Ranked-Choice Tally Hands Maine Seat to Ex-Governor

Paul LePage, who governed Maine from 2010 to 2018, is already in Washington for new-member orientation. He got there by squeaking past Democratic state auditor Matt Dunlap in Maine's 2nd congressional district, after officials finished the ranked choice voting process and the Associated Press called the race Thursday. Dunlap conceded last week. LePage declared victory. The machinery did the rest.

Who Has the Power

The seat opened because Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat, is retiring. He announced last year he wouldn't run for a fifth term, saying he had "grown tired of the increasing incivility and plain nastiness that are now common from some elements of our American community." Golden had held the district by running as a moderate Democrat willing to break with his party. When he walked away, the seat went to a man who once called himself "Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular."

LePage's spokesperson, Brent Littlefield, put it this way: "Paul LePage is already hard at work for the people of Maine." Hard at work, that is, at orientation. The job hasn't started yet.

What They're Calling a "Bright Spot"

Republicans are digging out from under a midterm landslide, and this seat is the one thing they can point to. It's the only blue-to-red flip in the nation that didn't need redistricting. The only other flips, Texas' 32nd and Tennessee's 9th, were enabled by redistricting efforts that made those electorates far more conservative. In other words, the lines on the map got redrawn until the outcome looked right. Democrats flipped 44 seats, and a handful of races still haven't been called.

Even the one clean flip was hardly a mandate. It took ranked-choice tabulation to separate the two finalists, and the margin was a squeak. President Trump carried the district by 9 points two years ago. LePage needed a recount of voters' second and third choices to scrape through anyway.

Who Lives There

Maine has two congressional districts. The 1st is heavily Democratic and includes Portland and wealthy coastal towns. The 2nd takes in a few small cities and vast rural and forested areas, home to logging, potato farming and lobster fishing. People who work those trades now get a representative chosen through a process they didn't design, from a short list the two parties handed them.

LePage has promised to put the state first. "If it is good for Maine, I will work hard to make it happen. If it is bad for Maine, I will oppose it," he said. That's the standard pledge, and it comes with the standard escape hatch. He has also criticized Trump's tariffs on Canada, a key trading partner for Maine, and expressed support for legal immigration. Whether any of that survives contact with caucus discipline in Washington is a question the base facts don't answer.

The district's voters traded one career politician for another, and the party leaders on both sides will spend the next two years claiming the result as proof of something. Meanwhile the loggers, potato farmers and lobstermen keep doing what they were doing before the AP made its call. Nobody in an orientation session is going to haul a trap or cut a tree for them.