Day: September 29, 2021

Democrats wanted clarity Tuesday from Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema after back-to-back meetings with President Joe Biden. They didn’t get it.

During a private meeting with the president, Sinema made clear she’s still not on board with the party’s $3.5 trillion social spending plan and is hesitant to engage on some specifics until the bipartisan infrastructure package passes the House, according to a person who spoke with her.

“This is the third time she said she has told the president, ‘I’m not there,’” the person said, quoting Sinema as telling the president: “‘I’ve been very clear with you from the start.’”

Sinema has problems with both the price tag and some of the tax increases devised to pay for it. After returning from his White House meeting, Manchin said that he did not give Biden a top-line number and made “no commitments from my standpoint.”

Sinema and Manchin’s approach to the negotiations has frozen Biden’s jobs and families plan and potentially may lead to a high-profile failure of a bipartisan infrastructure bill on the House floor as progressives threaten rebellion. But without more details from the moderate duo, any hope of a bicameral agreement on Biden’s agenda is a pipe dream.

Manchin and Sinema met with Biden separately Tuesday, the second time in less than a week that they paid a visit to the White House to lay out their concerns and haggle with the president over reducing Democrats’ plans to spend $3.5 trillion. Sinema also returned to the White House twice more to hash out details with staff as Manchin huddled separately with Biden for more than an hour.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki described the meeting with Sinema as “constructive” and said she and Biden “agreed that we are at a pivotal moment [and] need to continue to work to finalize the path forward.”

Even as the House tees up a vote on the senators’ bipartisan physical infrastructure bill for this week, Manchin and Sinema have yet to publicly indicate how far they’re willing to go on Democrats’ party-line legislation addressing climate change, child care and a host of other party priorities.

The back-and-forth between Biden and the two senators is making Democrats anxious about the prolonged timeline for the negotiations. And many are in the dark about what spending figure either of them would support, let alone their policy objections.

“What I know is that the longer these debates hang out there the easier it is for the opposition to mislabel and twist what we’re trying to do,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “If we’re going to come to an agreement it would behoove us to do it sooner rather than later so that we can go out and start explaining it to people.”

Privately, patience is waning in the Senate Democratic caucus.

“I’m worried my colleagues are going to shoot themselves in the foot,” said one Senate Democrat, who spoke under condition of anonymity. “We should find a solid number and move on.”

For months, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have insisted on a “two-track strategy,” which meant Democrats would not pass the bipartisan infrastructure package without the party-line social spending bill. But by setting up a vote Thursday on the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill, Pelosi is effectively de-linking the two, prompting consternation among progressives who don’t want to lose leverage on the social spending plan.

“The agreement from the beginning was that all the pieces would move together… and that one piece wouldn’t be broken off and moved ahead of the others,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “Both Leader Schumer and Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats in the House and the Senate all said that’s the deal. I want to make sure we hold to that deal. I don’t want to see that deal broken.”

Manchin and Sinema have consistently signaled that they do not support the package costing $3.5 trillion. During last week’s meeting, Biden urged Manchin to come back to him with a number that he could support. But Manchin has indicated that he’s in no rush to make a decision.

“We had good honest, straightforward negotiations. There were no commitments made at all, no commitments from my standpoint, just good negotiations talking about the needs of the country,” Manchin said. As far as a topline spending number, he said: “We haven’t talked about it, no. Just talking about the need. I’m looking at the needs of the country.”

Sinema’s office declined to comment for this story.

Meanwhile, Democrats face a lengthy to-do list with little time.

“We’re reaching a point where we need to bring this to closure. I think that’s obvious,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “We have four major challenges on us at once: Funding the government, dealing with the debt ceiling, bipartisan infrastructure bill and reconciliation. That’s a big agenda. I think a breakthrough on one of those will help.”

Democratic leaders are starting to acknowledge that any social spending package that passes the House and Senate will have to take a major haircut from the $3.5 trillion blueprint both chambers of Congress approved in August. But that’s not stopping some progressives from expressing their frustration with Thursday’s vote on the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) even called for progressives to vote the legislation down, should the White House and Senate moderates fail to reach an agreement. Meanwhile, Murphy added that he may have taken a different approach to the bipartisan infrastructure bill had he known it would be de-linked from the social spending plan.

