Republican candidate for governor Paul LePage speaks at the Republican state convention in Augusta, Maine, on April 30.Robert F. Bukaty/The Associated Press
He’s back.
Back from Florida. Back with bluster and lacerating insults. Back with old nostrums appealing to the discontent of the dispossessed. Back with contempt for the elites and the experts. Back with remarkable energy for a man in his 70s. Back as a magnet of attention. Back trying to reclaim his old job.
Not Donald Trump. Instead: the guy who was Donald Trump before Donald Trump.
That phrase – ”I was Trump before Trump” – was his trademark. Born poor; educated far from the Ivy League; unfamiliar with Queens, N.Y.; a stranger to scandal; whip smart and dead serious, Paul LePage in some ways is the polar opposite of the 45th president. But the 74th governor of Maine has enough of the Trump tailings to luxuriate in the comparisons, when in fact it might be more accurate to say that Mr. Trump is the pretender and Mr. LePage the original.
Trump takes jabs at Maine’s Democratic governor during visit
One way or another, Mr. LePage has an advantage that his disruptive doppelganger lacks; he has the Republican nomination for the job he once held. He’s challenging his successor, Democrat Gov. Janet Mills, and though Mr. LePage is rated a slight underdog, he remains the big dog in the state’s political conversation.
Mostly because the tenor of his conversation tends to the crude. He once told the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” compared the IRS to the Gestapo and spoke of drug dealers “from Connecticut and New York” who come to Maine, adding, “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”
Sound like someone you know?
Not so fast. Even some of his critics agree that Mr. LePage is more reflective and less reflexive than the man who, in the former governor’s rendering, is his successor as populist-in-chief.
“There are elements of Trump’s appeal as a politician that LePage figured out long before Trump entered politics,” said Mark Brewer, a University of Maine political scientist. “It’s the tough-guy persona who appeals to the common people and has no time for elites and experts. LePage had, and still has, this. But let’s not take the comparison too far. Even people who aren’t big LePage fans admit he doesn’t have Trump’s personal failings.”
No one ever accused Mr. LePage of seeking to profit from holding office. No one has accused him of scandal. His private life isn’t like Mr. Trump’s.
“He cares about ideas and policies more than Donald Trump does,” said State Treasurer Henry Beck, a Democrat. “His behaviour often was an obstacle to implementing them.”
Just as the country wasn’t ready for the bombast of Mr. Trump, this state had little preparation for Mr. LePage.
Politically, Maine was a peaceable kingdom. Edmund Muskie might have fomented a revolution when he was elected governor as a Democrat in 1954; Democrats had occupied the governor’s chair in Augusta for only a dozen years in the preceding century. But despite his raging private temper, he had a soothing public persona.
So did modern Republican senators Margaret Chase Smith, Bill Cohen, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, as does Independent Sen. Angus King. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell may have been a strong partisan, but he spoke quietly and was the soul of respectability.
Then along came Mr. LePage.
In recent years, Maine has had a blue tint, having voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in the past eight elections. But it also possesses a red patina. Maine has four electoral votes, distributing half of them to the presidential candidate who wins the statewide popular vote and then delegates one electoral vote to the winner of each of its two congressional districts. In the past two elections, Mr. Trump has lost the state but won the single electoral vote of the congressional district that generally occupies the northern and much of the western portions of the state.
In Act II of the LePage political drama, the former governor is, much like Trump-associated candidates countrywide, taking on Ms. Mills for her COVID-19 restrictions and mask mandates. But there seems to be a slight moderation in the LePage lexicon.
“He is modulating his image,” said L. Sandy Maisel, a Colby College political scientist. “He isn’t saying anything outrageous. In the past, he seldom went more than a month without doing that.”
Mr. LePage, whose first language was French, has a personal story more dramatic and more affecting than that of Mr. Trump, who with a University of Pennsylvania degree, nonetheless is the master of an unconventional mix of lower- and upper-case spellings.
The eldest of 18 children of a father who repeatedly beat him, Mr. LePage ran away at age 11 with a broken jaw. He lived off the land and off the kindness of strangers and went to college on funding provided by Peter Snowe, a state lawmaker who would later become the husband of Olympia before dying in an automobile accident.
That connection sealed a personal relationship between Ms. Snowe, herself an orphan, and Mr. LePage, manager of Marden’s, a popular surplus and salvage discount store with 14 locations across the state, before becoming mayor of Waterville.
Mr. LePage argues that “schools should be places to encourage kids how to think for themselves on important topics, not what to think.” Ms. Mills, daughter of a long-time Maine public schoolteacher, emphasizes education opportunity. While the governor boasts of providing $850 checks as inflation relief, Mr. LePage argues that the assistance itself will contribute to inflation. While she supports abortion rights, he said, “Right now, more people are dying than being born, so it’s time to have an opportunity to keep them alive.”
The campaign has settled into a summertime hiatus. The state’s lakes and shoreline beaches beckon. But this race has incendiary potential; the two repeatedly clashed when Mr. LePage was governor and Ms. Mills was attorney-general. He asked her to press legal action on some of his priorities. She refused. He withdrew funds from her office. She threatened to sue him. Threats were exchanged.
The 2020 campaign between Ms. Collins and House Speaker Sara Gideon, her Democratic challenger, attracted national attention and cost a record US$200-million. It was bitter. This will be, too. Because in the background is this question: If Mr. LePage can reclaim his office, might Mr. Trump do so as well?
Our Morning Update and Evening Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.