What better way to start a governorship than to refuse to attend a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day breakfast and, when the NAACP complains, tell them, on camera, to “kiss my butt”?

That’s how Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, introduced himself to the nation three years ago, and the Republican Tea Party favorite quickly followed up with a series of intemperate remarks and questionable actions that arguably garnered him more negative national media attention than any Maine politician since Sen. James G. Blaine, the so-called “continental liar from the State of Maine” whose 1884 presidential run was derailed by graft and corruption charges.


LePage’s first major initiatives as governor—to roll back all state environmental laws to weaker federal standards and stop a ban on bisphenol A (BPA), an endocrine disruptor, in baby bottles—were drafted by his special adviser, a registered lobbyist for many of the affected industries. LePage defended the restoration of BPA in bottles by saying, with a smirk, that the worst that could happen was that “some women may have little beards.” Even as that effort collapsed, crowds of protesters were on the steps of the statehouse condemning LePage’s removal of a mural illustrating the history of Maine’s labor movement from the Department of Labor because an anonymous letter writer had likened it to North Korean efforts to “brainwash the masses.”

And that was just his first 100 days. LePage has since threatened to move his office out of the statehouse (over a dispute involving a television used to promote his policies in a public space), refused for months to allow his commissioners to testify before legislative committees and ordered state employees not to speak to the state’s largest newspaper chain (a move that earned national attention but went unimplemented).

He is skeptical of wind power—and sabotaged a $120 million offshore wind investment by Norwegian energy giant Statoil last year—perhaps in part because of a declared belief that some turbines “have a little electric motor that turns the blades [when the wind isn’t blowing] … so that they can show people wind power works.” A champion of charter schools and voucher initiatives, he has advised students: “If you want a good education, go to private schools. If you can’t afford it, tough luck. You can go to the public school.”

As for President Barack Obama, LePage said on the campaign trail that the president could “ go to hell” and reportedly told supporters at a private fundraiser that Obama “hates white people,” a remark LePage later apologized for, even as—in a feat of gymnastic oratory—he declined to confirm or deny having said it.

In June, LePage denounced a Democratic state senator for always wanting to “give it to the people without Vaseline.” He has likened the Internal Revenue Service to the Gestapo and, when criticized for the remark, claimed the agency’s enforcement of Obamacare would cause a slaughter comparable to the Holocaust. He told schoolchildren that Maine’s newspapers are full of lies and joked about bombing the largest of them, the Portland Press Herald, where I work and have been covering LePage’s antics.

LePage’s behavior has been all the more jarring because Mainers have long seen their state as a bastion of practical, common-sense politics. It’s a place whose most revered politicians in recent years have been consensus-minded, congenitally civil U.S. senators, like moderate Republicans Margaret Chase Smith, Bill Cohen, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins; independent Angus King; and centrist Democrats Edmund Muskie and George Mitchell. Firebrands rarely win statewide office here.

But from the moment he became governor three years ago, Paul LePage has turned those assumptions upside down. (I asked to speak with him about his effect on Maine’s political landscape, but the governor rarely grants interviews, and I didn’t hear back from his spokesperson.) “For decades,” says state Senate president Justin Alfond, a Democrat who often tangles with the governor, Mainers have felt “pride that our politics weren’t like other states. Paul LePage has changed all of this.”

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How a man who can make even the most hot-headed conservative talk radio hosts seem reasonable won the governor’s mansion in our quiet, level-headed state goes back to another unusual facet of Maine politics: our tradition of strong third-party candidates, who can split the vote and increase the risk of the election of a candidate whose polices or personality lack wide support.

Republicans are the smallest of Maine’s electoral blocks (28 percent of registered voters) after independents (37 percent) and Democrats (32 percent). But LePage had the luxury in 2010 of running against not just one independent but three. He won the election with 38 percent of the vote and a 1.7 percentage point margin over independent Eliot Cutler.

In 2011, LePage signed a $150 million tax cut, the largest in Maine's history. | AP Photo

LePage campaigned on a promise to improve the economy by scaling back taxes, welfare and regulations—and he’s accomplished much of it. In 2011, he signed a $150 million tax cut, the largest in state history, which reduced the top income tax rate and doubled the estate tax exemption from $1 million to $2 million. Under LePage, a five-year limit on welfare benefits was imposed—in order to stop Maine from being a welfare “destination state”—and laws restricting big-box stores and mining were repealed.

