Politics
Our political journalists are based in the Maine State House and have deep source networks across the partisan spectrum in communities all over the state. Their coverage aims to cut through major debates and probe how officials make decisions. Read more Politics coverage here.
Nirav Shah, who became one of Maine’s best-known public officials while leading the state’s health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, filed to run for governor Monday.
The former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention called reporters to a morning campaign event in Portland. He joins Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, House Speaker Hannah Pingree, former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson and former clean energy executive Angus King III in the Democratic field looking to succeed the term-limited Gov. Janet Mills.
Shah’s campaign is an audacious bet that Maine voters will highly value his management of the pandemic in the absence of a defined record on any other issue. He also would have less time living in the state than any other governor in the modern era.
“My priorities are very straightforward,” Shah, 48, of Brunswick said in an interview last week ahead of his launch. “I want to feed kids, I want to fix housing. I want to fund health care, and I want to fuel our economy’s growth.”
The trained doctor and lawyer grew up in Wisconsin and started his career fighting disease outbreaks in Asia. He ran Illinois’ public health agency under a Republican governor, but the state’s two Democratic senators called on him to resign in 2018 following a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a veterans home.
His career was revived by Mills, a Democrat whose administration picked him to lead the Maine CDC after the governor took office in 2019. He rose to prominence during media briefings in the early part of the pandemic, initially winning bipartisan plaudits for his communication skills.
Overall, Maine fared relatively well during the pandemic. A 2022 study by conservative economists tied to President Donald Trump gave the state an A grade for keeping deaths low while mitigating economic harm. It was one of only six states to get that high mark.
But political polarization around management of the virus grew as the pandemic dragged on. Mills faced conservative resistance over business restrictions and vaccine mandates. Shah was the public face of those policies. He left the Maine CDC in 2023 to be the No. 2 official at its federal counterpart, and he now leads a public health initiative at Colby College in Waterville.
He left the federal government after President Donald Trump took over. He focused heavily on the Republican president in an interview, saying Trump’s approach is threatening health care, the environment and “our democratic way of life.” He said the next governor needs to be a lawyer for the state to push back against the federal government on multiple fronts.
Shah said he was “proud” of Maine’s liberal set of laws around abortion, which have been expanded under Mills. Shah said the state’s current tax code is appropriate, adding that he is skeptical of a millionaire tax that has been floated by progressive Democratic lawmakers but resisted by the governor’s administration.
Maine’s next governor will be confronted with a rural health care crisis. Brewer-based Northern Light Health has faced massive losses, closed a hospital and had executives resign. Three hospitals in Belfast, Bar Harbor and Calais have closed their birthing units. Shah said hospitals should be collaborating more regionally but do not for fear of the state enforcing antitrust laws.
“Some small changes to the way that the state allows hospitals to collaborate could mean that not every hospital has to stand up its own system but rather they would be able to collaborate and as a network, provide the services that people need,” he said.
