The Maine People’s Alliance, a liberal activist group that helps elect Democrats, was forced to apologize last weekend for a mailer that targeted Republican state lawmakers who voted against Medicaid expansion. Among the lawmakers criticized by the mailer, which accused them of having “no spine,” was Rep. Dale Crafts of Lisbon Falls, who uses a […]

There’s a lot of interesting nuggets in the latest campaign finance reports submitted by the candidates running for governor. Here’s one: Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, gave the maximum — $3,000 — to Republican Gov. Paul LePage during the last reporting period. That’s Barry Mills, husband to Karen Mills, a former member of […]

The Center for Competitive Politics, a Virginia-based group fighting limits on donations to political campaigns, is telling Maine offiicials to stop enforcing a law capping aggregate giving by wealthy donors.  In a letter to Republican Gov. Paul LePage, Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat, and legislative leaders, CCP urged state officials to either change or […]

Mike Tipping has a column in Saturday’s Portland Press Herald criticizing conservatives and Maine reporters (specifically me and BDN politics writer Chris Cousins) for noting that a recent Public Policy Polling survey oversampled people who identified themselves as Democrats.  The PPP survey showed that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mike Michaud had a 7-point lead over Republican […]

The Washington-D.C. think tank Employment Policies Institute will begin running a radio ad that targets a significant policy initiative of Democratic gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud: Raising the minimum wage.  The issue is also on the front burner in the U.S. Senate, where U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is reportedly working on a bipartisan […]

The prevailing media narrative is that Democrats seeking elected office in November will put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.  There’s plenty of reasons why this tack toward self-preservation seems prudent. According to a Pew Research Center/USA Today poll taken in early April, 50 percent of respondents […]

UPDATE : The Maine Wire, MHPC’s news service just announced that Moody is leaving to join the Virginia-based State Budget Solutions, another conservative think tank. According to the Wire post, no successor has been named at MHPC.  J. Scott Moody, the CEO of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, confirmed Friday morning that he’s leaving the organization. Moody, who […]

Gov. Paul LePage is known to send handwritten notes to his allies and his opponents. The missives sometimes surface in the mailboxes of state lawmakers. Some of the notes are friendly. Some are not.  Oamshri Amarasingham, the public policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, recently received one of the latter notes. […]