“Clearly the rules are changing, sometimes that’s necessary given changing realities. But it can be pretty frustrating,” he said.

On the other side of the Capitol, House Democrats are paying unusual attention to Manchin and Sinema and are largely in a holding pattern until the two senators make a decision on a topline. Pelosi has indicated to members that she will not move legislation that can’t pass the Senate.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the No. 5 House Democrat, said he remained hopeful that the conversations with Manchin and Sinema would lead to a tangible result “so we’ll know what’s possible in the House.” And Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) indirectly said Sinema is the House’s biggest problem during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, predicting Manchin will get on board but expressing concern that a senator from a Biden-won state won’t give a number she’s willing to support.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leading progressive who met with Sinema recently, said of the duo: “They need to tell us what they don’t agree with. And we need to actually be able to negotiate.”

Still, Democrats are refraining from making any predictions about when Manchin and Sinema might make up their minds. And even as they wait it out, for the most part they’re declining to criticize the two moderates publicly, well aware that they will need their votes for any legislation that passes the Senate.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) reiterated Tuesday that she is “still waiting” for Manchin and Sinema to offer specifics about what they want.

When asked if she was frustrated with the two of them, she replied: “Just a tad.”

Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.

Sometime next month, the United States will run up against its statutory debt limit. Unless Congress raises the ceiling, the federal government will either default on the national debt or be compelled to freeze critical domestic and defense initiatives — or possibly, even both.

The Biden administration has asked Congress to raise the debt limit, meeting what was once a routine responsibility of governing. But Republicans in Congress have refused. Given the minority’s ability to block nearly all legislation in the Senate, they have the power to hurl the country over an economic cliff, costing millions of jobs and erasing trillions of dollars in household wealth, overnight.

To be clear, in asking for a boost to the debt limit, the Biden administration isn’t asking Congress to pay for new programs. It’s asking Congress to finance initiatives the government has already authorized and costs it has already incurred — including $7.8 trillion in debt that the Trump administration racked up in just four years, principally owing to tax cuts for corporations and wealthy earners that Republicans approved on a party-line vote.

This isn’t a new story. The Republican Party has wielded the debt limit as a partisan cudgel since 2009. When a Republican president is in power, they happily rely on bipartisan congressional support to ensure the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. When a Democrat occupies the White House, they weaponize the debt limit and refuse to participate in its adjustment. It’s a tale of unabashed partisanship — but by now, it’s a familiar tale.

There is another dimension of the debate, however, that goes unnoticed. The idea of a “limit” or “ceiling” on the public debt sounds like an important constraint on borrowing, the kind of thing the Constitution demands to keep a runaway White House in check. In reality, it’s a 20th century innovation, originally intended to give more, not less, authority to the president. A measure born of necessity during World War I and World War II to allow the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations greater leeway in financing government operations has evolved into a partisan noose.

Understanding the origins of the debt limit places into sharp focus how radical its current weaponization really is.

The U.S. government has always borrowed money to finance its operations. The total amount of outstanding debt hovered below $100 million in the years prior to 1860 but rose to over $2.7 billion during the Civil War. By the end of the 19th century, it stood at roughly $2 billion, a figure that more or less remained steady until World War I, when military mobilization necessitated a wave of borrowing, causing the national debt to balloon to $27 billion.

Less important than how much the government owed was the mechanism by which it raised debt. Prior to World War I, Congress authorized specific debt issuances. During the Civil War the legislative branch passed several bills permitting the Treasury Department to sell bonds at specific maturities and coupons. One popular issuance were 5-and-20s, which paid 6 percent annual interest over a 20-year maturity date, with an option allowing the government to redeem the face value after five years. Hundreds of thousands of Northern citizens purchased the government paper in a show of patriotic fervor. Generally speaking, new debt authorizations were earmarked for specific purposes — for instance, Panama Canal bonds, which could be used only to finance construction of the historic commercial passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Until World War I, the Treasury Department enjoyed little leeway in rolling over or consolidating existing issuances, devising the terms of new debt offerings or moving funds between one committed stream and another. Congress largely dictated the terms; the Treasury Department’s principal role was to market and administer public debt instruments. This disparate system worked well enough when government borrowing remained at modest levels, but during World War I, the sharp spike in borrowing and spending made the old system impractical. The Wilson administration needed flexibility to raise and commit money for war production. In response to this reality, Congress for the first time set aggregate levels of debt financing and granted the Treasury Department more freedom to move money where it was needed. It was the origin of what we know today as the debt ceiling, though specific issuances — for instance, Liberty Loans — still retained their own statutory limits.

