Money is flooding into races up and down the ballot during a highly-watched election year in Maine, and Bangor is no exception.
Two groups are supporting competing slates of endorsed candidates in a crowded Bangor City Council race, including one political action committee backing conservative candidates that has collected double the donations of all of last year’s candidates combined, representing a significant influx of cash to the council race.
The vast majority of the PAC money in the race comes from real estate investors and companies, a community that’s become more vocal at City Council meetings this year in its criticisms of Bangor’s government. Tuesday’s council election will be a test of whether those critics represent a majority of Bangor voters.
Concerned Citizens of Bangor, which is backing three of the more conservative candidates in the race, has raised nearly $30,000 and spent more than $15,000, according to campaign finance reports filed with the City Clerk’s office and obtained by the Bangor Daily News through a public records request.
“We’re in a crisis,” said Philip Henry, a local real estate investor who is spearheading the Concerned Citizens project, in reference to persistent issues in Bangor around public drug use and homelessness. “I think that’s pretty much, I think, why people were willing to contribute.”
On the flip side, Food and Medicine, a progressive Brewer-based organization that runs anti-poverty programs in the Bangor area, often endorses candidates in the Bangor City Council election and has spent money on mailers and canvassing, although it’s only spent about $300 on municipal candidates this year.
Food and Medicine has taken money from a national PAC working to get Democrats elected and is also advocating for candidates in state and federal races.
Bangor’s local government is officially nonpartisan, which means that city councilors are bound by the city charter to maintain a nonpartisan structure, and that candidates’ party affiliations do not appear beside their names on the ballot. That doesn’t preclude political groups from supporting candidates or otherwise influencing local elections.
Concerned Citizens, which identifies itself as nonpartisan but is closely aligned with policies and talking points being used by Republicans across the state, has spent more than $15,000, mostly on social media and online advertising.
“We need a more balanced approach,” Henry said of partisan influences on the council, adding that he doesn’t think any one party should get too much power. “For the time that we’re in right now, I think we need to vote Republican, or in this case, we need to vote common sense.”
The PAC endorsed candidates Anthony Cote, Terry Dinkins and Joseph Pratt and has run seven ads on Facebook and Instagram, mostly advocating for its preferred candidates. Some also include attacks on Food and Medicine’s chosen candidates Adam Baker, Andrei Yermakov and incumbent Joe Leonard. One ad includes footage of people slumped over in the streets of a city that does not resemble Bangor.
Oftentimes, PACs operate independently from the people they support, meaning the candidates don’t necessarily have any say in the ads run by the groups or the money that flows through them. Neither of the two PACs that are active in Bangor’s council election this year have donated directly to a candidate.
The ads highlight issues like needle distribution and responsible spending and say its chosen candidates will “save Bangor.” Henry named drugs as a top issue for the campaign, saying he’d like to see additional drug enforcement and no more syringe distribution in the city.
Concerned Citizens paid Florida-based Harris Media $13,000 for online ads. The conservative political marketing agency is owned by Vincent Harris, is also a strategist for Republican Bobby Charles’s gubernatorial campaign and has worked for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and a pro-Trump SuperPAC.
More than $23,000 — about 80% of donations to the PAC — came from realtors or real estate-related companies, including $10,000 that came from several LLCs linked to Maine Real Estate Management, a major property manager in the city.
Henry attributed that trend in part to the relationships he and others in his group have with other business leaders in the city.
About a third of contributions to the PAC came from three LLCs that are all tied to Maine Real Estate Management, a major property management company in the city that’s owned by Jesse McCue. The property management company oversees about 3,000 units across the state, according to McCue’s LinkedIn profile.
Those three LLCs all donated on the same day and listed post office boxes as their addresses, according to the PAC’s campaign finance filings. Two of the LLCs — JM Investment Group LLC and C&M Investment Group LLC — listed the same post office box. McCue is named as a part owner of both companies on filings with the Maine Secretary of State’s office.
The other company, Apartment Living LLC, lists Tristan Thomas as an owner in its Secretary of State filings. Those files list 21 Main St., Suite 101 as Thomas’s address, the same suite as Maine Real Estate Management’s downtown Bangor office. The BDN could not find contact information for Thomas.
The three LLCs own at least six properties each in the city, property records show, ranging from smaller residential buildings to commercial properties to the Tower 99 luxury apartment complex downtown.
McCue did not respond to phone calls, emails and text messages requesting comment.
The PAC’s funding is separate from Maine for Keeps, the nonprofit headed by the wealthy tech entrepreneur and Cape Elizabeth resident Jonathan Bush that is pouring tens of thousands of dollars into local elections in Maine, although the two groups are aligned in some shared complaints about the city and have both hired the same social media agency.
While Concerned Citizens of Bangor is focusing on three candidates, Bush’s group is not endorsing or contributing to any in particular. His nonprofit, Maine for Keeps, had spent about $60,000 on what the entrepreneur called an “issue-based campaign” as of Oct. 21, he told the BDN. He did not respond to a follow-up question asking how that money was split between the campaign’s three target cities of Bangor, Lewiston and Waterville.
Maine for Keeps does not need to report any campaign finance filings because its ads don’t support or oppose any named candidates. Analysis of public information on the Meta Ad Library shows the group has spent at least $3,800 on Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Bangor.
Food and Medicine is also spending money on the council election, although its expenditures are far smaller.
The group is an anti-poverty organization that runs various programs in the area, such as community gardens and food distribution to those in need. It’s closely affiliated with the Eastern Maine Labor Council, which also participated in its candidate endorsement deliberations, according to Jack McKay, the executive director of Food and Medicine.
Food and Medicine’s PAC spent about $890 in the latest campaign finance reporting period, which ran from Oct. 1 to Oct. 20, on mailers, door cards and canvassing staff that included support for city-level Bangor candidates as well as those running for state and federal races, according to filings on the state ethics commission website. The BDN excluded expenditures that only related to state and federal candidates from its analysis of municipal election spending.
Split between the eight candidates the group endorsed up and down the ballot, that means it spent just over $110 on each City Council candidate, or about $330 on the three endorsed municipal candidates.
Mailers advertising the progressive slate say that the group’s chosen candidates “will work hardest for everyday Mainers, not special interests.” They list Movement Voter PAC and Food and Medicine as the PAC’s top donors. The former is a nationwide group working to fund a “blue wave” in Senate, House and downballot races across the country, according to its website. The group’s “Maine 2026 plan” posted online focuses on the federal races in the state.
The Food and Medicine PAC has not taken in any new contributions in this election cycle, although it has tens of thousands in the bank leftover from previous cycles, according to state filings, and Federal Election Commission records show that Movement Voter PAC has given $40,000 to the Food and Medicine nonprofit this year.
As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which the federal government defines as a social welfare organization that may engage in political activity as long as social welfare remains its primary purpose, Food and Medicine is allowed to accept political donations and create a PAC.
McKay, the executive director and a Bangor resident, emphasized that his organization runs many different programs, and electoral work is one piece of that.
“We believe it’s a better country when people directly affected have a voice in public policy matters,” he said.
Concerned Citizens of Bangor has repeatedly criticized Food and Medicine for its political organizing since it’s also received city money for social programs in the past.
Last year, the nonprofit spent just over $1,000 combined on the three City Council candidates it endorsed, according to BDN analysis of that year’s state filings.