Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills used part of her speech to warn against another Donald Trump presidency at the state party convention in Bangor. (Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)
The 2024 presidential election is a battle for the soul of America, said U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. For Maine Gov. Janet Mills, it’s a choice between compassion or chaos, and decency or denigration. U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree said the country has to keep President Joe Biden in the White House, “otherwise all is lost.”
Federal, state and local Democratic officials positioned the stakes of the upcoming election as a fight for democracy during the Maine Democratic Party Convention in Bangor on May 31 and June 1.
“If Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans return to the White House, they have pledged to take a wrecking ball to women’s health, to economic justice, to racial justice and to all of the progress that we have made,” Haaland told the crowd during the convention’s keynote address. “Our economy and our democracy are still recovering from the divisions they sowed and the damage they brought and our country simply can’t afford another four years of that.”
Party leaders urged the base to focus Democratic voter turnout efforts on Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, in particular. Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that split their electoral votes by congressional district, and in the 2020 presidential election, this model gave Trump an edge.
While leaders called for party members to focus efforts on voters in this rural swing district, frustration with the Democratic Party and current leadership was evident at the convention as well, with programming on the first night interrupted by protests of U.S. support of Israel in its ongoing war on Gaza.
Gordon Street, a member of the Lincoln town council, wants the Democratic Party to focus more on rural voters. (Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)
A focus on Maine’s split electoral votes
In the 2020 presidential election, Biden carried Maine at large, securing three of four electoral votes. However, Maine’s rural 2nd District backed Trump by wide enough margins to secure the other electoral vote.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris received 435,072 votes statewide, also winning the 1st District, with Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence receiving 360,737 votes statewide.
In light of this history, Maine Democratic Party officials, delegates and legislators repeatedly emphasized the importance of talking to voters in northern Maine.
“They talk about Maine being a battleground state and it’s because of that one electoral vote that could come into play,” Senate President Troy Jackson said. “For all of us in this room, we’ve heard it for days now, we know what the job is. It’s to go out there. There’s no reason why we’re losing this CD. There is no reason, other than the fact that people have become complacent, people have lost faith.”
For Gordon Street, a Democratic town councilor in Lincoln, the opportunity for a different outcome this year lies in the rural Democratic vote.
“It seems to me that if we really pay attention to the rural areas that might be an important piece in trying to swing the election,” Street told Maine Morning Star.
After getting elected to his otherwise Republican-dominated town council last November, Street began an effort to increase collaboration among rural Democrats. During the convention he passed out pins that read, “I’m a rural Democrat and I voted.”
Street said that when he ran for office, he did not run to win, per se. Rather, he aimed to bring greater visibility to rural Democrats and their priorities, which he feels are often left out of Democratic representation in state and federal offices, as those elected officials are often from urban areas.
Street sees parallels between his path to politics and his priorities in Jackson, who represents Aroostook County, the northernmost part of the state.
During comments to the convention crowd on Saturday, Jackson began by saying that he had not been born a Democrat. “Forgive me, I was a registered Republican despite little understanding of what that actually meant, or whether or not it actually reflected my working class values,” Jackson said.
Similar to Street, Jackson first ran for office because of issues important to his community. “I felt like no one cared or was even listening,” Jackson said. He eventually joined the party because when he first showed up to Augusta, he said, “this was the group of people, Democrats, that seemed to care the most about family and communities like mine.”
Party officials pointed to past instances of seats flipping from red to blue, such as the state Senate seat previously held by Pingree. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows also underscored the power of mobilizing voters, as evidenced by her prior position in the state Senate, too.
“When I was first elected to the Maine Senate in 2016, some political observers were surprised because my state Senate district voted for me and also voted for Donald Trump that year,” Bellows said. “I wasn’t surprised because I had done the work.”
This upcoming election, Bellows said, Maine Democrats cannot expect favorable outcomes without focusing time and energy to engage such voters.