Beginning in 1941 the system evolved further, when Congress passed the first of a series of Public Debt Acts that both raised (on several occasions) the overall debt ceiling and consolidated all borrowing authority under the Treasury Department. Going forward, different departments and agencies borrowed what they needed from Treasury, which in turn issued, managed and marketed debt within the statutory limit. It’s effectively how things work today.

During the House debate over the Public Debt Act of 1941, Rep. Robert Doughton of North Carolina, Democratic chair of the Ways and Means Committee and the bill’s floor manager, emphasized that the purpose of the measure was to “provide funds to cover the appropriations, authorizations, and commitments made by Congress” to finance the government’s war effort. “The bill neither appropriates nor authorizes the expenditure of any funds. Its sole purpose is to enable the Treasury, under such restrictions and limits as the bill sets forth, to secure the necessary funds to finance the program which the Congress has authorized or will authorize by further legislation.”

This was the crux of the argument. Even in 1941 Republican deficit hawks opposed consolidating and raising the debt ceiling as an exercise (in Doughton’s words) in “boondoggling and wasteful extravagance.” In response, Doughton accused his Republican critics of engaging in “political partisanship” and reminded the House that “it would be very inconsistent, indeed, for the Congress to authorize appropriations and not provide the Treasury with necessary funds to cover such authorizations and appropriations.” In fact, “the gentlemen of the minority have voted for these appropriations also.”

The question at hand was not whether Congress should insist that “economies” be taken in other areas of federal spending, as the nation mobilized for war. Doughton affirmed that “members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are of one mind and accord” on this point. At issue was whether Congress would authorize the Treasury Department to pay for what Congress had already appropriated, and how much authority it would grant the department in managing the nation’s debt.

The specifics of how the debt ceiling operates have evolved since World War II. In response to wrangling with the Nixon administration, in 1974 Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which removed the debt limit debate from the annual budget process — ostensibly to provide legislators greater freedom to scrutinize or reject more borrowing without feeling obligated to vote down an entire year’s budget framework. But in the main, the system has remained consistent for over 80 years. So has its rationale.

As was the case in 1941, today, Congress is fully empowered to reduce federal borrowing. All it needs to do is spend less, or tax more. As Doughton pointed out eight decades ago, the time to do so is during the budget and appropriations process, not after the money has been allocated and spent during the debt limit process.

Fast forward to 2021. After adding $7.8 trillion to the public debt in just four years, between 2017 and 2021, Republicans have rediscovered their commitment to fiscal probity. Speaking for his party, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has made clear that GOP senators will provide not a single vote to raise the debt ceiling, even though the government risks a default on its obligations as soon as October — and even though the very need for an adjustment owes to spending and tax cuts that McConnell’s party approved between 2017 and 2021.

It matters little to McConnell that his caucus enabled Donald Trump to grow the deficit in percentage terms by more than every other president except George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln. His calculations are deeply cynical.

But the political theater currently playing itself out on Capitol Hill places in sharp relief a core truth: The perennial debate over whether Congress should pay for what Congress already spent has become a political charade — entirely divorced from the original intent of the debt ceiling. Conceived to help presidents meet the demands of national emergencies and to ensure that the government can pay bills that Congress has already racked up, the debt ceiling has become a blunt instrument in the hands of a radical and destructive minority.

As they address the looming emergency, Democrats might consider the possibility that the debt limit no longer meets the purpose for which it was designed. It may be time to eliminate it.

Joe Biden’s domestic agenda at the moment is, like his presidency, in peril.

It is caught between the Scylla of progressives insisting the bipartisan infrastructure bill can’t pass the House before the reconciliation bill passes the Senate and the Charybdis of moderates insisting the bipartisan infrastructure bill must pass the House before anything else happens.

It is, to switch metaphors, a standoff out of an old Western, with the intervention that will lead to all factions holstering their weapons not yet evident.

