From Mainstream to MAGA
Maine’s GOP is a perfect example of how American politics are nationalizing
Today, we are inaugurating something new: guest writers who can offer a unique perspective on our life and times. Today’s expert is Amy Fried, John Mitchell Nickerson Professor of Political Science at the University of Maine. Her most recent book, At War With Government: How Conservatives Weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump (Columbia University Press, 2021), is co-authored with Douglas B. Harris I’ve been following Amy on Facebook for a while, and earlier this week, I asked her if she would give us a local look at the MAGA movement. Stay tuned: Amny and I are plotting to get her on the pod in teh not-too-distant future. Know someone who would be interested? Please:
There once was a political saying: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” If you want to chart the political shifts of the Republican party from mainstream to MAGA, you would start by pointing to the northeast corner of the continental United States. There, you would find Maine, a state bordering two Canadian provinces, and just one other American state, New Hampshire.
The new saying should be: “As the Republican party goes MAGA, so goes Maine’s GOP.”
Maine used to have a fair number of center-right and even moderate Republicans. Those individuals did very well in elections. Some of those legislators still exist, but their numbers and influence have declined since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. Today’s Maine GOP has increasingly picked leaders and adopted official positions that would easily find a home in Florida or Texas -- and Democrats seem to be benefitting from that. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans lost two congressional races and failed to win back the governor’s mansion and either chamber of the Maine legislature.
But this hasn’t deterred Maine Republicans from selecting a new slate of party leaders who have taken on the GOP’s most reactionary agendas: they support the January 6 insurrection, COVID denialism, and culture wars issues.
On January 28, 2023, the Maine Republican Party state committee voted to pick a new party chair, ousting Demi Kouzounas. Joel Stetkis, the new chair, recently served in the Maine House and was the Assistant Minority Leader. He’s a conspiracy theorist. The day after the January 6 insurrection, Stetkis blamed the violence on the left, not the insurrectionists who attacked police with flagpoles bearing Trump flags. On Facebook, he wrote, “If History repeats itself as it usually does, it’s likely we found [sic] out the people responsible for the violence were ANTIFA or anarchists, not the 99.9% of the Freedom-loving folks.”
Stetkis won with support from Heidi Sampson, the target of considerable publicity, criticism, and even calls to resign for her antisemitic, anti-vaccine remarks—and who had expressed interest in being Maine GOP chair herself. Party rules prohibited Sampson’s candidacy because she is a member of the state legislature, but she resigned her seat to take a leadership position. Then, as Maine Wire, a conservative publication, put it, “In a dramatic intervention, Sampson addressed the committee saying she considered the Republican party a ‘family’ and would not willingly tear it apart. She then withdrew her candidacy and threw her support behind Stetkis. Returning to her seat, she and Stetkis hugged.”
This was not just an endorsement but also a sign of the power of Republican conspiracy theorists as kingmakers in the state party. And Sampson is as dangerous as they come: In July 2022, she attended an event in Belfast, Maine, organized by a man that her colleagues in the state legislature characterized as a “known anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.” At a rally in the summer of 2021 against vaccine mandates for health workers, she said:
Do I need to remind you of the late 1930s and into the ’40s in Germany and the experiments with Josef Mengele? What was it -- a shot. And these were crimes against humanity, What came out of that -- the Nuremberg code, the Nuremberg trials. Informed consent is at the top. Violating that is punishable by death. So we have Joseph Mengele and Joseph Goebbels being reincarnated here in the state of Maine.
Sampson then implied that one of the two “Nazis” was Democratic Governor Janet Mills, as Maine Public journalist Steve Mistler explained, and the other was the governor’s “sister, former Maine CDC director and current MaineHealth vice president Dora Anne Mills.”
Stetkis spoke after Sampson, making a pitch to vote Republican. “He too deployed the Nazi trope,” Mistler wrote, “portraying the current Democratic majority as an oppressive regime hellbent on crushing individual liberty. He co-opted a famous quote by German concentration camp survivor Martin Niemöller to make his point.”
Sampson and Stetkis reflect the larger rightward turn in the GOP: such remarks are common among activist COVID truthers and some prominent elected Republicans outside of Maine, like Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. They also represent a significant segment of the Maine Electorate: as Maine Wire put it, both Stetkis and Sampson had support from “the grassroots” and “activists.”
