In 11 days, Maine citizens will elect a governor to lead their state for the next four years. Students of Bowdoin College: you live in Maine, you can vote in Maine and you have the opportunity to decide the trajectory of Maine’s future.
Maine can proceed either down a path paved by Democratic congressman Mike Michaud, or one paved by Republican incumbent Paul LePage. Both Michaud and LePage have the support of around 40 percent of voters, while the support for Independent candidate Eliot Cutler has stagnated near 15 percent for the past six months.
Assuming the winner of this election needs 40 percent of the vote, 25 percent of Maine citizens would have to change their mind and vote for Cutler for him to win. Barring any ridiculous controversies, the statistical likelihood of that happening is effectively zero. All that is to say, if you want to make your vote count, vote for Lepage or vote for Michaud.
Vote for LePage if you support a governor who vetoed raising the minimum wage from $7.50 per hour, compared the Affordable Care Act to the Holocaust and the Internal Revenue Service to the Gestapo, opposes gay marriage, objects to abortion, proposed tax cuts for corporations operating in “Open for Business Zones” and denies that humans have been the primary cause of climate change.
Vote for LePage if you support a governor who refused to sign a bill that banned the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) in plastic products. BPA is a known carcinogen that has been positively correlated to birth defects, heart disease and asthma. LePage claimed, “the worst case is some women may have little beards.”
Vote for Michaud if you would like a governor who has pledged to give Maine citizens a living wage, thinks that women have the right to make their own health care decisions and believes that everyone deserves the basic human right of marriage. (If elected, Michaud would be the first openly gay governor in U.S. history.)
Vote for Michaud if you support clean energy progress in Maine and the rebuilding of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection after LePage appointed an oil lobbyist to lead it.
Cutler and Michaud have very similar political stances. When I look solely at the issues, I have a hard time choosing between them. But when I see the polls, Michaud becomes the clear choice. Since Cutler isn’t going to win, not only does voting for him fail to accomplish anything, but it also withholds a vote for Michaud, making a vote for Cutler essentially a vote for LePage. It makes sense, then, that the cunning Maine Republican Party has poured tens of thousands dollars into pro-Cutler ads.
The Maine gubernatorial election won’t be decided by a sudden surge in the LePage campaign. If LePage wins, he’ll win with around 40 percent of the vote. If Cutler supporters decide that they want to actually see a governor in office who shares a vision of Maine relatively similar to their own, then they’ll vote for Michaud, and consequently, we won’t have an embarrassment of a governor.
For those of you who plan to vote for Cutler because you don’t believe in partisan politics, I beg you to vote practically, not ideologically. Though the issues at stake are sadly partisan, they ought to be treated chiefly as issues of justice. Voting for Cutler or LePage—or not voting at all—is an injustice to women, to minimum wage workers, to the LGBTQ community, and to the current and future communities disproportionately affected by the horrors of climate change.
To the 90 percent of Bowdoin Students not originally from Maine, if you have not registered to vote in your home state, you can register to vote in Maine on election day. To students who have already registered in their home state: if there isn’t a particularly close race you care about in your home state, consider cancelling your home state registration and voting in Maine. To those who were not planning to vote: vote. Every vote for Michaud brings Maine closer to achieving a more just, sustainable and LePage-less future.