Still, the conventional wisdom is that Democrats will get both bills in the end. They will stare into the abyss, recognize the partywide debacle that would ensue if they pass nothing, and agree, somehow or other, on the infrastructure bill and a reduced reconciliation bill.

It’s certainly true that, whatever the intervening drama, must-pass spending bills always pass. (There are very occasionally government shutdowns, which are only temporary pauses until the bills pass anyway.) But the possibility of a complete meltdown over the Biden spending bill shouldn’t be underestimated.

The reconciliation bill isn’t too big to fail, but big enough potentially to fail spectacularly. It has the hallmarks of other signature presidential initiatives that, despite huge investments of presidential political capital, have gone down at the hands of a president’s own party.

In an unimaginable defeat at the time, Bill Clinton couldn’t get his health care bill through Congress, despite a roughly 80-seat House majority and 56 or 57 senators.

After his reelection in 2004, George W. Bush’s Social Security reform fizzled in a Republican Congress.

Out of the gate, Donald Trump suffered an embarrassing defeat on Obamacare repeal in 2017.

So, no, victory isn’t inevitable, no matter how much Biden needs his bills.

It is a well-established axiom that delay, which characterized the Clinton health care debate, is a killer. Momentum is lost. Entropy takes a hand. Presidents don’t tend to get more popular after an election, and if a delay pushes a fight into a midterm-election year, members of his own party are likelier to conclude they need to go their own way to protect their interests.

This is why Sen. Joe Manchin’s talk of putting off consideration of the reconciliation bill until 2022 is itself an existential threat to its prospects.

It’s always a warning sign when a specific, partywide electoral mandate hasn’t been built for an agenda.

Clinton didn’t set out in any detail his ambitions on health care during the 1992 campaign, which were instead cooked up by a health care task force after his election.

Bush hardly campaigned on Social Security reform, and never had his congressional party on board.

Trump had no idea, and neither did the rest of the party, about what would replace Obamacare.

Biden did lay out out his agenda last year and it was clearly very ambitious, but he never made it front and center in the campaign. He didn’t stump every day on $6 trillion in new spending. Instead, he presented himself as the anti-Trump who would bring the country together, cut bipartisan deals in Congress and defeat the virus.

Obviously the size of congressional majorities matters. Clinton and Bush couldn’t work their will despite healthy numbers, whereas Trump had a very slender majority in the Senate, opening the way for John McCain’s famous thumbs-down.

Biden technically doesn’t even have a Senate majority, hence the power invested in Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s thumbs.

This gets to what sets Biden apart from all of his predecessors — the massive disconnect between the scale of the legislation he seeks and the narrow majorities that are supposed to pass it.

The amount of spending in reconciliation is greater than Barack Obama’s stimulus in 2009, which Democrats passed when they had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

There’s more new health care spending than in Obamacare, which, again, passed the Senate when Democrats had 60 (then 59) votes.

There’s a hunt for villains among progressive commentators as the Biden agenda encounters turbulence. There really shouldn’t be any mystery here, though. A president who has an approval rating in the mid-40s, a tie in the Senate and single-digit majority in the House is having difficulties passing the most sweepingly ambitious progressive agenda in decades.

What else would anyone expect?

The Democrats’ factions are empowered to make their conflicting demands because the margins are so small.

The bill is so huge, encompassing everything from climate to perhaps immigration, also because the margins are so small. (To avoid the filibuster, everything has to be in reconciliation instead of broken up and passed piecemeal in lower-stakes fights.)

Given the real risks of failure, it would make sense for Democrats to pass the infrastructure bill and pocket that success, then move on to reconciliation, realizing one way or the other that it is going to be slimmed down.

But that’s not the mood right now.

As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute has pointed out, the process of a bill passing and a bill failing in Congress is often indistinguishable, so in the coming weeks it will be difficult to tell whether Democrats are, messily and haltingly, getting to “yes,” or stumbling into a box canyon.

But history says they should be afraid, very afraid.

An apocalyptic mood sweeps over the congressional press corps every couple of years as the federal government approaches its debt ceiling and representatives and senators meet to bicker over whether to raise the ceiling, temporarily suspend it or perform other legislative magic to finance the workings of the U.S. government. Take, for example, this page one, above-the-fold lede from the Sept. 22 edition of the Washington Post, which all but unleashes the Seven Plagues on mankind and tosses the unbelievers into a lake of fire. The lede reads:

The United States is careening toward an urgent financial crisis starting in less than two weeks, as a political standoff on Capitol Hill threatens to shutter the government during a pandemic, delay hurricane aid to millions of Americans and thrust Washington to the precipice of defaulting on its debt.

