Graham Platner, Susan Collins and Janet Mills were born there. Tucker Carlson and the horror writer Stephen King spend a lot of time there.
And Maine’s vast northern Second Congressional District is about to command more attention as general-election season arrives, stepping out of the shadow of the First District’s southern restaurants, beaches and presidential lore.
For starters, the Second District’s House seat — currently held by the retiring Rep. Jared Golden, a moderate Democrat — is one of the most politically competitive on the map. Republicans see the red-tinted district as one of their best pickup opportunities.
Last night, Paul LePage, the bombastic former governor who has declared himself “Donald Trump before Donald Trump,” officially won the Republican nomination for that seat. The district stretches from Lewiston and Bangor to Caribou, on the Canadian border, and is home to many working-class residents.
There was a fiercely contested and crowded Democratic primary to take him on. The results were tight between three candidates — Joe Baldacci, a state senator, Jordan Wood, a former congressional aide and Matt Dunlap, the state auditor. Because of Maine’s ranked-choice system, it could be a week or two before a winner is declared.
The voters in the Second District will also play a crucial role in determining who Maine sends to the Senate, in a highly competitive race that Democrats have long seen as central to their push to regain control of the chamber.
Graham Platner, who formally became the Democratic nominee last night, doesn’t need to win the northern district to win the state — but he probably can’t afford to get trounced there by Senator Susan Collins, the three-decade Republican incumbent, either.
(Collins, for her part, faces the difficult task all over the state of holding onto Democrats who may have supported her in previous campaigns, but are now furious with her party, angry over her votes for some of the Trump administration’s priorities, and raring to vote out Republicans at every level of government.)
The Second District will offer one of the clearest tests in the country of a bet some Democrats are making: that they can make inroads with some of the blue-collar voters who have fled their party if they run their own anti-establishment, working-class candidates who promise to be fighters.
Platner is an oysterman, a combat veteran and a former harbor master from tiny Sullivan who is running as a fiery populist and a sharp critic of Democratic leadership in Washington at a time of high economic anxiety.
But his own economic back story is complicated and his personal history is messy. He has also embraced left-leaning positions like calling to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and has sharply criticized the culture of the military in a way that has irritated some fellow veterans.
How do more moderate, blue-collar swing voters think about those crosscurrents? That’s one of my big questions as the general election gets underway. As my colleague Lisa Lerer and I discussed on The Daily yesterday (you can listen here!), the outcome will be heavily scrutinized by Democrats who are already thinking about what kind of candidate could help them win back the White House in 2028.
Below, you can read our preview of the November election to come in Maine and our takeaways from Tuesday, when three other states also held primaries.
