June elections in odd-numbered years often feature low turnout, but look closely around the state and you will see some of Maine’s top political themes on the Tuesday ballot.
A race for a closely divided legislative district along a craggy part of the midcoast, plus school board races across the state are marked by hot-button debates about social issues and a key housing referendum in Maine’s largest city are among the wider causes facing voters.
Here are some of the reasons to turn up at your polling places today.
Republicans finally look favored in a legislative special election.
There is only one race for statewide office on Tuesday’s ballot, and it is an interesting one. Former Reps. Abden Simmons, R-Waldoboro, and Wendy Pieh, D-Bremen, are running for the seat that a freshman Democrat resigned from in February after facing signature fraud charges.
The result won’t change much in Augusta, where Democrats have an 81-67 advantage in the House of Representatives over Republicans. But it is a solid chance for Republicans to shake their big bugaboo of not winning a special election in a truly competitive area since 2015.
This losing streak has been due in part to Democrats’ general financial advantage and poor candidate selection on the Republican side. Neither is a problem this time. Simmons has raised $10,000 more in private funds than Pieh’s publicly funded campaign could muster. Republicans have also poured in nearly $18,000 in outside money to less than $4,000 for Democrats.
Gov. Janet Mills and House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland, were canvassing for Pieh over the weekend in a sign of support, but their party has money that it is not burning for her. Democrats go into Election Day with a 93-vote advantage in absentee ballot requests for their party’s voters, an organizational strength that would likely play a role in any Pieh upset.
Culture-war issues in schools prompt hot local debates.
The national conservative call for more “parental rights” in schools has turned into Republican orthodoxy and a major point of contention facing school boards across the state. These kinds of debates look a little different everywhere and rely on local issues, but they usually center on library books and teaching on race, sexual orientation and gender identity.
In Hermon, where the high school recently instituted a policy requiring students to get parental consent to check out books with sexual content, two school board candidates were on opposite sides of a different policy proposal. The conservative one is running as part of an informal slate endorsed by local Republicans alongside two town council hopefuls.
In Waldoboro and Union, a political group run by hard-right former state Rep. Larry Lockman, R-Bradley, sent similar mailers assailing incumbent school board members for actions on social issues and endorsing conservative opponents, according to the Courier Gazette of Rockland. Skowhegan features a slate of teachers’ union-endorsed candidates against conservatives.
Housing is on the ballot again in Maine’s largest city.
After Portland instituted rent control by referendum in 2020, landlords are leading an effort to claw it back by eliminating the 5 percent cap on rent increases when a tenant moves or the unit changes hands for some other reason. That is the only part of the rule that the change affects.
The Rental Housing Alliance of Southern Maine, a recently rebranded group of landlords, is fronting the campaign while progressives including former Mayor Ethan Strimling are speaking out against it. The result will be a new guidepost in the city’s longtime war between those more aligned with business and the activist crowd, and it will have an effect on housing policy.