Careening! Urgent! Crisis! Standoff! Shutter! Precipice! Default! If you were new to the subgenre of debt-ceiling journalism, the tone of this piece might be enough to encourage you to make like a doomsday prepper, liquidate your market positions and start stockpiling rations, batteries, water and weapons. Because it’s true that a default on the federal debt would fracture the economy and unleash a blood-dimmed tide over humanity — but it’s equally true that such a calamity has never happened, won’t happen this time and will likely never happen because members of Congress who love to play chicken never follow through. They always chicken out. Checking the fossil record, we find that Congress has averted disaster at least 78 times in the past 60 years by passing legislation to forestall the debt-ceiling end times that would otherwise unfurl. We will be writing about the 79th time before the month is out.

The same day’s New York Times avoided the Post’s hysterical stylings in its coverage, pushing the debt-ceiling story inside to Page 14 and playing it as a standard “process” story. No “careening” or “crisis” here, but the Times does allow that House legislation, which passed with Democratic votes only and kicks the debt ceiling issue down the road to December, was “urgently needed.” The Associated Press did the same, predicting a “high-stakes showdown” with Senate Republicans who are likely to oppose it.

Why do the Republicans oppose a new debt ceiling? They want to pretend that it’s about taming out-of-control government spending, but this is very slim cover. Raising the debt ceiling merely allows the government to borrow to cover previously approved congressional spending. As financial columnist Allan Sloan noted in the Washington Post earlier this month, Republicans approved three debt-ceiling increases and a debt-ceiling suspension during the Trump administration. What it amounts to, Sloan writes, is blackmail, something the Democrats have done but which Republicans now routinely inflict upon the Democrats. In 1995, the Gingrich Republicans forced two government shutdowns on the Clinton administration over raising the debt ceiling. They wanted spending cuts but settled for a couple of “Contract With America” initiatives. In 2011, the Obama administration horse-traded spending cuts for its debt-ceiling increase. (Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell currently says it’s up to the Democrats to pass the debt-ceiling bill on their own. We’ll see about that.)

None of this is to suggest that playing political chicken over the debt ceiling is smart. It’s a little like playing catch with sharp knives — if you’re practiced at it and pay attention, nobody gets hurt. As the White House has warned Republicans, a federal default — something that has never happened — could push the economy into recession or worse. The GOP’s financial “blob”—former Republican Treasury secretaries—have been warning McConnell and other party leaders that the economy might topple off a cliff if the ceiling goes unrepaired. But as Reuters reported a week ago, investors are betting that an increase or suspension of the debt ceiling is in the offing. The economic sky isn’t cloudless, but neither is it falling.

Properly vetted, the current round of debt-ceiling “brinksmanship” isn’t brinksmanship at all. The Democrats know that the Republicans know that they know how vigorously the entire debt-ceiling apparatus can be stressed before the springs and rivets start popping out. As POLITICO Chief Economic Correspondent Ben White put it succinctly in a tweet Wednesday morning, “We are not going to breach the debt limit and default. Simply no way Dems will ultimately allow that kind of a catastrophically unthinkable own-goal to happen heading into midterms.”

Donald Trump conveyed an unusually honest sentiment this morning in one of his “Save America” fundraising emails to explain why congressional Republicans are playing showdown with their Democratic colleagues. “The only powerful tool that Republicans have to negotiate with is the Debt Ceiling, and they would be both foolish and unpatriotic not to use it now,” Trump wrote, using his best art-of-the-deal voice. “Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede.”

If it’s so self-evident that the the debt-ceiling problem is doomed to work itself out, why all the annihilation imagery of the Washington Post piece? There’s a long journalistic tradition of juicing up a perfectly standard story without actually straying from the facts. It’s called “writing your way onto Page One.” And it works more often than not.

The debt-ceiling squabble is ugly. It’s potentially perilous. And nerve-wracking for financial markets. But it’s not about to uncork a Book of Revelation-type cataclysm. We’ll muddle through as we always do. It’s only a matter of what the Democrats will surrender in order to bring peace back to the kingdom.

