By Michael Shepherd - Oct. 4, 2022
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📷 This photo combination shows former Gov. Paul LePage, left, and Gov. Janet Mills. Independent Sam Hunkler is also running in the November election. (AP photo by Robert F. Bukaty)

Good morning from Augusta. There are 35 days until Election Day.

What we're watching today

The first of four televised debates between Gov. Janet Mills and former Gov. Paul LePage begins with a forum at 7 p.m. Tuesday hosted by Maine Public and the Portland Press Herald. Independent Sam Hunkler will also be on the stage before an audience at the Franco Center in downtown Lewiston.

The Democratic governor and her Republican opponent have a historic rivalry going back to his time in the Blaine House and her overlapping six years as attorney general. She won the race to succeed him with a promise to undo much of his legacy.

They are even preparing differently for the debate slate. Last week, Mills said she was doing research to confirm what she already knows about her successes in office. Not setting low expectations, LePage said he does not need to prepare and he will "eat her lunch."

Here's what to expect and what Mills and LePage allies want to see.

Look to TV ads for signs of what the candidates want to discuss. The media outlets will set the agenda for tonight's debate after recent polling that has shown costs and inflation, abortion rights and the state of democracy to be among the top-of-mind issues for Maine voters.

The candidates will have some overlapping ideas. Some of Mills' most recent TV ads have focused on her abortion-rights stance and the divisiveness of LePage's era. Republicans first looked to reintroduce the former governor's life story but have now changed to hit Mills on education, including a video linked to a lesson on a state website calling several terms examples of "covert racism."

Mills has run a reasonably quiet in recent weeks amid polling that shows her comfortably ahead. Both parties are skeptical of that and expect a closer race, but LePage has run like he is behind in recent weeks, pivoting from lower-key appearances before friendly crowds to a deluge of news conferences on Kennebec River dams, education and the opioid crisis.

Allies want to see both precision and fire from the candidates. We have not seen LePage on a debate stage since 2014, when he won reelection on an "actions, not words" message that downplayed his bombastic history. (That was before the most controversial moments of his tenure in his second term.) He was both jovial and animated in those early debates.

Mills, a career prosecutor with a long history in state government, was chiefly debating Republican businessman Shawn Moody four years ago. Early debates were cordial but escalated late in the campaign. She looked to establish command of government's finer details while he looked to present a contrast. That contrast should establish itself between Mills and LePage.

"This is kind of an apples-to-apples debate and we haven't seen that a very long time," said former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, R-Lisbon Falls, who is now a political operative. "People are going to be able to compare them in real time."

Mason wants to see a "vintage LePage" that is fiery but tempered and hits hot-button issues including energy and education and outlines exactly what he would have done differently than Mills over the last four years.

Veteran energy lobbyist Tony Buxton, a former Maine Democratic Party chair and a Mills ally, noted that TV does not reward calmness, so he would advise the governor to "have her lines ready" for the unpredictable LePage. But he also noted that the governor can be feisty as well.

"This is not a docile person. So I think if he brings it, she will counter it," Buxton said. "She's got plenty of hard-hitting things that she can say."

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News and notes

📷 Sen. Kim Rosen, R-Bucksport, (left) and former Sen. Linda Baker, R-Topsham, speak in the Senate chamber at the State House in Augusta on Nov. 7, 2014. (BDN photo by Troy R. Bennett)

📹 An outgoing Republican state senator endorsed Mills in a new ad.

◉ Sen. Kim Rosen, R-Bucksport, was the only sitting lawmaker in her party to appear in an ad for Mills, saying she "brings people together" and contrasting her tenure with the "fighting" of the LePage era.

◉ There is history between LePage and Rosen. Her husband, former state Sen. Richard Rosen, resigned abruptly as LePage's budget commissioner ahead of the 2017 government shutdown in a move widely rumored to be a firing. Rosen narrowly escaped a 2020 primary with incendiary then-Rep. Larry Lockman after LePage endorsed him. She is term-limited now.

◉ The other two Mills endorsers in the ad are former state Sen. Roger Katz, a moderate Republican who represented Augusta and often warred with LePage, and John Cashwell, the former mayor of Bangor and Calais.

🚤 Maine's congressman is hit creatively by a Republican lawmaker in an ad.

◉ The lobster industry continues to be a flashpoint in the race between U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine's 2nd District and former Rep. Bruce Poliquin, which also features independent Tiffany Bond. That is despite the entire congressional delegation and Gov. Janet Mills speaking with one voice against a group's recent "red-listing" of the lobster and federal regulations.

◉ A new Poliquin ad featuring Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, R-Winter Harbor, on his lobster boat, gets cute. It opens with a reference to a 2020 donation to Golden from the leader of the group that called the lobster unsustainable. Faulkingham goes on to lodge more general complaints against Golden.

◉ "Unless he leaves his party, there's no way Jared Golden can do anything to help Maine," he says.

◉ Since rules aimed at aiding the endangered right whale are advancing under President Joe Biden, Republicans have rushed to associate Democrats with them. But they also moved along under former President Donald Trump, who did not stop them after being told of them in Bangor during his 2020 campaign. In 2019, the Maine delegation sent him a letter asking him to step in.

📮 We get our first look at absentee voting momentum today.

◉ Secretary of State Shenna Bellows' office will be releasing the first set of data showing absentee ballot requests ahead of the November election. It will show us how many members of each party have requested ballots and where they reside.

◉ Democrats are virtually assured to be way ahead since they embrace this voting method more. By this point in the 2020 presidential campaign marked by a massive switch to absentee voting, 149,000 of them had requested ballots in Maine to just 43,000 Republicans.

◉ That should teach you to not take the earliest numbers as a sure sign of electoral direction. But we will be watching the ratios here.

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What we're reading

🔨 He works 60 hours a week building a $1 million home. He's also homeless.

🏫 The mantra for most Maine cities and towns is preserving downtowns. This drive-through suburb is trying to reconstitute one.

🚜 The state ordered the builders of the Central Maine Power Co. corridor to remove mats and felled trees from the path.

📌 The case of an Aroostook County man could define what constitutes a speedy trial in Maine.

🎓 A University of Southern Maine professor who prompted students to walk out by allegedly saying there are only two genders will not be removed.

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