Seven Republican gubernatorial candidates debated Tuesday without their frontrunner, leaving the one benefiting from massive outside ad spending as the focal point on the stage.
The event hosted by the conservative group Common Sense for Maine at an Old Orchard Beach golf club ran nearly 2 1/2 hours, cycling through topics lighting up the party’s base from education and the economy under Gov. Janet Mills to allegations of Medicaid fraud.
It was framed in part by who wasn’t there: frontrunner Bobby Charles. That absence made lobbyist and former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason the target of both oblique and explicit attacks, including a testy exchange with an outsider that broke up an often-cordial event.
Here are three key moments from the debate.
A debate over Mason’s billionaire backers got personal.
Mason was the final candidate to enter the race in January. He quickly got help from an outside group funded by Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein that has reserved $1.7 million in pro-Mason ads, according to AdImpact data. It made Mason the first candidate on TV without having to spend money of his own.
During a segment in which the candidates could ask each other questions, real estate agent David Jones asked Mason whether he was beholden to billionaires. Mason responded by noting the donors’ importance to Republicans, saying Jones was jealous of him. Jones said the campaign finance system was not designed with this level of spending in mind.
“This is David Jones,” Mason said. “All show, no go. Never completed any kind of service in the state of Maine at all.”
Businessmen seeking momentum found ways to team up.
There was somewhat of an alliance between the candidates styling themselves as outsiders. Jones asked former fitness executive Ben Midgley a question that alluded to Mason’s recent comment on a Maine Republican Party podcast that the state can’t be run like a business.
“When you run a large organization, you understand the strategic vision of building a winning team,” he said. “You want to put the people in the right places that have the answers that you may not know.”
Also trying to fit into this group is health tech entrepreneur Jonathan Bush, although he is also the nephew of the late President George H.W. Bush and the cousin of President George W. Bush. He lobbed a question to another entrepreneur, Owen McCarthy, about whether it was better to have a political insider or outsider as governor.
All of these candidates are running against Augusta in concept and were stuck in the single digits behind Charles and Mason in a recent Pan Atlantic Research poll. They need to move up, and Bush is the only one of the four on TV right now.
An abortion answer alluded to a tough path for Republicans on social issues.
Bush has been a fascinating addition to the primary for several reasons, including his sharp past criticism of President Donald Trump, who has taken over the party that the Maine candidate’s family was once royalty in. He agrees with the party on many issues but has criticized its approach, including the wording of the voter ID referendum that failed in November.
Longshot candidate Robert Wessels quizzed Bush on his abortion stance on Tuesday, getting him to say he supports the right to abortion before 24 weeks. Wessels said he believes life begins at conception, which led Bush to nod to Maine’s status as a Democratic state.
“The surest way to keep us out of the House, the Senate, the governor’s mansion and every district attorney’s seat is to try to inflict that overwhelmingly unpopular view,” he said.