******

Nobody ever talks about the debt floor. Send economic advice to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have a long cash position. My Twitter feed lost all of its money in the dotcom bomb. My RSS feed thinks it’s a chunk of bitcoin.

LEWISTON, Maine — Remember Paul LePage? Sure you do. He’s the former governor of Maine who has called himself, accurately enough, “Donald Trump before Donald Trump” — a hot-headed, vulgar and sometimes erratic figure who regularly made international headlines for doing things like celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day by telling the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” rushing up to a television crew at the State House to volunteer that a state senator liked “to give it to the people without providing Vaseline,” and leaving an unhinged, obscenity-filled message for a Democratic legislator which he said he wanted recorded and released “because I am after you.”

He joyfully mused about bombing newspaper offices and shooting rivals, cartoonists, and lawmakers. His final term was spent tangling with legislative leaders of his own party, having his vetoes of bipartisan legislation and budgets overturned, and watching his handpicked successor get walloped by Janet Mills, the Democratic attorney general with whom he had regularly sparred.

When term limits ended his governorship in 2018, he didn’t just leave office; he left Maine. “I’m going to retire and go to Florida,” he proclaimed just before Election Day, to the relief not only of Democrats but much of his own party. “I’m done with politics. I’ve done my eight years. It’s time for somebody else.”

But now: He’s back. Making good on years of threats, he filed papers last month to run for his old office against Mills, a popular incumbent backed by Democratic legislative majorities whose approval ratings have generally run more than 10 points higher than LePage’s best ratings during his eight years in office. And on Wednesday evening, he held a kickoff rally at the Augusta Civic Center, touting his fiscal austerity and casting his opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal who’d disrupted the economy and the future of schoolchildren by imposing lockdowns and closures during the pandemic. “May the Almighty give us the strength and wisdom to overcome what divides us,” he concluded.

In Maine, this has sent tremors through the political system — turning the state into something of a preview of what may happen to U.S. presidential politics if Donald Trump jumps back in.

While LePage has been in Florida, Maine politics has returned to a semblance of normality. The legislature passes bipartisan bills. The heads of state agencies and departments field lawmakers’ questions. Mills sometimes takes positions that upset conservatives or progressives — or even both — but she hasn’t been making headlines worldwide for regularly saying shocking and ghoulish things.

Voters here are still dealing with a resurgence of the coronavirus and the accompanying disruption of the labor market, which is filling hospital intensive care units and has forced restaurants, nursing homes and retailers to cut back hours or close entirely. Here on the ground, the 2022 election still seems far away for most Mainers.

But inside Maine politics, even as elected officials try to remain focused on recovering from a crisis that has racked all levels of government, storm winds are picking up. Interviews with strategists, former officials and journalists portrayed a state house rife with anxiety about what a LePage run will look like now that Trump has altered what is acceptable in mainstream politics, even more broadly and deeply than LePage himself did. There are Republicans, too, who are worried about the further damage a LePage run could do to their party, just as it was beginning to heal itself from the ruptures his campaign and administration provoked. LePage has declined to speak to the media in these early stages of the campaign and didn’t respond to POLITICO Magazine’s requests.

But there’s also a countercurrent of excited expectation among the former governor’s myriad, diehard fans, which is further amplifying the fear on the other side. This excited, relentlessly engaged base is, after all, what led to upset wins for the former governor in two previous elections. And nobody who has to stand in a primary election wants to upset them, which may account for Sen. Susan Collins’ Tuesday endorsement of LePage, a man who in 2016 said she was “done” in Maine politics — “she’s really cooked her goose” — for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump.

“[LePage’s] style of politics is dangerous and his policies are dangerous, and together they make him doubly dangerous,” says Democratic political operative David Farmer, who was deputy chief of staff to LePage’s predecessor, Gov. John Baldacci. “I just hope that our politics have turned after eight years of LePage and four years of Trump and that those calls to our ugliest side aren’t answered anymore.”

