2010: The crest of a conservative wave
Do you remember what the Maine Republican Party looked like in 2010? It was the peak of conservative energy in Maine, with the high-water mark, of course, being November 2010 when Governor Paul LePage and the Tea Party swept Democrats out of power for the first time in three decades.
This formidable conservative movement was the result of a decade of efforts to pull the whole state to the right. Though Democratic Governor John Baldacci entered the Blaine House in 2002 riding a wave of progressive energy around healthcare reform (thanks largely to the nationally recognized vote Portland took for single payer the year before), progressive energy dissipated with every passing year of his administration.
Meanwhile, conservatives set up a brand new institution, the Maine Heritage Policy Center (MHPC), which was ostensibly a “think tank” but one willing to flood Augusta with misleading information to serve nakedly partisan purposes, scandalizing legislators and lobbyists used to a more innocent era. MHPC led the charge in undermining Dirigo Health at every turn, and used (even as voters repeatedly defeated them) ballot measures to build popular opposition to taxes of any kind.
Also during this time, Maine garnered its first (but far from the last) national headlines for outspoken racism in the new millenium when Lewiston’s mayor wrote an open letter to Somali refugees, asking that they no longer come to the city. Although that letter looks downright moderate in contrast to the more bombastic rhetoric of President Donald Trump and LePage today, that incident reads as a prescient precursor to where literally all of American politics was headed.
All of this spooked Democrats. Rather than putting forward their own populist vision for a multiracial democracy built on economic justice, they began to accept the basic premise of the right’s anti-tax crusade. While controlling the legislature and Blaine House, Democrats passed laws like those requiring all local school budgets to pass by local referendum, breathing even more life into local anti-tax revolts. Rather than lead a renewed push for health care or any other traditional Democratic priority, after winning re-election Governor Baldacci prioritized school consolidation. Perhaps worst of all, in the midst of the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression and facing severe revenue shortfalls, Democrats–chronically frightened by movement conservatives– spent their last years in power: lowering taxes on the wealthy; attempting to raise sales taxes on everyone else; slashing social services that aimed to help exactly the people worst hit by the recession; failing to get a bill for paid sick days out of committee; and barring undocumented immigrants from receiving driver’s licenses.
In other words, though the GOP controlled no branch of the legislature, by using innovative communications, organizing, and policy strategies—particularly ballot measures—movement conservatives managed to dominate the conversation so much that a frightened Democratic Party handed them major policy wins.
I recount this history because it’s shocking how little the Republican Party of 2018 resembles that movement that peaked eight years ago. The current Republican gubernatorial primary features candidates completely bereft of the kind of grassroots energy or any real, workable conservative ideological goals. There is no scrappy LePage-like figure threatening to lead a populist realignment. After advancing half a dozen ballot measures in less than a decade, conservatives can no longer get one on the ballot, and instead spend their time trying to restrict the very democratic tools they once so effectively used. To understand the Republican primary, we need to understand how this transformation occurred.
How LePage ruined conservative ideology
While it’s clear that Gov. LePage used outrageous statements and legislative norm violations to his advantage, the true legacy of his administration is actually the gradual forced abandonment of all major conservative ideas. This has put Republican gubernatorial primary candidates in a bind that seems impossible for them to escape.
When he took office, LePage seemed to authentically believe that, with elimination of business regulation and state government “waste,” taxes could be cut to levels that would revitalize the Maine economy. In his first legislative session, he lowered taxes tremendously for the wealthy (very little for everyone else), slashed retirement for state workers, cut health care for over 50,000 Mainers, and deregulated the health insurance industry. Not only were those actions unpopular–paving the way for Democrats to take back the state legislature in 2012–they actually had the opposite of their intended effect, leading to two recessions in Maine, even while the rest of the country steadily recovered. This also exhausted his real policy options. The state now spent so little over the barest of federal minimums that serious tax cuts could no longer be financed from public assistance rollbacks. There just wasn’t anything left to cut.
Admitting as much in his second budget, LePage resorted to direct and indirect property tax increases to finance further tax cuts. He didn’t do this because he wanted to; in fact, the legislature was flooded every week with resolutions passed by conservative towns around the state, furious that their anti-tax champion would force the most hated tax increase of all onto their communities. He did it because he had to. After cutting public assistance to the bone, he had nowhere else to go. Cutting income taxes meant raising property taxes—a stunning admission from a movement conservative.
