California chaos should serve as a warning for Maine Democrats | Jim Fossel

Despite being the majority party in the largest state in the country, California Democrats can barely manage to find a field of respectable gubernatorial candidates.

They easily brush away the Republicans year after year, consigning them to the sidelines in Sacramento, but may well be on the verge of bumbling away the governorship.

Take a look at — until last week — their top candidates: Eric Swalwell, who just dropped out of the race and resigned from Congress in disgrace after sexual assault allegations; Katie Porter, a former congresswoman who’s been accused of being abrasive toward her staff; and Tom Steyer, a billionaire climate change activist whose once ran for president for five minutes.

Maine Democrats are in a similar position. In the 2nd District, they have Matt Dunlap, the state auditor who failed the auditing exam; Joe Baldacci, whose biggest claim to fame is his last name; and Jordan Wood, a congressional staffer who’s never run for office before.

In the U.S. Senate race, they have a governor, Janet Mills, who’s older than the incumbent and hardly beloved; and Graham Platner, who’s never run for anything before and had to have his Nazi tattoo covered up. Meanwhile, the gubernatorial field for the Democrats features two children of well-known politicians, longtime legislators and a bureaucrat who’s never held elected office.

In both states, the majority party struggles to find reasonable, young, experienced up-
and-coming candidates without baggage, yet they have no trouble maintaining power. Part of that is due to the total ineptitude of the opposition. In both California and Maine, the GOP has proven terminally incapable of fielding serious candidates for high or statewide office. In Maine, only two Republicans have been elected statewide in the past 20 years: Susan Collins and Paul LePage.

Throughout her tenure as governor, Janet Mills has largely governed on a party-line basis, and Republicans in Augusta have been left as observers. Republicans haven’t even been effective as an opposition in Augusta: they haven’t put many of her bills (or her budgets) to a people’s veto, and they haven’t done everything they could to foil the majority party.

They’ve also rarely done much to negotiate and improve legislation, nor have there been many instances when Democrats have bucked their party to kill a bill. That environment isn’t one that naturally produces a lot of rising stars in either party. Mostly, it’s left to leadership — and they elected to run for governor, rather than the U.S. House or U.S. Senate.

Another reason for the lack of new voices or greater competition on the Democratic side is apathy. While the Democratic Party has a statewide machine that allows them to consistently remain in the majority, it’s built to retain control, not to encourage new voices. That means they don’t go out seeking new talent — especially in a state where they already have almost full control, and where those in the top offices tend to stay put.

This explains why they heavily recruited Gov. Janet Mills to run for the U.S. Senate: she seemed like a safe choice. The flip side of that machine, however, is that many young, ambitious Democrats who might have considered running were either actively dissuaded from doing so or simply saw the writing on the wall and decided to pass.

In the Senate race, the D.C. and Maine Democratic machines worked together to dissuade challengers. Platner simply ended up being the last man left standing. The same thing happened in the gubernatorial race, albeit with less direct discouragement.

Aspiring candidates saw the current field and most of them decided to take a pass. That left Angus S. King III as the closest candidate to an outsider in this race, and it’s hard to say that with a straight face.

A robust party machinery may help with winning elections to both the Legislature and major offices, but it doesn’t help build a future. We saw that with the sudden retirement of Jared Golden leaving Democrats with few viable options: they weren’t there because Democrats didn’t need to win in the 2nd District to maintain their legislative majorities.

The Republicans have this problem as well, with former Gov. Paul LePage being unchallenged in the congressional primary and Democratic incumbent Rep. Chellie Pingree facing only token opposition in the 1st District. The question for both parties is whether they innovate, as many of their supporters clearly hope, or continue to do the bare minimum. If they opt for the latter, we may be in for some interesting times in the years to come.