But he’s been underestimated before, in 2010 and 2014 — and many Mainers don’t want to make the same mistake again, including the Republicans who didn’t think he could win the first time. “There was nothing in his background that would have led a thinking person to think he would be good for the state of Maine, other than his rhetoric about lower taxes and less government intrusion,” says Republican political consultant Lance Dutson, a former Collins aide who has been critical of LePage and Trump. “All of us jerks who thought we knew everything laughed behind our hand at him.”

***

LePage was the most divisive governor in Maine’s history, inviting comparisons to Trump, whose presidential candidacy LePage supported early and enthusiastically. And in some important ways, their political trajectories are similar.

But unlike Trump, LePage was born with nothing. The second-eldest of 18 children, he was raised in the tenements of Little Canada, a densely populated Franco-American neighborhood squeezed between the textile mills on the riverfront of Lewiston, a scrappy industrial city of 40,000. Area residents recall his hustle and hard work, traits that eventually drew the attention of a young up-and-coming businessman, Peter Snowe, who would later marry another Lewiston orphan, Olympia Bouchles, the future U.S. senator. When LePage was 17, Snowe called in a favor to the president of Bangor’s Husson College, got his young mentee admitted and, with another businessman, paid his first year’s tuition.

“My only option was to work hard and outsmart my opponents,” LePage recalled of his escape from what he said would otherwise been a life of poverty in an interview with the late conservative activist Robert Shaffer in 2010. “For me it was a matter of seeing the Haves and the Have Nots, and making a conscious decision to be one of the Haves.”

LePage went on to get an MBA and serve in a series of senior financial administration roles at industrial companies, a consultancy that specialized in winding down bankrupt businesses, and as a general manager of Marden’s, a chain of retail salvage stores based in Waterville, a struggling mill town of 16,000 in central Maine, where he was elected mayor in 2004.

LePage won the gubernatorial election in 2010 with the support of just 38 percent of the electorate in a five-way race, hired his inexperienced daughter as an aide, attacked the press in his inaugural address, and unveiled an agenda so radical, Republican lawmakers declined to support swaths of it.

In a state with a long tradition of electing civil, consensus-minded centrists to statewide office — late Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, former Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Olympia Snowe and independent Sen. Angus King, to name a few — LePage generated controversies faster than they could be resolved.

“LePage’s style is very similar to Trump’s, though LePage came in with more experience in governing,” says University of Maine political scientist Amy Fried, referring to LePage’s prior tenure as a mayor and city councilor in Waterville.

After eight years as governor, LePage’s wife, Ann, wanted to retire to Florida. LePage had other plans.

***

Now, on the eve of another election that LePage could win, many in Democratic politics, and some Republicans, in Maine are shuddering. “Those were terrible times — the ugliness, the racism — and as the distance gets larger since he was in office, we forget that,” says Farmer.

Republicans, Democrats and independents alike worry about the people that the LePage campaign run will energize. “LePage needs to shore up his base, and it’s made up of white supremacists, anti-vaxxers, QAnon believers and hardcore conservatives who believe the 2020 election was stolen and are pushing for some sort of authoritarian rule,” says Andy O’Brien, a former journalist who now tracks and exposes extremist groups as a hobby. “And Paul LePage is a very authoritarian person. I don’t think this next year is going to be pretty.”

The ongoing pandemic emphasized the importance of steady, science-based management in the face of actual crisis, argues Maine Democratic Party Chair Drew Gattine, who is also the former legislative appropriations committee co-chair. “This state performed [about as well as] the country during this pandemic, whether you look at health care or economic performance,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine Maine would be doing better if he had been at the helm during this pandemic.”

Most Republicans welcome LePage’s return, including the top leadership of the state party. Republican Party Chair Demi Kouzounas announced her group was “absolutely thrilled” about his candidacy the very day he filed papers and called him “the only credible candidate running for the Republican nomination.”

But LePage reshaped the Maine GOP during his tenure in much the same way Trump did to the national party, driving out polite, socially liberal, fiscally conservative politicos and doubling down on racist dog whistles, anti-immigrant sentiment and visceral tribal politics. Nobody expects those changes to be dialed back as long as he is on the scene, and probably not after that, either.

