Hannah Pingree and Bobby Charles will face each other this fall for Maine governor after winning their party primaries Friday in the ranked-choice runoff count. The results set up an open-seat contest for the state’s top job, with Democratic Gov. Janet Mills term-limited after serving since 2018.
The governor race did not end with a landslide for either side. No candidate in either primary cleared 50% in the June 9 voting, and the Democratic contest was especially tight, with the top four challengers separated by only a few percentage points. Democrats chose among Pingree, Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Angus King III and Nirav Shah, while the Republican field included Charles, Jonathan Bush, Garrett Mason, Robert Wessels, Owen McCarthy, David Jones and Ben Midgley.
Maine’s use of ranked choice voting, adopted by voters 10 years ago, turned Tuesday’s primary into a longer count that left the final nominees to be settled later in the week. That process also kept the governor’s race in the spotlight because Mills, who has led the state since 2018, is leaving office even as she had launched a Senate primary bid before suspending it in April.
The close Democratic finish matters because it shows how little separated the contenders in a field that had five active Democrats and seven Republicans competing for the nomination. Pingree emerged from that squeeze to claim the party’s line, and Charles did the same on the Republican side, giving both parties a clear fall ticket in a race with no incumbent on the ballot.
The other major contest to come out of the same ranked count also settled on Friday. Matt Dunlap won the Democratic nomination in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and will face Paul LePage, who was unopposed in the Republican primary, for the House seat being vacated by Jared Golden. The governor’s race now shifts to the general election, where the size of Pingree’s margin in the final count is the number that best captures just how close this primary really was.
