PORTLAND, Maine — Republican Bobby Charles accused Democrat Hannah Pingree without evidence of using her state job to enrich her family in Wednesday’s final gubernatorial debate.
He opened the WMTW debate with the charge and came back to versions of it more later in the debate, including during a question about electricity rates.
“She boldly violated the public trust, conspiring with Janet Mills to enrich her family,” Charles said.
The attack dominated an hour of bitter exchanges that showed where each campaign stands three weeks before the Nov. 3 election. Pingree, a former Maine House speaker and top Mills adviser, has led every public poll since the June primary. Charles has gotten almost no help from national Republicans, and he made the debate a test of her character.
The underdog’s attack rests on two allegations he first made at a Sept. 30 news conference in Rockland. Both involve films made by Pingree’s husband, filmmaker Jason Mann, and neither is supported by the public record, according to the Midcoast Villager.
The first, which Charles repeated Wednesday, involves North Haven Sustainable Housing, a nonprofit on Pingree’s home island that Mann now leads. It received an $840,000 forgivable loan from MaineHousing for rental units, and around the same time Mann co-directed and produced a film for the group. Pingree said she was not involved in the award.
The second claim was that Pingree’s former office gave nearly $38,000 to the Island Institute, a Rockland-based nonprofit group, and that the money paid for a climate film produced by Mann. The institute called that “false” and said none of the grant went to his film.
Pingree predicted in her first answer that Charles would spend the night attacking her, and she cast it as a repeat of his primary campaign.
“This is how he won his Republican primary with lies, AI memes, [President] Donald Trump 2.0,” Pingree said. “I think Maine people want a positive campaign where we talk about how we solve the issues.”
Pingree’s strategy has been to tie Charles firmly to Trump, who is unpopular in Maine. She called Charles a “25-year lobbyist.” She also raised his past support for Trump’s Iran war, his opposition to MaineCare expansion and his remarks in August, obtained by the BDN, that he would ask for “ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths.”
Charles has softened his tone on Trump since the primary, and on Wednesday he said he has never met the president. He also defended a scaled-back version of his pledge to cut $4 billion from the state budget. To do it, he cited a $15.9 billion budget figure that includes nearly $6 billion in federal money.
The third candidate, independent state Sen. Rick Bennett, a former Maine Republican Party chair polling in the single digits, cast himself as the alternative to both. He struggled at times to get words in.
“It’s not really a debate. It’s more like who can outshout each other,” Bennett said.