Many county committees were taken over by LePage loyalists in 2010, and earlier this year, the one in Waldo County — halfway up the coast from Lewiston — went so far as to pass a resolution banning former state Senate President Kevin Raye and another former Republican state senator, Roger Katz, from running for office in Maine. Their crime? Turning against Trump ahead of the November 2020 election. Meanwhile, three sitting GOP legislators’ participation in a July rally in the county seat, Belfast, featuring a prominent Holocaust denier Robert David Steele and one of the nation’s leading vaccine conspiracy theorists, Christiane Northrup, received no such censure.

Members of the former establishment wing are worried their party is diminishing itself by demanding allegiance not to policies but to personalities. “The party has been almost completely replaced from what I recognize, or have ever known, as the Republican Party,” Raye, also a longtime chief of staff to Sen. Olympia Snowe, told Maine Public radio recently. “Many of the people who were involved, and activists who worked in the trenches for years, are no longer even involved in the party.”

“There are a lot of conversations going on where people are asking, ‘Is this our party anymore? And what can we do about it?’” Katz told a reporter earlier this summer.

“He brings out a set of people who don’t believe in the Republican Party or the ‘political establishment,’ but they truly believe in Paul LePage,” says former Republican state Sen. Garrett Mason, a conservative who still found himself in the governor’s crosshairs from time to time. “Their No. 1 thing isn’t some bureaucratic promise or accomplishment, it’s the fact he was openly fighting for them, without compromise, if, ands or buts.”

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Between incumbency, relative approval ratings and recent election results, most political watchers give Mills the edge. But what worries Republicans and Democrats alike in Maine right now is that LePage could upset all of those predictions and win handily. He’s done it twice before.

When he burst onto the statewide political scene to run for governor in 2010, few took the two-term mayor seriously. Polling by rivals of reliable GOP primary voters suggested the upstart firebrand — who gave fiery anti-government, pro-creationist speeches to Tea Party supporters — had little to no support.

That June, he crushed all six of his GOP rivals under a tidal wave of new voters, garnering more votes than the next two candidates combined. In November, he eked out a win with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race as his opponents split their vote between independent Eliot Cutler (who got 36 percent) and a hapless Democrat, former Maine Senate President and House Speaker Libby Mitchell (who got just 19). A majority of Mainers couldn’t believe what had just happened, and not a few chalked it up to a fluke.

Four years later, LePage’s approval rating had never broken 50 percent, and pundits predicted he’d be ousted by his experienced challenger, veteran legislator and six-term Democratic Rep. Mike Michaud, himself a working-class Franco-American. Instead LePage boosted his share of the vote to 48 percent, edging out Michaud by 5 points and Cutler by 40 points.

His biggest obstacle to recapturing office is Mills herself, a former legislator and career public prosecutor, who as attorney general had no problem locking horns with LePage. (He sued her, unsuccessfully, for joining a legal effort to protect young immigrants from deportation; she sued him for withholding $4.9 million in legislatively approved funds from her office.) Mills — scion of a western Maine political dynasty closely allied to Margaret Chase Smith — has generally governed from the center, kept Maine one of the safest places in the country throughout most of the pandemic, and has an approval rating in the mid-50s and low 60s. (Like LePage, she declined to speak to POLITICO about the race.)

Mason, who was Republican majority leader in the state senate in the final two years LePage was in office, says this race will be the “fight of his life.” “It’s going to be a blood sport,” he says. “It’s no secret that the two of them do not have the highest regard for each other and have very different views of governing.”

LePage also has a major advantage he did not enjoy a decade ago: a national profile and the support that comes with it. “Paul is the caricature the national Republicans want; they couldn’t come in here from central casting and come up with a better character,” says Dutson. “He will have third party money, field work, additional data and polling, a fundraising apparatus. Paul still has his people around him, but D.C. is going to run this race.”

LePage’s best hope may be to run a replay of 2010, when his opponents split their votes between centrist and left candidates, giving him a narrow victory. Anger over that race drove Maine voters to institute, via referenda, ranked choice voting at all levels to end this spoiler effect. Ironically, however, while it is now used in primaries and for federal races, a quirk in the state constitution has prevented it from being implemented for state-level general elections, including next year’s gubernatorial.

“What you have to remember about Paul LePage, which is also true about Donald Trump, is that they both draw people to the polls who normally don’t vote, and that makes it hard to predict the makeup of the voting electorate,” says Cutler, the independent who nearly beat LePage in 2010. “I wouldn’t be sanguine.”