“We have to do the work when it’s hard,” Bellows said. “We have to set aside our fear, our anger, hopelessness, even despondency… We can’t sit this year out.”
Frustration over war in Gaza
On Friday, the first day of the Maine Democratic Party convention, the Biden administration announced a new development in the Middle East, a three-phase deal proposed by Israel to Hamas militants, which in Biden’s view could lead to the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza and an end to the now eight-month war.
The announcement did not assuage some Mainers in Bangor, who interrupted the first night of the party convention during a pre-recorded speech from U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, who represents the 2nd District.
A delegate rose to announce his disappointment in the convention’s lack of focus on Gaza and invited others to join him in walking out. The comments were met with mixed responses from the crowd, some yelling “sit down” while others built on his critique, chanting “Free, free, Palestine!”
A group of Maine-based organizations (Jewish Voice for Peace, Health Care Workers for Palestine, Maine Students for Palestine) interrupted the state Democratic Party convention tonight in protest of U.S. support of the war in Gaza. @MaineMorninStar pic.twitter.com/dnUA7kRlxm
— Emma Davis (@byemmadavis) June 1, 2024
A group of Maine-based organizations — including Jewish Voice for Peace, Health Care Workers for Palestine, and Maine Students for Palestine — organized the demonstration, particularly targeting Golden for not speaking out against Israel’s actions and for voting in favor of a resolution condemning Biden’s decision to pause weapons shipments to Israel.
The chanting grew as Golden’s video played, only fading when staff asked the remaining protestors to leave the building. Golden did not respond to a request for comment on the protest.
Before resuming programming, party chair Bev Uhlenhake said, “Voices of dissent are part of what happens in good democracy, so I’m actually not disappointed at all by the protest happening tonight.”
In a statement from the Maine Democratic Party later shared with Maine Morning Star, a representative said the coalition as a whole echoed Uhlenhake’s stance. “The right to peaceful protest and free speech are core to our democracy,” the representative said.
Prior to the action inside, protestors had gathered along the street outside the building, waving the Palestinian flag and calling for a ceasefire. Only Ellie Sato, chair of the party’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee committee, acknowledged the protestors in her speech Friday evening ahead of the disruption.
“I keep getting told how the protestors are wrong and they’re uninformed,” Sato said. “But what I don’t hear are people listening and taking the opportunity to see the issue from their perspective. We have to start listening to those voters that feel disenfranchised by the party.”
Brendan Davison, a delegate for Penobscot County and an organizer for the Coalition for Palestine, said the goal of the demonstration was to get people talking and to get voters to think twice about voting for Golden.
“By no means am I saying they should support Republicans,” Davison clarified, “but if they are going to vote for Golden, they should at least do so through gritted teeth.”
Davison said he is not looking to the ballot box for change but is instead focused on getting those in power to listen to the growing body politic that is speaking out in support of Palestinians.
However, other Democrats worry protests will pull votes away from Biden, and in turn help Trump, including Brooksville resident Abbie McMillen, who spent the convention urging other attendees to write to Biden requesting he support the latest call from the Alliance for Middle East Peace for a reconciliation movement.
This group of 160 Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding organizations wrote a letter to the leaders of the G7 urging them to center civil society peacebuilding, a strategy they view as a way to support sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
While at the Democratic convention, McMillen refrained from calling herself a party person. “I’m a policy person,” she said, however she added, “I cannot see how we can have a democracy if citizens are not engaged and the parties are the way it happens. Parties can be influenced. Autocracies cannot.”
A fight for democracy
While Maine Democrats spent much of the convention speaking to Democratic priorities and achievements, several speakers also took the opportunity to critique those across the aisle.
These comments began Friday evening with former state Sen. Emily Cain, who also previously served as executive director of the political action group Emily’s List, which focuses on electing Democratic women who support abortion rights, said she’d prepared a pep talk that might not be needed because a jury had a day prior found Trump guilty on 34 counts in the hush money trial. The crowd met Cain’s comments with cheers.
