Probably the most likable candidate for governor of Maine last time won less than two percent of the vote. Sam Hunkler, a retired physician from Washington County’s Beals Island, struck me as an all-around good guy when I interviewed him over coffee in Rockland. It also quickly became apparent that Sam didn’t have much of a plan.
He wasn’t going to get into staking positions on issues, he told me. First he wanted to study them, which seemed both naive and refreshingly honest. The fact that he was against the COVID vaccine mandate and for tribal sovereignty was enough to get my attention, but in the hurly-burly of a statewide election campaign that wasn’t enough to build the kind of broad support base one needs to win.
The other day I got an email from Sam. In it, he said he was endorsing Rick Bennett for governor in next year’s election. Granted, it is a bit early for endorsements in an election still more than a year away but it got me thinking. What sort of plan does Rick Bennett have anyway?
Bennett, who has been the Republican nominee for Maine’s Second District U.S. House seat in 1994, sought the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate in 2012, served as chairman of the Maine Republican Party and been president of the Maine Senate and is now in his second tour in the state legislature’s upper chamber– also as a Republican — this past week launched his candidacy for governor as an independent.
[RELATED: Oxford Senator Rick Bennett Sheds GOP to Run for Maine Governor as an Independent]
The last independent to win the Blaine House was Angus King, first in 1994. I remember that election because I was a young staffer for the Republican nominee and found it wholly demoralizing – perhaps my first real lesson in politics. King garnered 35 percent with a little over 180,000 votes.
Maine has changed some in the intervening three decades which is why I figure an independent next year would need 250,000 votes to win, but much of that depends on how well the respective party nominees do, so its very rough guesswork.
In 1994, Angus flipped counties that had traditionally gone either Democrat or Republican by using two advantages he had: time and novelty.
Crowded fields for the party nominations on both sides gave King the ability to lay his campaign groundwork while his soon-to-be rivals were duking it out with their fellow partisans. The Democrats settled on former two-term governor Joe Brennan, no wellspring of energy or new ideas. And while Susan Collins won the GOP nomination, a conservative activist sued her on Kafka-esque eligibility grounds, distracting her from fully launching a general election campaign.
Then there was the novelty thing. Angus had never been elected to office but had a statewide profile thanks to his Maine Public talk show, which also afforded him friends in the media. His flashy ideas like a free laptop for every kid in school wowed that sub-sect of the state’s population that believes tech will miraculously save us as Moses did the faithful. All of this made him the kind of shiny new object that occasionally attracts fish.
Rick Bennett, by comparison, is not new. Relatively fresh-faced for his age, he’s still been around for a while.
In his latest incarnation, as a centrist Republican state senator, Bennett can make the case for ‘reaching across the aisle’ more meaningfully than Sara Gideon tried to do with her House seating charts, but he’s also pissed off a decent number of Republicans with recent votes against barring biological males from playing on female school sports teams and for prohibiting state and local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE, which will be difficult for voters hungry for change to forget.
Chances are his strategy is less burdened by all that than it is lifted by the hope he can use time to his advantage. The Republican field for the gubernatorial nod is not yet fully defined and probably won’t be for months to come. And the Democrats have enough big names already in the mix that the intramural skirmishes will continue for nearly a year.
Bennett can also argue, with some merit, that partisanship has destroyed Augusta. One-party rule has led to zero accountability, and biennial after biennial of partisan budgets has bankrupted the state coffers.
That is Rick’s gamble, and why he has been leaning left so far. He is likely banking on the chance he can tack back right on fiscal austerity because, at the end of the day, Mills’ ballooning budgets are probably the greatest damage she’s done to the state — though its competitive list to put it gently.
To win, Bennett needs most of one side and some of the other. He will not win most of the Republicans, especially if the party manages to nominate a compelling candidate. But he must hope to win most Independents, 15-20 percent of Democrats and a few Republicans of the old Collins/Snowe/Cohen/McKernan ilk (yes there are such remnants, though it’s an army way smaller than Henry V’s).
Talk about threading the needle.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine a 2025 scenario. The GOP nominates either a credentialed crime fighter or an accomplished businessman who has created a notable number of well-paying jobs in their career – both possibilities exist. And the Democrats nominate Hannah Pingree, who is successfully able to distinguish herself from her mother, ie. centrist problem-solver vice limousine liberal. What then is Bennett’s play?
Maybe he’s betting on Democrats nominating someone nasty and divisive like, I don’t know, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Or someone clumsy and compromised, like, hmmm, Troy Jackson. Possibly even too-cool-for-school and un-relatable outside the Patagonia vest crowd like Angus King III. Each of these scenarios offer Bennett a whiff of possibility, but my gut still tells me Hannah’s going to come out on top of that heap.
250,000 is less than either Mills or LePage won last time, but it’s still a lot of votes. Where do those votes come from? One of the two parties has to really shoot itself in the foot, or I just don’t see it as mathematically-possible. In his first go-around in 2010, Eliot Cutler won 207,000 but LePage bested him by 10,000 votes. Because of that outcome, we were “blessed” with Ranked-Choice Voting, something Bennett supports now being extended to state-wide races. Is that his play?
Quite possibly. That’s a bigger gamble still, though. He’d need to come in second in the first round of voting. Weirder things have happened, but would need a very powerful telescope to see this shaking out in Bennett’s favor.
Discuss…
