Well, it’s time for a recap on what I got right over the past year … and what I got wrong.

The list of things I got wrong was bound to be short, not because I’m some kind of genius, but because I’m generally not in the business of predicting things.

It seems I was right — so far — that none of the Republicans who ran for governor in 2018 are running again in 2026. That may still change in the coming months, but I don’t think any new major candidates will enter the race. I was also absolutely correct that there would be a large number of inexperienced, unknown gubernatorial candidates on the Republican side.

I was also correct that the progressive wing of the Maine Democratic Party would be active in the gubernatorial race: all of the leading candidates fit that label at the moment. While I didn’t explicitly predict that Gov. Janet Mills would get a free pass if she ran for the U.S. Senate, I didn’t expect a political unknown who’s never run for office before to be her primary challenger.

Graham Platner’s rise shows that, for all the ascendancy of the progressive wing, they don’t have a lot of household names ready and willing to enter the fray.

While I didn’t predict that Rep. Jared Golden would pass on a run for governor, that decision wasn’t exactly surprising. Several progressive candidates were already in the race at the time he made his decision; clearly nobody was deferring to him in their plans. He would have not only faced a primary, but a contentious one.

What was surprising was his decision to bow out of re-election and, at least for the moment, elective politics entirely. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been such a shock, but the timing was curious: he made the announcement the week after the off-year elections in which Democrats did extraordinarily well.

There’s no particular reason to question his explanation for his decision — that he was tiring of extraordinarily divisive nature of politics lately. It clearly wasn’t a well-laid plan, though: he’d been acting like a candidate for months, brushing aside the prospect of a primary challenge
from former Secretary of State Matt Dunlap.

Now, the only Democrats running for Congress in the second district are Matt Dunlap and newcomer Jordan Wood, who pivoted from the U.S. Senate race after Platner’s meteoric rise.

Another surprise of this year was the decision by former governor Paul LePage to run for Congress in the Second District. Although he did well in the district during his gubernatorial runs, there hadn’t been many hints that he was considering a congressional run. Suddenly, he was in the race.

Not only that, it was immediately clear that no other major Republicans were going to challenge him for the nomination. It’s odd to see the majority party in an open congressional district without a competitive primary, but that may well be the case in Maine’s Second District. The fact that LePage can so easily discourage opposition shows he still has enormous sway over Maine Republicans.

When it comes to the U.S. Senate, though, don’t expect Sen. Susan Collins to suddenly change her mind about re-election, like Golden did this year or Olympia Snowe did years ago. She knows very well that Maine Republicans lack an experienced, well-known candidate who can win statewide: one need only look at the long list of gubernatorial candidates for evidence of that.

Indeed, by next year it will have been twenty years since any Republican other than Collins or LePage won statewide. It won’t be an easy race for Collins, though, nor will it be cheap: It’s already the third-most expensive U.S. Senate race in the country and it’s not even election year yet.

It will finish as the most expensive campaign in Maine history, and one of the most hard-fought races ever — in both the primary and the general. The Senate race will sweep up so much oxygen that it will overpower the gubernatorial race, especially in the primary.

Given the huge variety of lesser-known candidates in the gubernatorial race, and ranked-choice voting, that could lead to unexpected results. The Senate race may get the most attention, but in the end the gubernatorial race will be far more interesting — and, potentially, quite surprising.