As speculation grows over possible 2026 Democrat candidates for U.S. senator from Maine, one most-obvious name hardly ever comes up.
So what is keeping Pingree, who has been in the U.S. House for 16 years, from taking a good old-fashioned chance at a promotion and running against Republican incumbent Susan Collins.
It’s certainly not the fear of losing money, which Pingree has plenty of, as The Maine Wire has analyzed.
Sure she gets a bigger pension the longer she sits on her nestegg, also known as her safe seat in the House. (Quiver Quantitative estimates Chellie Pingree’s net worth at $7.4 million.)
So money is not what Chellie Pingree is worried about losing.
What she’s afraid of is actually losing – like she did in 2012 when her own party ditched her for “independent” Angus King.
Pingree even complained to Maine Magazine afterwards that “it was my turn,” in language reminiscent of that employed by the one-time U.S. senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton. Spoiler alert: voters don’t care whose turn it is, only entitled candidates do.
When Republican Olympia Snowe unexpectedly announced in 2012 she was retiring from the Senate, all eyes turned to U.S. Rep. Chellie as the obvious Democrat next in line for a promotion.
Liberal groups quickly coalesced behind Chellie, urging her to enter the race, and MoveOn raised more than $300,000 within days to help her campaign efforts if she got in.
But polling showed that King as the so-called independent would likely peel off more votes from Pingree than he would from the Republican nominee.
He led a three-way race between Pingree and Maine Republican Secretary of State Charles Summers in a poll by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, with more Democrats than Republicans saying they would back King.
That prompted Democrats to ponder whether it would be less of a gamble to help an independent get elected than to keep their own candidate in the race and risk letting a Republican divide and conquer.
“I didn’t want to take the chance that my entering the race would make it more likely for a Republican to be the next senator,” Pingree said at the time.
Translation: “I didn’t want to take the chance that I would lose.”
Republicans speculated that Democrats wouldn’t have pushed Pingree out without an agreement from King that he wouldn’t caucus with the GOP.
Pingree dismissed the notion that she had been thumbed out of the race but of course that is exactly what happened – her own party dumped her for Angus King, a former two-term governor who has proven several times now that he can win statewide.
A year later, Maine Magazine sent a “reporter” to have tea with Chellie Pingree.
Here’s how that October 2013 article began:
“Have you found yourself shopping around for a new political hero lately?“Someone in the U.S. Congress who speaks her mind? Who breeds dairy cows and grows heirloom tomatoes and doesn’t bend in the fickle Washington wind? Chellie Pingree may be your person.“
“When she’s not in Washington D.C., she lives on North Haven, a tight-knit island off the coast of Maine where, she explains, ‘You can’t fake it. There’s a truth meter out here.’”
Aww, how daringly hypocritical.
No “faking it” by the Minnesota transplant who just a year earlier did just that when she denied there were any hard feelings after getting sandbagged by her own party for a Virginia transplant.
Susan Conely, who wrote the 2013 magazine article after hanging out with Chellie on her North Haven “farm,” included this passage:
“I ask her one last question, the one so many women in Maine have tried to answer this past year: why she didn’t run for Olympia Snowe’s open Senate seat in 2012. We’re leaning against the open barn doors, looking down to the cow pasture. Pingree smiles and says, ‘Angus called me and said ‘I’m thinking about it.’ And I said ‘I’m thinking, too.’“Now she laughs: ‘I thought it was my turn! But then Angus said he was running. And the door closed.’”
Then the obligatory stuff: “I love my job. I couldn’t give up my House seat to run.”
What? She went from “it was my turn” to “I love my job. I couldn’t give up my seat.”
Then there was the time ten years earlier when she ran against Susan Collins in 2002 and lost by nearly 100,000 votes. Could a quarter century’s interim fill that gap? Pollsters must be telling her ‘no,’ perhaps explaining that Pingree’s brand of limousine liberal progressivism doesn’t sell so well north of the Kennebec River.
In 1992, after Pingree won a race for a Knox County state senate seat, Conely wrote in her piece, “it was suggested that she vote ‘strategically’ on a range of issues to please her diverse constituents.
“But Pingree drew a line in the North Haven Island sand. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m going to be exactly who I am. I won’t stay in politics if I can’t be the real me. I’m not doing this just to keep a job.’”
What a difference 33 years make.
Chellie is clearly now “doing this just to keep a job.”
If Pingree knew – or even felt – she might actually win a race for governor or U.S. Senate next year she could give up the House seat and make a run for either.
But governor is out now since her daughter is running for the Democrat nomination.
So Chellie has one option – U.S. Senate, now that Hannah Pingree has effectively done to her mother what Angus did to her in 2012.
Surely Chellie and Hannah had a chat before Hannah announced she was running for governor which went exactly like this: “which one of us is going to run?”
The question is, why did Chellie Pingree again play the foil?
She’d be about the only U.S. House member in history from Maine who wouldn’t have taken a chance at bettering herself politically.
Republican Margaret Chase Smith took the gamble in 1948 and moved up from the House to the Senate.
Other Maine U.S. House members, some Democrats, some Republicans, who bravely tossed the dice for higher office have included Hannibal Hamlin, Harris Plaisted, Owen Brewster, James Blaine, Frank Coffin, William Hathaway, David Emery, Bill Cohen, John McKernan, John Baldacci, Tom Allen, Tom Andrews, Mike Michaud, Joe Brennan and Snowe, some winning, some not.
Yet they all tried.
U.S. Democrat Rep. Jared Golden in the Second District at least gave serious consideration recently to running for governor or Senate before deciding to stay put.
It would have been so refreshing if Chellie had told the Dems in 2012 to pound sand and gone up against Angus.
Or, if she had told her daughter this year, “It’s My Turn.”
But she played it safe in both cases. As she likely will again next year when it comes to a Senate bid against Collins, whose term would be her sixth.
The Portland Press Herald’s Democrat political columnist fantasized recently that Collins could face the kind of opponent who successfully took out Smith in 1972 when Smith, 74, was seeking her fifth term.
But Chellie, who will be 71 next year, is no Bill Hathaway so speculating that she could do to Collins, who will be 73 next year, what 48-year-old Democrat Hathaway did to Margaret is pure foolishness.
Even if “it’s my turn.”
