Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
Tonight we jump from reporting on swingy state legislative races to one of the most fiercely contested Congressional races in the country. If progressive Democrat Matt Dunlap can win in Maine’s second District, it would blow up a lot of recieved wisdom about the kinds of ideology that appeal to much of the country. I spoke with Dunlap, and it’s a longer interview, so let’s jump right into it.
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Progressives and populist Democrats have proven that they can oust even the most entrenched incumbents in safe blue districts. This November will test whether they can win over electorates that traditionally veer purple and even voted for Donald Trump.
The marquee race in this category is the Michigan Senate race, which pits progressive Abdul El-Sayed against Republican Mike Rogers. Over on the House side, all eyes will be on Maine’s second Congressional district, where state auditor Matt Dunlap is facing off against far-right former Gov. Paul LePage.
Massive and rural, the district is currently represented by Rep. Jared Golden, the House’s most conservative Democrat. During the Biden administration, he voted against party priorities more than any other Democrat, then announced that he’d be fine with Trump winning in 2024. It seemed prescient at the time, as Golden eked out a close win in a district that backed Trump that year, but he went from survivor to antagonist soon after: in March 2025, he provided the one Democratic vote needed to pass a GOP budget bill, funding the administration’s reign of terror. Shortly after, word began to circulate that Golden might have earned himself a primary challenge.
The DCCC tried to discourage Dunlap, whose name was emerging as a possible challenger, from pursuing a run. A fixture in Maine politics, Dunlap was seen by insiders as too progressive for the district; he supports Medicare for All and served as chair of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign. After Golden announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election, the DCCC backed a different candidate, moderate state Rep. Joe Baldacci.
Dunlap’s triumph in the four-person primary led pundits and election handicappers to list the district as a likely Republican pickup, but the tide is turning. Last week, Cook Political Report nudged the race to Lean Republican, while the latest polls actually put Dunlap in the lead. If he can pull off the win, Dunlap would shatter a lot of ossified political conventional wisdom about what constitutes electability. It would provide ample evidence that populist economics, not fiscal conservatism, is the secret sauce.
I spoke with Dunlap last week to better understand the unusual circumstances of this race, what people don’t understand about the politics of rural Maine, and how he plans on defeating one of the most infamous governors in American history. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Progress Report: You got into the race a year ago, before Jared Golden retired. It looked like an uphill battle given the district’s vote in 2024. What triggered the decision?
Matt Dunlap: It was not entirely my idea. The thing about it was that here we were, last March, and people had gotten increasingly frustrated with Jared for a couple of different reasons. There was the issue around a lot of his votes, which people didn’t quite get. People would give him a pass [before] like, “Yeah, he votes for the Republicans, but it is kind of a purple district and he has to mind the store at home.” But people were saying, “Yeah, everybody has to vote their district, but not like this. He’s voting with the Republicans all the time.”
The real thing that people were frustrated by was the fact he disappeared. He didn’t go to events anymore. He didn’t walk in parades. You never saw him at a Rotary breakfast. I was home one night last March and one of the Indivisible groups in the area had an event in Bangor, and he had been invited. He refused to go, so they made it into an empty chair event. A former colleague called me that night and said, “You probably need to brace yourself, because you’re going to get a bunch of calls…”
My wife and I talked about it for several months, and she was very skeptical. Every night the conversation ended with, "This is a terrible idea." But then she had people approaching her the same way, like, "Is it true that Matt's really thinking about doing this? Because I want to help him." And we finally concluded: I run, run hard, and if I lose, then people had a choice.
I put it out there that I was exploring the idea in May. It caused a bit of a thunderclap. I got calls from folks in D.C. saying, "Don't do it." I was strongly discouraged by leadership from doing it. But what I was hearing on the ground here was just the opposite.
You announced in October and Golden dropped out a month later. The DCCC encouraged other candidates to join the race and backed Joe Baldacci.
