AUGUSTA, Maine — A former Democratic legislator has filed to run in a March special election for a vacant Maine Senate seat in a race that could pit him against the last Republican to represent the district in southern Kennebec County.
The swing seat provides a decent pick-up opportunity for Republicans who saw their Senate minority reduced by one to 13 seats in the November election and was left vacant when Sen. Shenna Bellows, D-Manchester, resigned in December just before the Legislature elected her as the next secretary of state, replacing the term-limited and outgoing Matt Dunlap.
Politicking for the seat began shortly after that. Dunlap and Gov. Janet Mills set the election for Tuesday, March 9, on Monday. The party nominees must officially be picked by Democratic and Republican caucuses in the cities and towns in the district centered in Winthrop and Gardiner and the deadline for nominations is Jan. 8.
Former Rep. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop, was the first to file to raise money for the race on Friday, according to the Maine Ethics Commission. Hickman, an organic farmer and the first Maine lawmaker to be Black and openly gay, cut a unique profile in eight years in Augusta.
He was active on civil rights issues and met privately with then-Gov. Paul LePage in 2016 after the latter made racially insensitive comments. But he also persuaded the Republican governor to sign his pioneering food sovereignty bill in 2017 — winning shoutouts from LePage in his final State of the State speech — and opposed strict gun control measures.
Republican leaders are coalescing behind former Sen. Earle McCormick of West Gardiner, who served four terms in the Senate and two in the House since 2002 and has indicated he will run. McCormick narrowly lost a 2018 race to Rep. Charlotte Warren, D-Hallowell, in a relatively liberal portion of the Senate district. Warren, who had been considering a Senate run, said Monday that she was endorsing Hickman.
The district went for President Donald Trump in 2016 but flipped to endorse President-elect Joe Biden this year by 1 percentage point over Trump. Bellows won her first term in a three-way race four years ago and beat outgoing Hallowell Mayor Mark Walker, a Republican, in the November election. The last similar special election came in part of Bangor in March 2019 after Aaron Frey left the Maine House of Representatives to become attorney general.