Paul LePage is back and Maine braces for a political storm

Published: 09-23-21

Here in Maine, former Governor Paul LePage — who has described himself as “Trump before Trump” — officially kicked off his campaign to return to the governor’s mansion last night at a rally in the Augusta Civic Center. What’s his legacy? Can he win? What power will his brutish, sometimes overtly racist rhetoric have in the Trump-shaped world, where previously unspeakable ideas have been normalized?

The answers to these questions and more are up this morning in my latest dispatch for POLITICO Magazine. Hope you enjoy.

For more on Paul LePage from the archives, start here, then here and here.

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COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.

A native of Maine, he has reported from more than 50 countries and seven continents and lived for more than four years in Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet empire and the transition that followed. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago he is past Pew Fellow in International Journalism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for Excellence in Public Advocacy.

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