Because a bipartisan group of legislators refused to follow him down that road, he tried a different formula in his next budget: more sales taxes to lower income taxes. It was a truly bizarre move that left some of his most ardent followers completely puzzled and betrayed. The people’s veto of 2010 that helped propel his movement to power took aim at this exact formula (the successful question asked “Do you want to reject the new law that lowers Maine’s income tax and replaces that revenue by making changes to the sales tax?”). In the end, it was revealed that a true movement conservative simply could not propose a budget that lowered taxes any more.
Even more bizarrely, LePage’s biggest campaign issue, the denial of general assistance to asylum seekers, also ran into a dead end that session. He forgot to veto the bill, letting a reaffirmation of those immigrant public assistance benefits become law without his signature. Deregulation, anti-tax advocacy, and even the major thrust of anti-immigrant policy were now all taken off the table as viable planks in the movement conservative agenda.
In other words, Gov. LePage exhausted the ideas of his movement, which helps explain the lackluster Republican field today. For example, Garrett Mason has made off-hand references to reducing Maine’s income tax to zero, what LePage tried to do in the referendum he couldn’t quite get off the ground. But, with no real plan to pay for it, no one takes Mason’s remarks seriously (particularly as they come from a guy whose whole campaign is publicly financed through the taxpayer-funded Clean Elections system). Shawn Moody’s website mentions health insurance deregulation, specifically the PL 90 law LePage passed in 2011 (also known as the rate hike bill, as it caused premiums for some small businesses to skyrocket), but he fails to offer even the barest of ideas about what this would accomplish for anyone. (Most Republicans stopped pretending that PL 90 did anyone any good years ago, and changes to federal law make it a non-starter anyway.) Through Facebook posts, Mary Mayhew recycles stereotypes people have of immigrants and the poor, cheering cuts to public assistance policies that help them–but even she doesn’t pretend that would generate any significant savings, certainly not enough for meaningful tax decreases. In researching this piece, I couldn’t find a single substantive conservative policy proposal from Sen. Mike Thibodeau or Rep. Ken Fredette.
All of this makes me think that the central premise of movement conservative worldview—that reductions in taxes, and cuts to services that help poor people and immigrants, will result in economic growth—is no longer viable with the base and that gives the conservative movement little to be about excited heading towards November. Eight years after an anti-tax movement, fueled by conservative ballot measures, catapulted an obscure Waterville mayor to the Blaine House, the movement has no champions, little grassroots energy, and is seemingly only interested in restricting the referenda process it no longer has the strength to utilize.
Take nothing for granted
Still, the Republicans might win.
While the Republican Party has dramatically weakened since 2010, the Democratic Party has not necessarily strengthened. In some ways, progressives in Maine are showing signs of life similar to the ascendant conservative movement in the early 2000s: willing to wield ballot measures, generate scrappy grassroots pressure, and build new institutions.
But, in the same way that a bill for paid sick days failed to make it out of committee in 2010, paid family leave will probably suffer the same fate this year, despite a Democratic majority on that body. In the same way Democrats fell for xenophobic scare tactics from national Republicans pushing to establish a legal status requirement on Maine driver’s licenses, they seem poised to fall for the same trap on FGM. And, just as Democrats passed income tax cuts and sales tax increases after economy collapsed, the combined budgets of 2011, 2013, and 2015 essentially accomplished more of the same—even leading to an outright repeal of a surcharge on the wealthy passed by the voters themselves. In other words, although movement conservatism has been reduced to a zombie, Democrats and Republicans alike still seem to live in fear of it. A new set of leaders have not yet proposed the kind of visionary ideas able to excite the base and pass the most important test of all: actually working and making life better for real people.
So, while Democrats in Maine certainly have an unprecedented opportunity to make historic gains this year, that opportunity largely comes from the wounds Republicans inflicted on themselves, through a deeply unpopular President and a governor that de-legitimized the heart of his own ideology by exposing it to the acid test of reality. Leadership, as it turns out, has no shortcuts. One cannot simply fabricate a way of looking at the world and expect policies based on these flawed assumptions to accomplish anything. Nor can one spend their entire time in office relying on abusive tactics and outrageous statements to exercise power, yet still expect the hard, humble work of building infrastructure and developing leaders to occur. While Republicans seem to have the most to learn here, it’s clear both parties should take these lessons to heart.
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