Other LePage initiatives have been nonstarters, though. Maine trades on its natural beauty, and his plan to roll back environmental regulations—including the BPA ban—was rejected by the then-Republican-controlled legislature. Shortly after he signed a bill to end same-day voting registration, it was overturned in a popular referendum by 65 to 35 percent. More recently, LePage said he would like to lower the legal working age from 16 to 12—a plan unlikely to get traction in the Democratic-controlled statehouse—and he has promised renewed pushes to reduce welfare fraud and pass “right to work” legislation, which prohibits closed union shops.

Some of LePage’s more controversial positions are informed by his unusual life story. The eldest of 17 children in a working-class Franco-American family, LePage fled his tenement home in Lewiston, Maine after his father dislocated his jaw. He was just 11 years old and lived for a time on the streets.

Eventually, LePage received helping hands from private benefactors: the neighbors who took him in; the businessman who gave him work; another businessman—Olympia Snowe’s future husband—who got him into Husson College, despite his poor grades, and paid his first year’s tuition; his first father-in-law, who put him in control of a family sawmill in Canada. LePage worked hard, excelling in college and at business while some of his siblings, by his account, became welfare dependents and, in some cases, criminals. This appears to inform his dim view of social assistance.

LePage’s extreme distaste for environmental and labor regulations follows a career in the resource extraction sector, where he worked variously as financial controller at a large firm and as the court-appointed manager of smaller firms that were in bankruptcy. In interviews with the press, he has blamed such regulations as obstacles to business, and on the campaign trail he embellished them, claiming (erroneously) that the state had once required him to do a wildlife survey of black flies, a ubiquitous nuisance in the Maine woods.

“LePage seems to go out of his way to alienate people who disagree with him,” says Sandy Maisel, chair of the government department at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, a working-class town of 16,000 where LePage was mayor and managed a chain of salvage and surplus stores until moving to the governor’s mansion. “He’s turned off tons of people, including a lot of people who would otherwise be with him in terms of economic policy.”

Dan Demeritt, LePage’s former communications director, agrees with that assessment. “LePage seems like the kind of guy who will poke the establishment in the eye, bite the hand that feeds him and refuse to carry water for anybody,” he says. “That’s created a very stable core underneath him, but also a hard ceiling in terms of the political support he can rally.”

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One might assume that LePage is doomed in his 2014 reelection campaign, given that polls show him to be one of the country’s most unpopular governors—one recent one gave him a 54 percent disapproval rating. The fact that in 2012 Maine voters returned Democrats to power in both chambers of the state legislature only increases the sense of foreboding in conservative circles here.

Certainly LePage himself is well aware of the big target sign he carries. Earlier this year, he told supporters that he expects to face a barrage of “vicious” negative ads financed by labor unions “because I am going to be the next Scott Walker in this country, because I am challenging the status quo.”

LePage’s supporters are praying that independents split the vote just as they did in 2010—and that looks like a real possibility. Eliot Cutler, the candidate who narrowly lost to LePage last time around, is running again, as is five-term U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud, a conservative Democrat who until recently drove a forklift at a northern Maine paper mill.

LePage creates a headwind for every Republican seeking election in Maine.”

But LePage is widely seen to have damaged the brand of the Republican Party as a whole in the state, and conservatives are worried about the GOP’s prospects in down-ballot races. “LePage creates a headwind for every Republican seeking election in Maine,” says Demeritt. “And every one apart from him won’t have the luxury to position themselves in a three-way race.”

LePage is one of the country's most unpopular governors. Even so, if independents split the vote in 2014 like they did in 2010, LePage could very well win a second term. | AP Photo

State Republicans in the LePage era have been internally divided by an insurgency of libertarian activists—many of whom supported LePage in 2010—who seized control of the last two state party conventions, passing platforms demanding a “return” to Austrian economics, the sealing of the borders, prosecution of those found colluding in the “global warming myth” and vigilance against “efforts to create a one world government.” The 2012 state GOP convention devolved into chaos, with the party’s U.S. Senate candidates unable to deliver their speeches.

But some on the libertarian right have since grown disillusioned with LePage and state-level politics in general, says Andrew Ian Dodge, former state coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, who says that Maine’s Tea Party movement—which was never terribly large to begin with, LePage’s election being essentially the group’s most concrete achievement—has fizzled. “This could be a complete blowout for the Republicans,” Dodge predicts.

Still, Democrats are clearly worried about Cutler’s bid, with Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, already warning, “A vote for Cutler is a vote for LePage.” One thing is for sure, though: If LePage’s detractors fail to coalesce around a single candidate this November, the governor could be with them for a whole lot longer.