{"id":261065,"date":"2026-06-09T21:18:30","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T21:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/261065\/"},"modified":"2026-06-09T21:18:30","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T21:18:30","slug":"democrats-accuse-republicans-of-meddling-in-maines-second-congressional-district-primary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/261065\/","title":{"rendered":"Democrats Accuse Republicans of Meddling in Maine\u2019s Second Congressional District Primary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Republicans have appeared to use shadowy super PACs<\/a> to meddle in a series of Democratic primary contests this year, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to elevate candidates they see as weak or controversial.<\/p>\n

Democrats say the latest case is in their primary contest for Maine\u2019s Second Congressional District, pointing to a mysterious out-of-state group that has poured more than $500,000 into a race that is one of the country\u2019s most competitive general-election battles.<\/p>\n

Four candidates are vying on Tuesday for the nomination to succeed the retiring Representative Jared Golden<\/a> in the most Republican-leaning seat held by any Democrat in the House.<\/p>\n

Mr. Golden\u2019s retirement bolstered the G.O.P.\u2019s chances of flipping the vast, largely rural district, which he won with 50.3 percent of the vote<\/a> \u2014 the margin of victory was fewer than 3,000 ballots \u2014 against a Republican challenger in 2024<\/a>. President Trump won the district that year by nine percentage points.<\/p>\n

Polls suggest<\/a> that the race has no clear front-runner. None of the Democratic candidates have advertised themselves as moderates in the mold of Mr. Golden, who announced in November<\/a> that he would not seek re-election because he had \u201cgrown tired of the increasing incivility and plain nastiness\u201d of political life, citing \u201cfrequent threats\u201d against him and his family.<\/p>\n

After actively recruiting candidates for Mr. Golden\u2019s seat<\/a>, the official campaign arm of House Democrats threw its weight<\/a> behind Joe Baldacci, a state senator and former mayor of Bangor. The group argued that his record of \u201coverperformance\u201d in past elections made him the strongest candidate in a difficult district.<\/p>\n

In the Maine Legislature, Mr. Baldacci supported abortion rights but broke from his party<\/a> to oppose some gun control measures. Unlike his opponents, he has not called for universal health care.<\/p>\n

The Democratic group recently claimed<\/a> that Republicans had secretly worked to help<\/a> one of Mr. Baldacci\u2019s progressive opponents, Matt Dunlap, the state auditor, through the Real Change PAC, a political action committee registered so recently that it has not yet had to disclose its donors.<\/p>\n

Real Change PAC has spent more than $500,000 to oppose Mr. Baldacci and support Mr. Dunlap, according to campaign finance filings<\/a>, and one of its vendors uses the same Wyoming address as a firm used by another shadowy group with Republican ties<\/a>, Politico earlier reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWashington Republicans are spending over half a million dollars to attack Joe Baldacci because they\u2019re afraid to face him in November,\u201d Riya Vashi, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

On Monday, Mr. Trump singled out Mr. Dunlap, writing on social media<\/a> that he believed the Maine Democrat would win the nomination and would be a weak candidate.<\/p>\n

Mr. Dunlap previously served in the State House and as Maine secretary of state, and he was first elected as the state financial chief in 2021. After he failed to obtain the necessary certification for the job within the mandatory nine-month period, he resigned and was re-elected to the post in 2024.<\/p>\n

Asked about the outside spending, Mr. Dunlap\u2019s campaign accused Mr. Baldacci of benefiting from \u201cdark money\u201d and the support of \u201cD.C. insiders.\u201d Project 218, a Democratic super PAC<\/a>, has spent more than $900,000<\/a> to help Mr. Baldacci this cycle.<\/p>\n

\u201cMatt Dunlap stood on the debate stage and called on the entire field to swear off super PAC support in this primary,\u201d Harry Burke, Mr. Dunlap\u2019s campaign manager, told The New York Times in an email. \u201cEvery candidate joined him \u2014 except Joe Baldacci, who is being propped up by nearly a million dollars from dark money groups and corporate lobbyists because he couldn\u2019t build a campaign of Mainers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaila Harris, Mr. Baldacci\u2019s campaign manager, called the promise not to accept support from super PACs \u201cempty words.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHis empty rhetoric can\u2019t hide the fact that Republicans who want to protect Trump are backing him,\u201c she wrote. \u201cDemocrats who want to flip the House are backing Joe Baldacci.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Real Change PAC did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

A third Democratic candidate, Jordan Wood, a liberal activist, has also appeared competitive in the limited polling for the race.<\/p>\n

The Democratic nominee will face former Gov. Paul LePage of Maine, a Republican backed by Mr. Trump<\/a>, in November. A colorful, polarizing and sometimes controversial figure, Mr. LePage ascended to the governorship during the height of the Tea Party movement in 2011, adopting a populist style that has invited comparisons to the Republican president.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,\u201d Mr. LePage said after he endorsed Mr. Trump<\/a> in 2016.<\/p>\n

A spokeswoman for the campaign arm of House Republicans, Maureen O\u2019Toole, cast all of the Democratic candidates as \u201cfar left\u201d and said that \u201cvoters will send Paul LePage to Washington in November.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maine uses a ranked-choice voting system<\/a> in the primaries. If no candidate wins a majority of votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and those ballots are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on voters\u2019 next-ranked choices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Republicans have appeared to use shadowy super PACs to meddle in a series of Democratic primary contests this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[101456,28464,651,101454,416,101451,859,80739,65224,101452,5315,101455,46937,9,11,10,101453,30257,1875,5285,28306],"class_list":["post-261065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-baldacci","tag-david","tag-democratic-party","tag-dunlap","tag-elections","tag-golden","tag-house-of-representatives","tag-jared","tag-jordan","tag-lepage","tag-maine","tag-matthew-1964","tag-midterm-elections-2026","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-paul-r","tag-political-action-committees","tag-primaries-and-caucuses","tag-republican-party","tag-wood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}