A version of this article was originally published in The Daily Brief, our Maine politics newsletter. Sign up here for daily news and insight from politics editor Michael Shepherd.
U.S. Sen. Angus King is a loquacious guy, with a former reporter once telling the Portland Press Herald that a large part of King’s profile is his strength at making Mainers “feel good about being Mainers.”
That political profile has changed a lot since King sliced and diced the major political parties in becoming an independent governor in 1994. That’s why the senator’s silence on the controversies facing former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden are beginning to stick out.
The context: The former Democrat always leaned to the left, but he was often able to pit lawmakers in each party against each other and create issue-to-issue alliances when he was in the Blaine House. His leadership through the good times of the 1990s made him a popular politician.
After U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe abruptly retired ahead of the 2012 election, he effectively cleared a field of prominent politicians and cruised to the seat. King surprised some by announcing late last year that he was likely to run for a third term in 2024. No prominent opponent has emerged so far.
In the Senate, King has caucused with the Democrats. While he has not formally joined them, he does not break with them very often. VoteView finds several Democrats more conservative than King on non-economic issues in this iteration of the Senate, putting him firmly in the mainstream.
Quiet on controversy: There are a few ways that he still is still unique, however. He declined comment Tuesday after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-California, announced that he would begin an impeachment probe into Biden. That response stood out because many Senate Republicans spoke up to say the lower chamber lacked evidence linking the president to the dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine delegation’s lone Republican, and U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of the Trump-friendly 2nd District also gave noncommittal answers on the impeachment move. But they at least responded to questions from reporters on the topic, as they did when Trump was indicted in August for the fourth time in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign.
King did not respond at that time either. In this way, he has stood out. He has not generally avoided the press, doing frequent interviews on MSNBC on topics ranging from voting rights to thorny foreign policy issues. In 2018, he dinged House Democrats for not having enough evidence to impeach Trump on Ukraine-related charges, although he eventually voted to convict him.
What’s next: While the Maine senator has generally resisted Trump, he has broken with Democrats in some other informative ways, including by backing most of the former president’s initial Cabinet nominees. His silence may indicate a focus on things he can control, but it also may be abundant caution heading into 2024.