LePage, GOP chair plan to found an organization to ‘counteract’ Maine People’s Alliance

Even from retirement, former Governor Paul LePage may play a significant role in shaping the direction of the state GOP, according to party chair Demi Kouzounas, who said they are meeting to discuss founding an organization to “counteract” the Maine People’s Alliance (MPA).

“We’ve been too nice,” Kouzounas wrote in a letter shared with party members last weekend and made public by the Bangor Daily News. On Saturday, Kouzounas was re-elected party chair. Former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, who had hoped to contest the election but later dropped his bid, complained that Maine’s Republican Party remains in the grips of LePage’s “cult of personality.”

Kouzounas explained in her letter that, under her leadership, Republicans will appeal to President Donald Trump’s voting base. “Every day, President Trump is telling us how to win!” she said.

Her newly-elected vice-chair, Waterville Mayor Nick Isgro, who has a history of alt-right and racist rhetoric, said they will take on Maine’s progressive grassroots organizers. “I’m ready to take the fight to the left,” Isgro said in a statement.

A primary target of Isgro, Kouzounas, and LePage will be MPA (which operates Beacon). On the list of party objectives shared with members, Kouzounas said she would “start a 501(c)3 with Gov. LePage to counteract MPA.” She added, “I have a meeting already scheduled.”

“We have to get more aggressive and fight the Dems and the MPA,” is one of the lessons she said she’d learned from the recent election.

This would not be the first time LePage and Maine’s conservatives have started nonprofit organizations in a top-down attempt to build grassroots support for their policies.

In 2011, LePage campaign director Jason Savage — who with Kouzounas’ re-election likely retains his position as executive director of the Maine Republican Party — partnered with political strategist Brent Littlefield to create Maine People Before Politics to “work aggressively to build membership and raise funds” for LePage’s political agenda.

The organization, which its leaders said was meant to be “similar to the Maine People’s Alliance,” launched with funding left over from mostly corporate donations made to LePage’s transition account.

Rather than grassroots mobilization, the group’s most visible actions have been running television ads boosting the then-governor and attacking his inter-party rivals. It has largely been dormant in recent years.

Two years later, following an electoral setback for Maine Republicans in the 2012 elections, conservative political operative Matt Gagnon complained in a series of columns that “the right has absolutely no answer for the Maine People’s Alliance, or an organization that even comprehends what MPA does.”

“I blame many of the election losses experienced by the right in 2012 on this disparity,” wrote Gagnon. “MPA empowers the liberal grassroots activists in the state; it identifies and organizes voters; it persuades fence-sitters through smart voter contact; and it ramps up turnout on behalf of so-called progressive candidates and issues.”

That year, two Republican representatives who were close allies of LePage took up his call and launched the Lewiston-based Maine Citizens Coalition as a member-driven organization designed to counter MPA and “attempt to balance the scales on the ground.”

“The progressive movement and accompanying societal changes over the years have destroyed Maine’s business climate and created a culture of poverty and dependency,” the MCC website reads. Posts from MCC’s Facebook page ceased in 2016 but have recently restarted in the wake of the 2018 midterm election.

In 2015, Gagnon himself became director of the Maine Heritage Policy Center and said he would reorganize the conservative group by building up its own infrastructure of activists through coordination with other groups, direct recruitment of volunteers, and reaching out to young people in colleges and high schools. The organization has, however, remained mostly focused on distributing conservative messages through press conferences and their online newswire.

In 2015, Republican state Rep. Larry Lockman, who represents House District 137 and has a long and continuing history of extreme statements and actions, announced in a column published in the Bangor Daily News that he was working with LePage to found a new organization to counter MPA.

“LePage is a man on a mission in his second term. His vision is to leave Maine in better shape than he found it. That’s why he has given his enthusiastic endorsement to a new group that will go toe to toe with the Maine People’s Alliance to restore limited government and free markets in Maine and New England,” wrote Lockman. “The New England Opportunity Project has the vision, the plan and the team to fill the vacuum that exists on the right side of Maine policy and politics.”

Lockman later renamed NEOP the Maine First Project. The group has pursued a mostly alt-right and anti-immigrant agenda and has continued to hold small activist trainings, including for Republican legislative candidates.

It remains to be seen how LePage and Kouzounas’ new organization will differ from these past attempts.

In addition to founding the latest anti-MPA, Kouzounas also warned members against infighting in her letter and lamented a series of monetary “kick-backs” that had apparently influenced the party’s vendors and strategy. She pledged to “put the great people and kind hearts of the Republican Party out at the local level for all to see” while also promising to be more aggressive and “‘Tweet’ daily kinda like the President.”

(Photo: Former Governor Paul LePage, Maine Republican Party chair Demi Kouzounas and new vice-chair Nick Isgro, from the Maine GOP’s website.)

Contribute to the Maine People’s Alliance