AN UNABASHED BIGOT COULD BE ON THE VERGE OF VICTORY, BUT HIS NAME ISN'T MAMDANI

A new poll shows a bigot leading in the polls in a key race. The bigot's name? Paul LePage.

A prospective matchup between Maine Congressman Jared Golden and former Maine Governor Paul LePage in Maine's 2nd Congressional District is statistically tied at this early date. However, LePage is more popular than Golden in the 2nd district....

With the election more than a year away, half (50%) of Maine 2nd Congressional District residents say they would vote for LePage if the election were held today, 47% would vote for Golden, 2% would vote for another candidate, and 2% are undecided.

The poll is from the University of New Hampshire.

Many people, including a disturbing number of Democrats, are trying to generate a national moral panic about the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is accused of anti-Semitism largely because he's sharply critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Mamdani has expressed sympathy for New Yorkers who fear anti-Semitic attacks and promises a significant increase in funding for programs to combat hate crimes. By contrast, LePage -- who could help Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives if he flips a Democratic seat in 2026 -- is unquestionably a racist.

LePage generated national headlines by stating at a January 6, 2016, town hall meeting in Bridgton regarding drug dealers:

(Drug dealers) are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty; these types of guys, they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.

... On August 24, LePage was asked about these comments; he denied being a racist but said that he had been compiling a binder of drug arrestees since January and that "90-plus per cent of those pictures in my book, and it's a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people." When asked to provide the binder, LePage replied, "Let me tell you something: black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers. You ought to look into that. You make me so sick." The Portland Press Herald subsequently filed a Freedom of Information Act request for LePage's binder.

... LePage produced a binder of drug arrestees and went through some of the mugshots with the press. While admitting that the binder contained photos of both blacks and whites, LePage produced a page with a photo and press clipping of a young white woman who had been arrested, LePage called her a "very lovely young Mainer, maybe 20 years old." He then held up another page with a picture of a black man on it and said, "That's the other culprit." Reporting on the incident, Portland Press Herald quoted figures showing that according to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Service, in 2014 of the 1,211 people in Maine arrested on charges of drug sales or manufacturing only 14.1 percent were black, and almost all the rest were white.

Also, LePage

repeated other controversial comments he'd previously made on the topic. "You’ve been in uniform? You shoot at the enemy," he said at a statehouse press conference.... "You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

And there was this in 2019, after LePage left office:

With Colorado on the verge of enacting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to nullify the Electoral College, the next state to sign on could be Maine, where a resolution is scheduled to be introduced in committee in the state House this week.

But former Republican Gov. Paul LePage ... is fiercely opposed to eliminating the Electoral College for an unlikely reason: he believes it would silence white people!

“What would happen – if they do what they say they’re going to do – is white people will not have anything to say,” said LePage in an interview with WVOM. “It’s only going to be the minorities that would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida ... We’re gonna be forgotten people.”

Democratic moderates such as Senator Kirsten Gillebrand and Congresswoman Laura Gillen are denouncing Mamdani right now, but the allegedly moderate Maine Republican Susan Collins accepted LePage's endorsement when she was in a tough Senate race in 2020 and needed to shore up her right flank, and then endorsed LePage in his unsuccessful run for a third gubernatorial term in 2022. They'll probably endorse each other again as 2026 approaches.

Mainstream Democrats love to say, I'm not like these horrible left-wing extremists in my party, which is out of step with decent Americans except for candidates like me. Republicans, by contrast, say as little as possible when their party-mates become controversial. You'll never read a story about a Republican whose big move in pursuit of the 2028 presidential nomination is a denunciation of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. (A couple of Republicans tried this with Donald Trump in 2024 and were quickly sent packing.) No one in the media ever argues that the extremism of candidates like Kari Lake or Mark Robinson could doom the entire GOP. No one ever expects all Republicans to answer for their excesses, which are genuinely abhorrent.

Golden is a typical Democrat-hating Democrat -- he has defended Trump's wildly unpopular tariffs, attacked fellow Democratic members of Congress who've been detained or arrested while challenging Trump's immigration policies, and blamed the progressive group Indivisible for his own decision to stop holding town halls.

And, funny thing, Golden's approval rating among Democrats in his district is only 31%, according to that University of New Hampshire poll. LePage's approval rating among Republicans is 81%. Overall, LePage's approval rating is 43% in the district. Golden's is 21%. Gosh, maybe My party sucks -- vote for me isn't a winning message.