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AUGUSTA, Maine — Lobbyist and former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason will run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2026, adding a well-connected candidate with roots in the party’s evangelical wing to a fractured primary.
Mason, 40, of Lisbon was set to announce his run on an episode of his podcast that will be released on Wednesday morning. It is his second campaign for the Blaine House after finishing as the runner-up to businessman Shawn Moody in the 2018 Republican primary.
“There are times that we need somebody to come in and rattle up the system. That is not this time. This moment requires precision,” he said in the episode, which was taped on Tuesday and shared exclusively with the Bangor Daily News. “It requires institutional knowledge, and it involves understanding the real levers of power.”
That insider case stands out after eight years of Democratic control of Augusta and among a 10-person primary field mostly made up of outsiders. A top ally of Vice President JD Vance will manage Mason’s campaign, something that could be valuable at a time when President Donald Trump’s backing is the most important prize in Republican politics.
As a 25-year-old, Mason was first elected to the Maine Senate in 2010, the last time Republicans won control of Augusta under former Gov. Paul LePage. He was a party leader during the period of divided government at the end of LePage’s term, including when his caucus aligned with Democrats in a 2017 budget standoff that prompted a state shutdown.
During that time, he was a dynamic political operator. His paid internship program helped Republicans win the Senate in 2014 and keep it in 2016. He backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries, although he jumped on board with the president after he locked down the nomination and introduced him at a Lisbon rally days before the election.
In the 2018 Republican primary, Mason faced criticism from his right for running under Maine’s taxpayer-funded Clean Election system. Moody romped to victory in the primary after hiring top allies of LePage, including his daughter, Lauren LePage, but then lost to Gov. Janet Mills.
Mason was crosswise with LePage into 2019, when he tried to chair the state party but dropped out just before the election. He then criticized “a cult of personality” around the former governor, whose preferred candidate won the race. Many of the same LePage allies who backed Moody in 2018 are now behind former fitness executive Ben Midgley of Kennebunkport.
He is making a national play in hiring Vance ally Luke Thompson as his campaign manager. Thompson gained attention in 2022 by running a political committee funded by billionaire Peter Thiel that skirted campaign finance law by publishing research on a secret website in order to pass it to Vance’s bare-bones Ohio Senate campaign.
In an interview, Thompson noted the independent candidacy of state Sen. Rick Bennett, a former Maine Republican Party chair, by saying Mason’s campaign will focus on mobilizing a growing conservative base in the northern half of the state that could be crucial to winning a three-way race.
Mason is a social conservative who said in 2018 that he opposes abortion in all cases except to save the life of a mother. LePage lost a 2022 race defined by that issue to Mills, although Mason did not mention it in his podcast amid a focus on the economy and other issues.
Other primary candidates include health tech entrepreneur Jonathan Bush and two who have cribbed parts of Trump’s style in lawyer Bobby Charles and real estate agent David Jones. In his podcast, Mason implicitly criticized Charles’ big promises of eliminating taxes and crime as unrealistic and said Republicans cannot simply do a Trump impression to win.
“My value is knowing exactly how to work with Donald Trump, not to pretend to be him,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot about that on the campaign trail. It’s ineffective, it’s unserious, and quite frankly, it looks ridiculous.”