest tax increase in decades.
[RELATED: Republicans Cheer on Mills as She Signs Largest Tax Increase in Decades…]
That tax increase, which Bennett voted for, included the controversial paid family leave program funded through a blanket one percent payroll tax increase, directly impacting millions of Mainers.
His vote and applause allowed Mills to release a photo making it appear that her massive tax increase drew much wider bipartisan support.
While those three recent votes put him squarely in the Democratic camp in terms of the current configuration of politics in Maine, Bennett states he is looking to transcend the two-party system as Jim Longley and Angus King did in past gubernatorial elections. Convicted child pornography aficionado Eliot Cutler attempted that play twice more recently, but in both cases ended up cinching the victories of Republican Paul LePage in 2010 and 2014 respectively.
In 1974, Longley was the first Mainer to win the Blaine House as an independent. Democrat Governor Ken Curtis had hired him to run a DOGE-like audit of the state’s spending, and based on the profile he built doing so, Longley ran more than half a century ago without a major party label. Some say he simply missed the Democrat filing date, and others that he didn’t think he could beat George Mitchell or Joe Brennan in a primary, but whatever the motivation, it did make Maine history.
Twenty years later, talk show host Angus King leapfrogged a crowded primary season by also running as an independent. He hired then U.S. Senator Bill Cohen (R-Maine)’s long-time strategist Chris Potholm and cashed in on Republican business leaders’ contributions while Republican nominee Susan Collins was fighting off challenges from the GOP’s right flank. King wrote a book about how he’d transform Maine and managed to make party nominees Collins and Joe Brennan look tied to the past.
Of course Cutler’s two tries were less successful, but they did help LePage unwittingly. The last Republican governor’s victories via plurality wins motivated Democrats to enact RCV in Maine. Now Bennett, who recently supported RCV, may see the system working in his favor.
Both Republican and Democrat gubernatorial primary fields have been filling up in recent months. On the GOP side, there is already Ken Capron, Robert Charles, David Jones, Jim Libby, Owen McCarthy, Steven Sheppard and Robert Wessels with others expected to join by fall. So far, the Democrats have Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Angus King III, Ken Pinnet and Hannah Pingree — one of whom currently holds statewide office and two of whom have powerful political legacy names behind them.
Against this background, Bennett’s move to run as an independent — the only other candidate to do so as of yet is the little known Alexander Murchison — makes sense in the same way it did for Longley and King. Ultimately, though, the question is whether he will end up having an impact similar to Cutler’s (in terms of vote totals, that is). In any event, his entrance to the race today is likely to shake up the emerging fields.
