AUGUSTA, Maine — Former Maine House Speaker Hannah Pingree won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, turning a second-place starting position into a decisive ranked-choice victory behind the broadest closing coalition in the field.
Pingree won 56.2% votes in the final round of counting to runner-up Nirav Shah’s 43.8%. She entered the count more than 8,000 votes behind him but consolidated steady support in later rounds to a far larger degree than pre-election polling suggested. Backers of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson consolidated behind her.
The 49-year-old from North Haven was last on a Maine ballot nearly 20 years ago, but she has deep ties across the party. She appealed to establishment figures as well as progressives. She was endorsed by Gov. Janet Mills while being part of a ranked-choice alliance blessed by the man who ended the governor’s political career: U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner.
“Now the real work begins,” she said in a statement after the results were announced. “This campaign is about housing that allows young people to stay in Maine, quality health care we can afford, no matter where you live.”
In the Legislature, Pingree helped pass Maine’s same-sex marriage law, championed the Kids Safe Products Act against the chemical industry and more recently led Mills, functioning like a deputy governor responsible for policy areas including housing, climate and the economy. She is generally seen as being more progressive and more collaborative than the governor.
For example, Pingree broke with Mills during her campaign by embracing tribal sovereignty, saying she would have signed a ban on data centers and advocating for higher taxes on second homes owned by out-of-state residents. She remains tied to much of Mills’ legacy on housing, including a report that called for 76,000 new units by 2030.
Maine is highly likely to miss that mark. The state has also not elected a governor from the same party as the outgoing one since the 1950s, something Pingree’s campaign nodded to in a fundraising email early Friday. Republicans looked to brand her as a continuation of the outgoing governor.
“Pingree shares every failure of our failed [Gov.] Janet Mills,” Republican nominee Bobby Charles wrote on Facebook.
She ran alongside former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows in a ranked-choice alliance encouraged by Platner that designed to concentrate second and third choices against Shah. But she and Shah did not directly engage much and he even said Pingree was his No. 2 choice during a debate in early May.
The alliance held in a stronger fashion than Pingree’s supporters expected. Pre-election polling suggested that Bellows would be a strong opponent if she got ahead of Jackson for third place. But she was eliminated first in the ranked-choice count that was finalized early Friday, with Pingree picking up outsized shares of Bellows and Jackson supporters to beat Shah.
Pingree heads into the fall against Republican nominee Bobby Charles, with independent state Sen. Rick Bennett of Oxford also on the ballot. Republicans have generally seen Pingree as the most difficult nominee to run against, although some think the name of her mother, U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree of the 1st District, could be a drag in northern Maine.