The tight race for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District will head to a runoff after no candidate received more than 50% of the vote, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows announced Thursday.
But this process is unlikely to swing the election. Former Republican Gov. LePage, who holds a 5,400-vote lead among all reporting municipalities, is still a heavy favorite to win the race. He declared victory at a news conference Wednesday — although The Associated Press has not yet called the race.
And on Thursday afternoon, shortly after Bellows’ announcement, Democratic Auditor Matt Dunlap, LePage’s opponent, conceded victory.
“This is not the result we were hoping for and I am disappointed that we did not succeed. Congratulations to Paul LePage, I wish him the best,” Dunlap said in a press release.
Regardless, the ranking of picks will begin Monday in Augusta with confirmation of the accuracy of the votes cast. Then, tabulators will count second-choice votes among the ballots that initially ranked neither LePage nor Dunlap.
Although incomplete AP results show LePage with more than 50 percent of the vote, that doesn’t include the 6,014 blank ballots cast. The state also determines the 50% threshold necessary to avoid a second round of ranked-choice voting using these blank ballots. LePage is just 316 votes away from the winning threshold.
Blank ballots include those that have not filled out any candidate bubbles, as well as ballots with a registered candidate who has not officially declared their candidacy. It’s unclear how many of those blank ballots fall into each category, nor how many voters who wrote in for one candidate chose LePage or Dunlap as their second choice.
Also at stake are the 123 votes for the declared write-in candidate, Gregory A. Ward.
Any ballots that did not rank a first or second choice will be removed from the total votes cast in the ranked choice runoff.
At the press conference in Bangor on Wednesday, LePage said there was no path to victory for Dunlap.
This analysis is probably correct; with just a few hundred votes missing in LePage, he could cross the 50% threshold in the first round of counting.
LePage senior adviser Brent Littlefield supported his team’s vote count in a press release Thursday, saying it was “very clear…that Paul LePage is the elected member of Congress.”
Ranked tabulation was also used two years ago during elections in this same constituency. In 2024, the 2nd District race between Democratic incumbent Rep. Jared Golden and Republican Austin Theriault went to a runoff after 3% of voters selected neither candidate.
This runoff began a week after the election and ended three days later, with Golden declared the winner. A subsequent recount confirmed his victory.
After the first round votes were counted, Golden had a lead of 2,159 votes out of nearly 400,000 votes, with approximately 48.65% of the total votes cast. Golden even disputed the need for a recount, saying he received the majority of first-choice votes — but Bellows argued that blank ballots were counted in the total.
LePage, however, is much closer to the 50% threshold than Golden and holds a larger lead over his opponent. It is likely that he will become the final winner.
If the results are confirmed as his team expects, the former governor’s return to elected office is remarkable in the context of this electoral cycle: LePage would so far become the only Republican in this midterm “blue wave” to flip a seat held by the Democrats in the House of Representatives.
All other Maine elections heavily favored Democrats, with Troy Jackson defeating Sen. Susan Collins and Hannah Pingree easily winning the gubernatorial race. But by increasing margins in deep-red rural areas, LePage pulled ahead in the vote count Wednesday.
If he were to win the runoff, the 78-year-old would be one of the oldest freshman congressmen in American history — a backbencher with little individual legislative power in a heavily Democratic Congress.
LePage’s campaign has not yet made a statement on Bellows’ announcement, nor has Dunlap’s.
This is a developing story.
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