A version of this story first appeared in the Morning Update newsletter. Sign up here to receive the Morning Update and other BDN newsletters directly in your inbox.
Friday is here at last!
We’ve nearly wrapped up a historic election week. Over here at the Bangor Daily News, we’re still mopping up the last few election threads, including outstanding results on the Penobscot County Jail referendum. It’s too close to call, and just a handful of small towns with a few votes could tip the outcome.
State Auditor Matt Dunlap conceded to former Gov. Paul LePage in the 2nd District race, even as it heads to a ranked-choice recount. The Democrat acknowledged that the numbers aren’t there: He’d have to net the vast majority of second-choice votes on blank and write-in ballots to thwart LePage. That’s just not happening.
In the Oxford County sheriff’s race, Democrat Timothy Holland upset Republican incumbent Christopher Wainwright by the tightest of margins.
Meanwhile, Gov.-elect Hannah Pingree tapped centrist Republican Roger Katz and former Penobscot Nation ambassador Maulian Bryant to lead her transition team.
Now, we know no one wants to think about it, but, yes, the jockeying has begun for 2028 presidential contenders. This week’s midterms may mean the field is wide open on both the Republican and Democratic side. But maybe we can take the weekend, at least, to tune it all out.
We wish we could say you’d have beautiful weather to distract you, but unfortunately, temperatures are falling throughout the weekend and we’ve got a good amount of rain on tap today and tomorrow.
Oh well.
I was inside Susan Collins’ campaign in its final hours. Here’s what I saw.
Every photojournalist aspires to be, as the line from “Hamilton” goes, in the room where it happened. But getting access to private spaces is tricky, and the more important the moment, the harder it can be to get inside.
On Tuesday, the BDN’s Linda Coan O’Kresik cashed in 30 years of goodwill from photographing U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in public and asked if she could, for once, join the senator behind closed doors at her election night watch party.
Soon after, she was ushered to the hotel suite where Collins and her family were watching results come in. In the 15 minutes she spent there, Coan O’Kresik captured the only press photos of the private moments before the five-term senator’s historic upset loss.
“For me, it was more than another assignment,” she writes in today’s story. “It was the completion of a story I had been trying to tell for three decades.”
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From the Opinion Page
“This could be a turning point.”