One of the rules I have here is that you only worry about what you control, and I couldn’t control what the DCCC was doing. It angered a lot of people in Maine — and not because they backed Baldacci, but because they backed anybody in the primary. They would have been just as angry if they backed me. “Why are they getting involved in a primary? That’s for us to decide who our nominee is.”
The DCCC told me they were going to back Jared, which I understood. When he withdrew, I called them that night, and I said, “Well, it’s a different game now.” And they said, “We owe you a call. We’re going to let the dust settle, and then we’ll reach out.” And a reporter asked me the next day about my response to the news that they were sending recruiters to Maine to find somebody else. They did not want me, for whatever reason. And then, five weeks before the primary, they backed Baldacci.
When I won the primary, and then it was a very slow walk to get me into that same status. And our assumption was like, “Well, we’ve beaten them now twice. [We] drove out the incumbent, and then we beat their preferred replacement.” But you can’t really have a rearview mirror in this business. They’ve been incredibly helpful now. They’re fully on board. They are part of our weekly meetings. And one of their folks said to me, “Okay, in all fairness, we backed the wrong guy.”
I’ve often said in this business that no opportunity to be a grown-up ever seems to pass me by. And while it would be fun to demand a reckoning, I just need to get elected. And if they’re willing to help me out, I’m going to take it. So we’ve all moved on from all that.
How did you get the DCCC on board when there are so many other races?
It took some time. They wanted to see our numbers, because they had not been a part of anything to do with our campaign. So they wanted to see our poll numbers. They wanted to see our fundraising effort. And we have been very strong. I may have my faults, but I do the work. I come to the office every day and I make phone calls for five or six hours, sometimes a couple of hundred calls a day. And of course, now it’s gotten kind of lean, because people are feeling kind of tapped out, because they’re getting called by everybody. I was actually pretty excited to get into the Red to Blue program.
The conventional wisdom was that Jared Golden matched the district, like you said. So what about the district changed?
Well, really, no change. This is one of the strange mythologies of the second Congressional District of Maine, that somehow it has become deeply red. And really what’s happened here is [voters] were questioning our party. “When did the Democratic Party stop standing up and fighting for working people?”
Northern Maine, the St. John Valley, used to be entirely represented by Democrats. And now there’s not a single Democrat elected north of Old Town, where I live. And what you lose there is you don’t have that person from Fort Fairfield or Fort Kent or Presque Isle saying in the back of the caucus meeting, “Hey, don’t forget about us.” So everything’s coming out of the urban areas, and it continues an erosion that just really hurts us. It hurts our base. People feel like they’re not being heard, like they’ve been left behind. But this entire campaign has been focused around our neighbors.
When people talk to me about issues, they don’t talk about universal health care. They talk about how they can’t afford to go to the doctor. And then when you say, “Well, what if you didn’t have to worry about that?” “That would be great. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.” And it’s that sort of symbiotic give-and-take — it’s partly campaign, but it’s mostly policy. If you didn’t have to worry about child care costs, would it be easier for you to find a second job, or [for] both of you to work?
There’s this conventional wisdom that it’s fiscal conservatism that appeals to voters in places like your district. That’s not what you’re selling. Why do you think you have connected?
I think part of it is my background. I spent my whole life in the district. I grew up on a farm here. I went to school here. I’m a lifetime sportsman, which is really big for a Democrat, because you don’t have to navigate that labyrinth of gun issues and try to explain away your support for something that a lot of sportsmen don’t want. And I don’t have that issue. I chaired the Fish and Wildlife Committee. I was executive director at the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine for a year. I’m a founder of the Maine Youth Fish and Game Association.
We did some focus group work among some unenrolled, uncommitted voters, and we posited the whole sportsman issue. And for them, that wasn’t an advantage, just a baseline. So it kind of puts me in a better posture with voters who are maybe more moderate, maybe even a little bit more conservative. And in my work as a state representative and secretary of state, I think I’ve been to every school in the district talking about civics, going to communities, Kiwanis Clubs, Rotaries.