However, she cautioned a pep talk may be needed in the next six months. “There is a lot on the line,” Cain said. “No, everything is on the line, including and especially our democracy.”
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (left) speaks with former Maine state Sen. Emily Cain, on a panel about the threat she sees Donald Trump posing to reproductive rights if elected. (Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star).
Bellows, Maine Secretary of State, spoke about the threats she faced after removing Trump from the state ballot in December, a decision she later withdrew following the U.S. Supreme Court decision on a similar case out of Colorado.
“What came next was unacceptable,” Bellows said. “Members of my team, most outrageously, members of my family, were targeted with an overwhelming barrage of threatening communications simply because I did my job.”
Bellows urged the crowd to have courage, which she described not as the absence of fear, “but the willingness to do the right thing, regardless of personal or political considerations,” adding as an example that “courage is 12 ordinary Americans,” referring to the jury that convicted Trump.
Mills also took a stab at Trump, noting that he is now a convicted felon and particularly focusing on how his climate policies — pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, staffing environmental agencies with fossil fuel leaders — would directly impact Maine people, who are still recovering from damage from the back-to-back storms this winter.
However, Trump was not the only target of critique.
U.S. Senate candidate David Costello used part of his speech to voice his belief that not only Republicans but also independents have stymied Democratic progress.
“I believe that independent candidates … have on ballots undermined and continue to undermine our party’s efforts to grow and to succeed and should therefore not be supported, at least not the first choice on our party’s rank choice ballot in November,” Costello said.
Costello, who is running against incumbent Angus King, an independent, also directly criticized his opponent as being too cautious. “While I appreciate that Senator King caucuses with Democrats and that he’s a safe bet,” Costello said, “he’s been too reticent to pursue the kind of reforms needed to truly fix Washington.”
Maintaining the state majority
Sato, the party’s DEI committee chair, said she’s heard from many people who have lost hope in the Democratic Party. To those people, Sato says, “the hope lies in our Democratic bench here in Maine.”
The state Democratic Party has been in the majority since 2012 and throughout the convention the party’s elected officials made clear their intention to keep it that way. While all of the seats in the Maine Legislature are up for grabs in November, most that do not have an incumbent seeking reelection are currently held by Democrats, outlining a possible path for Republicans to gain more power.
Democratic state legislators praised progress made during their majority, including the supplemental budget approved earlier this spring, which added new investments in housing, education and child care, among others, to the biennial budget approved last year.
The party majority has not meant all of its priorities have become a reality, however.
The convention’s two days of programming each began with land acknowledgements, as the event occurred on Penobscot territory. Unlike the other 570 federally-recognized tribes in the U.S., the Penobscot, Houlton Band of Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy — collectively known as the Wabanaki Nations — are treated more like municipalities than sovereign nations in Maine under the Settlement Act.
“We will continue to work to ensure that tribal nations here have the same rights and opportunities as all other tribes across the country,” Sen. Mike Tipping said while providing the land acknowledgment. “We did not accomplish that goal this last legislative term. We will keep working towards it.”
Mills has continued to oppose sweeping reform of the Settlement Act, though has supported piecemeal changes, including this session signing into law an expansion of tribal authority over prosecuting crimes.
Another issue raised by Jackson that Democrats have not resolved is the pay gap between state workers and their private sector counterparts, which the Mills administration has disputed.
Echoing concerns about progress still yet to be made, House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross of Portland cautioned that the work goes far beyond electing Democrats. However, she explained to attendees that she views the state-level Democratic majorities as pivotal for that progress to be realized in the future.
“We must remain the backstop of whatever comes down at the federal level,” Talbot Ross said.
SUPPORT NEWS YOU TRUST.
The post Rallying base for Biden, Maine Democrats set sights on rural voters appeared first on Maine Morning Star.