On Wednesday night, I attended one of the last forums for the Democrats running for governor. Jeremy Hiltz, in recovery from drug addiction, and Fowsia Musse, a prominent leader of Lewiston’s immigrant community, started the night by plainly stating: “The two of us have much more in common than Governor LePage wants you to think.” After spontaneous applause erupted from the whole room, the most interesting night of the primary season began.
Candidates took courageous policy positions and stated their values–far more clearly and energetically than I’d heard them before. Sen. Mark Dion, former Speaker of the House Mark Eves, and Rep. Diane Russell all expressed support for supervised injection facilities, to make sure that people who use drugs can access harm reduction services and healthcare outside the criminal justice system. Attorney General Janet Mills spoke eloquently about the need to prevent the childhood trauma that lies at the root of so much addiction, comparing how easily one can report “game poaching” with the long hours spent on hold when reporting child abuse. Adam Cote made his support for single payer health care unequivocal, and spoke with great respect for the grassroots activists of Maine AllCare, who have been thinking hard for years about how to make single payer work at a state level. Refreshingly, Betsy Sweet gave a simple diagnosis for the challenges of ensuring adequate health care infrastructure in rural Maine: We have a system based on profits, not people. Every candidate, except Sen. Dion, said they supported one, fair minimum wage–without carving out tipped workers.
Over the course of the evening, important political shifts occurred as well. For the first time (that I know of), Russell revealed that, on her ranked choice ballot, she would also be voting for Betsy Sweet and Mark Eves, the “progressive slate,” endorsed by the Working Families Party. Sweet and Eves underscored the cross-endorsement of each other that they had just unveiled. But perhaps the most interesting moment came spontaneously between Eves and Cote.
Eves had already given an energetic performance. He delivered a powerful line about taxing the wealthy to fund public schools, saying that he was far more concerned about children going hungry in school than wealthy Mainers getting another vacation. Then, in what seemed to be an unplanned move in his closing statement, he decided to defend Cote, saying:
“In these next six days, you are going to see a lot of nasty, negative stuff. We are going to have [two] hundred thousand dollars of outside money come from an organization that I support, Emily’s List, that endorsed Janet, and it’s going to go after Adam. Put it in the garbage. Turn off the TV. Make your own decision. Don’t let outside interests buy this election.” Although he had refused earlier to say who else he would be voting for on his ranked-choice ballot, when it was Cote’s turn to give his closing statement, he joked that Eves had just won his vote.
That moment mattered for a number of reasons. First, it’s clear that the Democratic candidates have started to really think through political strategy in a ranked choice environment. Rather than engage in mudslinging, Eves seized an opportunity to help him and another candidate look good, simply by being positive and pushing back on exactly the kind of attack-ad politics that people despise.
Second, it raised fundamental questions about the relationship between issue-based organizations like Emily’s List, and party politics. There’s no doubt that the world is a better place because of Emily’s List, which dedicated to electing “pro-choice, Democratic women candidates.” There’s no question that pro-choice, Democratic women deserve the kind of fundraising, training, and support that Emily’s List offers; and it’s great that one of Maine’s own, Emily Cain, has recently been hired to lead this prominent national organization. But the decision to endorse Mills so early and attack Cote at the very end can only be explained by a kind of political calculus that favors (female) candidates that fit a specific profile.
To my knowledge, Mills’ female opponents–Donna Dion, Sweet, and Russell–are all pro-choice, Democratic women. (And all the male Democratic candidates for governor are also pro-choice.) The decision by Emily’s List to endorse, therefore, can’t just be about issues or getting women elected. Instead, Emily’s List must be calculating that Mills—who has more years in state office and is regarded as more mainstream—simply has a better shot at winning. It’s the same reasoning that drove many to expect Hillary Clinton, Libby Mitchell, and Mike Michaud to win their elections as well. The group seems to have a specific goal of elevating female candidates that fit a certain kind of conventional profile.
So, by questioning Emily’s List and defending Cote, Eves was doing more than staying positive; he was critiquing establishment politics for pushing the conventional wisdom of electability. He named the elephant in the room.
We are all trying to figure out which candidate is both progressive and has the best chance of beating conservative candidates in the fall. Thus far, each candidate has made a slightly different argument about how they pass this test. And while Mills has been the clear frontrunner, her nomination has never been a done deal; until now, we have engaged in a fair debate over which candidate fits the bill.
However, with Emily’s List introducing such huge spending into the race, the argument no longer seems fair. It seems like the forces that favor a more traditional candidate profile are putting their thumbs on the scales.
Ironically, Sweet, a progressive woman with decades of pro-choice credentials, who chose to run using clean elections funding, is most harmed by this structure. She only has the money that she has. The airwaves will now be crowded with Cote-Mills ads, making it harder for her to break through, and there’s no way for her to suddenly raise another two-hundred thousand dollars to compete.
I can’t help but think that the long view of history will judge this method of trying to increase women’s (or any underrepresented community) representation in government as extremely short-sighted. Women, people of color, and working-class individuals are less likely to run for office, in part because we have such a narrow view of who is electable. Barrier-breaking candidacies require that we gamble on Black senators from Illinois with middle names like “Hussein,” who would certainly receive lukewarm receptions in focus groups. Sometimes centrist candidates have a better chance at winning; sometimes they don’t. The point is that when we become too rigid in our thinking about who is likely to win, we will miss opportunities like Obama, as well as the threats like Trump.
The success of feminism—and racial justice—requires challenging the short-term ideas of the politically possible. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton rose to speak at the Seneca Falls Convention, arguing that the nascent women’s rights movement should back the right of women to vote, nearly everyone in the room greeted her proposal with shock and ridicule—everyone except Frederick Douglas. The former slave, and African American luminary, chose to back the long-term, principled position of women’s suffrage. At a time when emancipation seemed equally, if not more, unlikely, he knew the importance of building a principled alliance. Moments like those between Douglass and Stanton inspire generations of progress, even if they seem impossibly idealistic at the time.
That’s why the two events that book-ended the gubernatorial forum in Lewiston struck me as so important. An event that began with a white, working class man in recovery deliberately finding common ground with a Black, Muslim, immigrant woman ended with most of the candidates searching for ways to ally with each other and defy the status quo. I honestly have no idea who will win on Tuesday (and with the new voting system, it may take quite a while after Tuesday to figure it out). But I do believe it all matters. It matters to stand up and say that outside money should not interfere with a decision that we must make ourselves. It matters to form alliances based on moral principles, not the exclusionary conventional wisdom of the elite. Those 90 minutes in the Lewiston Public Library, where people from all walks of life gathered to watch this happen, will always, for these reasons, be my favorite part of this memorable primary season.
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