Meanwhile, according to the Bangor Daily News, Samuel Bridges, the new party co-chair, “was recently in the news for organizing against a drag show.” He’s not an outlier, either. The Maine Republican Party’s embrace of culture war issues was central to its 2022 platform deliberations and decisions. A floor vote to remove the party’s opposition to same-sex marriage failed, even though Maine is historically progressive on this issue. Mainers adopted marriage equality at the polls in 2012, three years before the Supreme Court legalized it nationwide. Other planks were anti-trans, “likened classroom teaching of non-binary genders to child abuse,” opposed sex education through 12th grade, and sought to prohibit critical race theory.
Maine’s purportedly centrist Republican Senator, Susan Collins, who spoke at the state convention later that day, was at least complicit with, seemed to condone, and even encourage these conspiracists and culture warriors. “Maybe we should buy [Democrats] a mirror,” she jested, referring to the proposed Maine Democratic Party platform, which condemns the January 6 insurrection and blames “fringe political factions” for “pitting neighbors against neighbors.” And, as the Portland Press Herald reported, “Collins did not respond Friday to an emailed request for reaction to the state party’s platform changes.”
But understanding what happened to Maine’s moderate GOP requires a longer history.
Until the mid-1950s, Maine was staunchly Republican. Maine is one of two states that never voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt (Vermont is the other.) But Maine Republicans used to be known as civil, somewhat independent, and moderate. Senator Margaret Chase Smith stood up to Joseph McCarthy, defending freedom of speech and proclaiming that she “did not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny–Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.” Decades later, when investigating Watergate and then the Iran-contra affair, Republican Senator Bill Cohen criticized presidents of his own party for their wrong-doing. More recently, Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins were seen as centrists willing to buck their party when necessary, even though Collins’ 2018 vote for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and other waffling has since tarnished her reputation.
But as liberals began to shift to the national Democratic party, Maine voters did too, electing Edmund Muskie as governor in 1954: just one of the previous ten elected governors had been a Democrat. Between 1959 and 2023, there were nine elected governors: two Republicans, two Independents, and five Democrats. Starting in 1992, Democratic presidential candidates began to win consistently in Maine. although in 2016 and 2020, the more rural Second District picked Trump, awarding him a single electoral vote under Maine’s system.
But the Maine GOP radicalized as part of the national Tea Party movement, helping to elect the raw and rude Paul LePage as governor in 2010. LePage was reelected in 2014, and in 2016 boasted that he was in MAGA vanguard, calling himself “Trump before Trump” and, at one point, calling a Democratic legislator a “socialist” who he would like to challenge to a duel.
But even LePage, who lost his comeback bid to Governor Mills in 2022 after running ads against teaching about gender identity, lobbied for the ousted Republican party chair and was ignored. The Maine GOP is that extreme now.
There is no question that, as political scientists agree, American politics are nationalizing. And as the Maine GOP demonstrates, the Republican party is now just a shell for the MAGA movement.
Short takes:
Is Arizona a swing state—or did voters only get it that GOP MAGA gubernatorial Kari Lake was a nutbag? Katie Hobbs won’t make any bold moves, that’s for sure. “When you ask local political experts about the new governor, the words you most often hear are `moderate,’ `understated,’ and `civil,’” writes The New Republic’s Marisa Agha. “In a tricky state, which until 2020 had not elected a Democrat for president since 1996, those qualities could prove useful.” (February 2, 2023)
How are college and university professors handling the restrictions on teaching race in Florida’s public universities? Very carefully and with legalistic disclaimers on the syllabus. But while college presidents and boards of trustees fold like wet napkins, students are angry that their freedom to learn is being infringed upon. Diane Roberts, a literature professor at Florida State, has “some hope that this hostile takeover of education will fail in the end. Intellectually curious young people are not good candidates for indoctrination—from the left or the right.” (February 2, 2023)
To defend itself from a Florida-style assault on Texas public universities, the University of Houston has created new "post-tenure review" standards. “The policy is meant to create consistency among all departments and mandate that tenured faculty be held to higher scrutiny when they fail their annual performance reviews,” writes the Houston Chronicle’s Samantha Ketterer. The rules could help some struggling faculty in the long run by accounting for long-term career goals that aren’t always reflected in the yearly reviews — but on the whole, they will be more strenuous for some faculty members and the administration.” Only 32% of the faculty are tenured, but administrators are trying to show that they are aligning the university with higher scholarly standards to evade scrutiny of actual course content. (February 2, 2023)
Correction: Janet Mills was elected governor in 2018 and reelected in 2022. Paul Lepage could nor run for 3rd consecutive term in 2018 but was able to run in 2022