People ask me what the magic TV ad is, and there isn’t one. There’s no stone in the forest with a sword in it that you can pull out and be declared the ruler of the realm, in a right sense. It’s just got to meet people where they are, hear what they have to say, and then try to translate that back to them in terms of ideas.
So let’s say you go to D.C., things go well, and the Democrats have at least one house of Congress. What are your main focuses?
The number one thing I’ve been hearing about has been health care, so that’s the first thing we need to work on. And while a Medicare for All universal health care system would be great, the odds of that happening right away are long, because it’s going to be a complex process. But at least restoring the ACA tax credits, and getting 30,000 Mainers back onto the insurance rolls that had to drop it because they couldn’t afford it, that would be a great step. And just keep building out [from] there.
Anything that we can do — taking the cap off Social Security contributions, and preserve Social Security into the foreseeable future, and expand people’s benefits — would be a great thing as well. And just things to take burdens off people’s shoulders.
You’re not running against a fresh face or Republican without much of a record or public profile; Paul LePage was a two-term governor and a big lightning rod during his time in office. Do you think that’s made the race more or less difficult?
I think part of what Jared’s thinking in withdrawing in November was, “Okay, Dunlap, you want a primary? Have fun.” And throwing the gate open, thinking that maybe a dozen people would get into the race. And that really didn’t happen. And I think part of it was people saw LePage, with his name recognition — the fact he’s a two-term former governor, that he had run for governor again and lost, although he won the second district by a point and a half — [and thought] that this may be something that people want to keep their powder dry about.
LePage is well-known, but not all for the best reasons. He vetoed Medicaid expansion six times. He talked about people of color as drug dealers who came to Maine to sell drugs and then they get a white girl pregnant on their way out of town. He called Social Security and Medicare welfare. He said that teachers were a dime a dozen as he was proposing cutting teacher and other state retirement benefits, which he did.
He withheld voter-approved Medicaid expansion funds. He withheld Land for Maine’s Future funds, which is our big conservation program. People remember this stuff. We talked about housing in the debate, and somebody wrote to me after the debate and said he should have reminded people that he would not issue voter-approved housing bonds when he was governor. He touched everything, and usually he touched it with a fist. And I think that’s why he is not running away with this.
You’ve got to remind people of those things, but the second district makes up most of the state, and it’s really rural. You can’t exactly go around doing door-knocking. So how do you campaign in a race like this?
Well, where I am in central Maine, Old Town is two hours away from everything but Bangor. There was one stretch where on Saturday we were down in Fryeburg on the New Hampshire border. The next day we were up in Presque Isle on the Canadian border. And then we went down to East Machias, way down in Washington County. And then we were in Lewiston, in central Androscoggin County, which is in the western part of the state. It’s just what you’ve got to do, and I don’t even think about it. We got to about a week before the primary, and somebody asked me how I was doing.
And I think I’ve got an analogy, but nobody understands it, because very few people have done the crazy things I’ve done. But I ran cross country at the University of Maine, and I was a distance runner on the track team. And at one point, somebody talked me into doing a 24-hour marathon. And four o’clock in the morning, I think I was actually asleep while I was running, and you’re just kind of catatonic, but you just keep going. And it’s kind of similar with this. It’s like, “Okay, where do I have to be today?” And I don’t think about, “I wish I was doing something else.” You just plan for it, and you get out there and you go and you do what you need to do.
It forced us to get our ground game going and iron out all the wrinkles. And when the fall campaign started, we were already at flank speed. Whereas LePage was unopposed — he got the fall, the winter, the spring, the summer off, for the most part. And it still feels like he’s trying to find his rhythm, and I don’t think he’s doing a very good job at it.
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Dunlap sounds like a solid guy. Here's hoping he wins and is able to do some of the things he would like to do.