Paul LePage, the outspoken former governor of Maine, is running for election to the U.S. House to replace Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat who is not seeking re-election. The lone Republican in his primary, he will compete in November against the winner of a slate of four Democrats in Congressional District 2.
Here are five things to know about Mr. LePage, 77, ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
1. He served as Maine’s governor for two terms, and ran for a third. Mr. LePage was first elected in 2010, and again in 2014. He left office in 2019 — Maine law does not allow governors to serve three successive terms — and was replaced by Janet Mills, the current governor and a Democrat. In 2022, he launched an unsuccessful bid against Ms. Mills for a third term as governor.
2. He was a businessman. Before entering politics, Mr. LePage worked as a business consultant; he started his career managing and handling finances for lumber and paper mills. As he campaigned for re-election in 2014, Mr. LePage said his past experiences working with business owners had cemented his conservative political beliefs about what he viewed as government dysfunction.
3. As governor, he had a reputation for being provocative. “I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” Mr. LePage said in 2016, after endorsing Mr. Trump for president. His incendiary rhetoric was notable in the pre-Trump era. In 2010 he said he wanted to tell President Barack Obama to “go to hell,” and in 2011 told the N.A.A.C.P. to “kiss my butt.” In 2016, he drew broad condemnation after saying that out-of-state drug dealers travel to Maine and “impregnate a young white girl before they leave,” a comment that he later described as “a slip-up.”
4. His relationship with Ms. Mills, then Maine’s attorney general, was tense. Ms. Mills chafed at Mr. LePage’s outspokenness as governor, and at the tenacity with which he vetoed bills. In 2017, near the end of Mr. LePage’s second term and soon after Ms. Mills declared that she would run for governor herself, he sued Ms. Mills for refusing to represent his administration in court.
5. Eyebrows were raised after public records showed that he and his wife had benefited from Florida tax laws. The news broke in 2022, as Mr. LePage was running for a third term as governor on a platform of phasing out Maine’s income tax. His stated intention was to keep the state’s wealthy residents from briefly moving to Florida each year in order to take advantage of its tax breaks. But Mr. LePage and his wife, Ann, owned property in Florida, and were found to have benefited from its tax laws themselves, capitalizing on property tax breaks reserved for permanent residents even while living in the Maine governor’s mansion.
