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The conservative slate for Bangor City Council — Anthony Cote, Terry Dinkins and Joseph Pratt — swept all three open seats on Tuesday, beating out nine other contenders in the city’s largest candidate pool in at least four decades.
The outcome is a sign that an uptick in local organizing on the right, backed by tens of thousands in spending on ads, paid off in a city that typically votes blue, and on a midterms night where Democrats have won nearly all the big-ticket federal races in Maine and across the country.
Cote was the most popular candidate, with 4,758 votes, and Dinkins and Pratt earned 4,615 and 4,099 votes, respectively.
Cote and Pratt are Republicans, while Dinkins is unenrolled in a political party. All three were endorsed by the Concerned Citizens of Bangor PAC, which formed this year and spent more than $15,000 on the election.
The nine unsuccessful candidates, in order of most to least votes received, were Adam Baker 3,331, Joe Leonard 3,165, Andrei Yermakov 3,102, Jennifer McGinley Maskala 1,833, James Gallagher 1,798, Michael Furrow 1,712, Katherine Devine 1,658, John King 1,640, and Dawson Nevells 1,485.
The new councilors will be sworn in Monday, Nov. 9, at 10 a.m. They will replace Leonard as well as outgoing councilors Susan Deane and Carolyn Fish.
Cote owns a construction business and has described himself as a centrist. He said his top priority as a councilor would be to make Bangor more business-friendly. He also wants to cut the city budget and further restrict the number of needles someone can get when visiting a syringe exchange program due to his belief that those programs enable addiction.
Cote was excited to hear the news, and also “a little surprised,” but said he thinks the results are a sign that residents feel they haven’t been listened to by the current council. There were “a lot of good candidates,” Cote said, but he thinks the Concerned Citizens of Bangor’s organizing helped voters unite behind three candidates.
Dinkins is the pastor of the Mansion Church on Center Street, the chaplain at the Penobscot County Jail and a branch manager for an armored car company. He’s run a winter warming center out of his church since 2020 and named reducing homelessness and cutting down on drugs and needles as priorities. He’d like Bangor to focus on improving mental health care and drastically reducing the number of needles distributed in the city. He’s drawn criticism in local circles online for counter-protests his church has held at LGBTQ+ pride events in the past.
“I think the citizens of Bangor want a change,” Dinkins said shortly after results came in. “The voters spoke, and we’re gonna do our best to make that change.”
Pratt oversees the wealth management group at Bar Harbor Bank and Trust and serves on the boards of several nonprofits, including the Bangor Public Library. He said his top priority would be to restore civility and decorum to the council. He also wants to expand the tax base to ease the burden on property owners. He’s opposed to harm reduction programs like syringe services and has said he believes those programs perpetuate drug abuse.
Pratt was a little surprised by the sweep as well, saying he expected one of the more liberal candidates to make the cut. The race’s results, and the large candidate field this year, were a sign to him that residents were unhappy with the direction in which the city has been going, he said.
Several Republican voters at Bangor’s polling place on Tuesday told the Bangor Daily News they thought those three candidates were the best choice for Bangor.
Jen Potter, a Bangor resident and nurse, said she was looking for local candidates who felt strongly about cleaning up the city, pointing to public drug use in particular. “I literally can look out my window and see people shooting up,” she said.
Electrician Kevin Peary saw his vote for the three as a vote for the council to “curve and come back to center” after skewing too far to the left. Peary said he was concerned about the housing market, the economy and drug use locally and wanted to see city leaders give people “a hand up rather than a hand out.”
The three winning candidates were by far the top fundraisers in the race. Dinkins raised nearly $15,000 by the most recent campaign finance filing deadline, while Cote and Pratt collected about $8,000 and $5,000 in campaign donations, respectively. The trio raised more than double the nine other candidates combined.
The PAC supporting them also spent more than $15,000 to support its preferred candidates, mostly via social media advertising. The group got most of its money from real estate investors and companies in the Bangor area and hired a conservative social media strategist who also worked for Republican Bobby Charles’s gubernatorial campaign.
All three winners said they thought the group’s work played some role in the decisive victory.
Separately, the wealthy tech entrepreneur and Cape Elizabeth Republican Jonathan Bush spent tens of thousands through his nonprofit, Maine for Keeps, on ads targeting voters in Bangor, Lewiston and Waterville this election cycle, although those ads didn’t name specific candidates.
On the left, the progressive, labor-aligned nonprofit Food and Medicine rallied about Leonard, Baker and Yermakov, although the group only spent about $300 on municipal candidates this year. The nonprofit took money this year from a national Democrat-aligned PAC and also supported candidates for offices further up on the ballot, including U.S. Senate and governor.
Katie Brydon, Emily Tilton and Jamie Beck were elected to the school committee with 7,593, 7,233 and 7,147 votes, respectively, after running unopposed for three open seats.