By Michael Shepherd - Jan. 27, 2023
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📷 Maine Republican Party Chair Demi Kouzounas speaks at a press conference in Portland on Nov. 1, 2022. (BDN photo by David Marino Jr.)

Good morning from Augusta. The Legislature is out today, except for a 9:30 a.m. meeting of the Government Oversight Committee. The agenda is here.

What we're watching today

The Maine party chair who has presided over two rough cycles fights for a final term. Some of the rawest elections come between people who mostly think alike. When it happens among an insular group of activists who have just dealt with a major loss, things can flare up more. This is where the Maine Republican Party sits after their bad 2022 election and entering a Saturday vote on who is going to lead their party into the next two-year cycle.

Chair Demi Kouzounas, a dentist from Saco, is standing for a final term. Her major threats in Saturday's election are Rep. Heidi Sampson of Alfred and former Maine House Assistant Minority Leader Joel Stetkis of Canaan, with former legislative candidate Guy Lebida of Bowdoin also running but seeming to be less active on the stump for the top job so far. The vote will take place at Le Club Calumet at 10 a.m.

Unlike most state parties, where leaders cycle in and out with great frequency, the Maine Republican Party has generally seen stability for more than a decade. That's partially due to the influence of former Gov. Paul LePage, who has dominated party politics and helped Kouzounas retain her seat after Democrats and Gov. Janet Mills swept control of Augusta in the 2018 election.

On Saturday, she needs to lock down 41 votes to win a majority of the party's state committee. LePage has been making calls in support of Kouzounas and some of my party sources think she effectively has locked the seat down. However, these elections are waged on a secret ballot and are highly uncertain. Someone told me yesterday that either Stetkis or Sampson could get into a runoff vote with Kouzounas, which would spell some danger for the chair.

The major problem for the insurgents seems to be that they are fighting for shares of the anti-Kouzounas vote. Take a run through grassroots Facebook pages and you will see similar criticism of the party but little agreement among those critics on whether Sampson or Stetkis should emerge.

They are running active campaigns, with Sampson boasting on WGAN last week of a petition with 700 people saying she should win. Stetkis is posting endorsements from former lawmakers and his local allies. But grassroots Republicans have shown an aversion to current and former lawmakers in recent internal and primary elections and that could work against them.

Both of them have sharply criticized the party's infrastructure, which was swamped in spending by Democrats during the 2022 elections, particularly in the Legislature. Stetkis recently told WGAN that the Maine GOP has been "top down," putting an outsized share of resources toward top-of-the-ticket candidates and not helping legislative candidates enough.

Sampson has probably been a sharper critic, saying she has national contacts willing to fund Republicans here who have not been mined by the party.

"They've never been asked. Isn't that ridiculous?" she said. "You have not because you asked not."

It's fair to wonder whether the party would be inherently better off under any of these candidates. While Democrats have cemented control of state politics, Republicans have receded in the Portland-area suburbs that have been crucial to their past election victories.

Sampson and Stetkis would be unlikely to take the party closer to swing voters, given that she once compared Mills with Nazis and he suggested Capitol rioters may have been members of antifa. One way or another, Republicans have to figure out their problems and rebuild quickly to become a force and not just a permanent minority in state politics.

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News and notes

📷 Central Maine Power utility lines are seen on Oct. 6, 2021, in Pownal. (AP photo by Robert F. Bukaty)

🔌 Maine's biggest utility gets its counterattack on the 2023 ballot.

◉ When voters decide in November whether to replace the state's two biggest electric utilities with a consumer-owned alternative, they will also contend with a utility-authored question that aims to blunt the effect of that first referendum.

◉ The latter proposal, which would subject certain public borrowing over $1 billion to a referendum vote, is championed by No Blank Checks, a political group that has been almost solely funded to date by the parent company of Central Maine Power Co. and is led by Democratic operative Willy Ritch.

◉ Passage of both questions would force another vote to effectively set up the consumer-owned utility, since it will require billions of dollars in borrowing for the new public entity to buy out the infrastructure of CMP and Versant Power, the state's other dominant utility. Figuring out that price could take years.

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What we're reading

🧗 Sen. Susan Collins is one of five women trying to avert a fiscal cliff.

🔥 Maine's hottest multifamily home market isn't what you'd expect.

🦹🏻 A theft ring conducted break-ins in Waldo and York counties, police said.

❄️ Two athletic facility domes in Maine collapsed under heavy snow.

👋 The manager of a major coastal town suddenly resigned.

☀️ Have community solar? BDN environment reporter Mehr Sher wants to talk.

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