Transcript
37 segmentsto Jason Savage, executive director of the main Republican Party. He is with us now. Jason, how are things, sir? Things are going well, sir. I mean, I feel like things are on track. The races are in good shape. We've got a pretty good fight on our hands in the governor's race, but I think we're going to overperform. I feel pretty good. Yeah. So when last we spoke, we were waiting for results. And they were supposed to come at noon that very same day, Jason. Then they, of course, were supposed to come at 2 o'clock and then 5 o'clock and then 7 and the 9. And it was 1.30 in the morning on Friday that we finally got them. But now we actually have definitive names to talk about. You have on the Democratic side, Hannah Pingree, of course, as we all know at this point. And you have Bobby Charles on the Republican side with Rick Bennett, you know, also running as an independent. So. Love to ask you, Jason Savage, how you view this race now that you actually have these names. Hannah Pingree, for instance. Let's tackle her for a second as the Democratic nominee. What do you think of that? The sweeping, the broad sweeping perspective on this is that it's our guy, Bobby Charles, against two Democrats. And, you know, Hannah's the official Democrat and Rick Bennett's the unofficial Democrat. But their policy agenda and their... their voting and their history, you know, in recent years are pretty much the same. So, you know, we've got to make the case. It's the Republican conservative direction or the liberal Democrat direction. And, you know, we'll see how it goes. I think that people have experienced enough pain from the liberal Democrat agenda over the last eight years that they probably don't want four more years of that. And that's the case that Bobby Charles and our team have to make. And Hannah Pingree, to bring her back up again, is of all the five that we're running in that contest, she is the most perfect corollary with Janet Mills. So Janet Mills, time in office, has obviously been quite divisive, done a lot of things that have, I think, ultimately resulted in the state going down the tubes, depending on what metric you track. It's not looking good for basically everything. So. Hannah Pingree was there as a chief policy advisor and one of the people that was really implementing and in charge of a lot of the policy that the administration pursued, including on things like energy and housing. And now she's the nominee. So if you're running against the last eight years, you have a perfect, a perfect avatar for Janet Mills' time in office. She told me on Tuesday I'm not running for Janet Mills 2.0. for her third term, but yet it's going to be hard to make that case when you were there for the entire time. She may not say she's running for Janet Mills 2.0, but that's what we're going to get if she wins. And, you know, we can go maybe from 48th to 50th in the country in some of the areas where Janet Mills hasn't put us in last place. But, you know, we're basically going to become the Jamaican bobsled team of states when it comes to the economy and education and everything else that you care about.
with with hannah pingrey um you know maybe we need a new term besides Janet Mills 2.0 um but it's it's essentially is junior an acceptable thing and on for for women i don't know i mean that's that's essentially it's the same thing i mean just just another Janet Mills. She's Janet Mills mini-mee. She's been there. She's been there supporting the agenda all eight years. It's not like... You know, funny thing though, Jason, it's not even that she's just been supporting it. She's been driving it. You know, it's like a lot of the decisions, if you don't like some of the decisions she's done, which of course I don't, guess where a lot of them came from? Hannah Pingree. Yeah. Hannah Pingree was whispering them in Janet Mills' year. Yeah, or signing pieces of paper that actually did it. It's a real perfect, I think it's a real perfect opportunity to say, look, are you happy with what you have just lived through for the last eight years? Because if the answer is yes, fine, go vote for her. But if it's no. then you got to look somewhere else. And there you go. Bobby Charles is sitting there. And now you have a nominee. Actually, that's my other question for you, Jason, here is that I know that there was, you know, originally eight and then later seven candidates in that race. It was a hard-fought contest. But Bobby Charles came through. In the end, rather comfortably, he had a 17-point lead in that first round and then maintained it throughout the additional rounds. It seemed every single round that went by in the ranked choice voting count, you know, he picked up 20-something percent of the vote of the people who had been eliminated or more and ultimately won by about 20 points or so. So he was definitely like the choice, it seems like, for the Republicans. What does Bobby Charles bring to this campaign in the fall? So I didn't talk about this a lot during the primary because I try to keep my nose out of it. But I've known Bobby Charles for a while. He was out on the campaign trail in the previous election cycle at doing, you know, meeting. don't meeting with donors with me i mean i i had bobby charles before he ever ran for office sitting down with donors that you know people that he knew people he could make connections to helping the party raise money uh the one thing that you undeniably bobby charles brings to this race is energy And I guess along with that, if I had to just kind of think, you know, of a couple other just simple ways to describe it as he has a vision for what he thinks Maine should be and, you know, a really clear policy agenda to get there.
And he's a true believer. Like he loves the state of Maine. He sometimes goes on forever about it. And I kind of, you know, I don't have the ability to articulate it like he does. But he really does love the state of Maine. And I think that it was lost a little bit in the primary because it was such a hard fought situation. But he really does believe in where we need to go. He knows how to get there. He's got the energy to do it. The guy's just got boundless energy. And he's a hopeless romantic for the state of Maine. And I don't think anybody who ever spends 10 minutes with him could deny that. Jason Savage, joining us talking about the gubernatorial race before I leave the race and ask about a couple other things that I definitely want to pick your brain about. The Rick Bennett calculus is interesting. Obviously, Bobby Charles said almost exactly the same thing on Monday, saying that Rick Bennett is ultimately, you know, in this race and is running basically as another Democrat. He's over there, not over here. Hannah Pingree joins me on Tuesday and says the exact opposite, says, well, you know, Rick Bennett's been a lifelong Republican. He's been over there, not over here. Obviously, each side is trying to occupy that side by themselves and then have Rick Bennett split up the other side, right? You worked with. Rick. I mean, it's got to be said. You know him. He was there as a party chair, and so was Jason Savage as executive director. So you've been close to him. You've seen him. You've known him, et cetera. What is your assessment of him? I know you mentioned that his policies are now left of center. So how do you think voters will view him this year? I don't recognize this. It's really hard to say. I mean, I'm trying, I'm going to maintain a level of respect for the Rick Bennett. from back then, but the policy agenda now is not something that I recognize. So to me, that's where it comes down. Like, look, we can talk about personalities, we can talk about relationships, all that. When it comes down to it, do we need a governor who is going to be, you know, okay with giving out free needles that become, you know, dirty needles that our kids have to step over on their way to school? Do we want to protect our women and girls in locker rooms and on the playing field? Or do we want to just continue along with the agenda that Janet Mills and Hannah Pingree are behind? And that's what we're going to get. And whether it's Rick Bennett or Hannah Pingree, I just feel like that's where we're at. So I really want to stick to. The policy impacts on the state of Maine, and when you look at the two of them, you know, if you don't put a name at the top of the ledger, you can't tell the difference between Rick's agenda and Hannah's agenda. Moving on, of course, beyond that race, you have the CD2 race, which was also decided by rank choice voting. And in that race, also just like the Democratic primary, you had the second place winner, ultimately winning that race with Matt Dunlap overcoming Joe Baldacci. There's been some grumblings nationally from Democratic circles that they're not.
quite as sure about whether or not they want to invest money in that race and throw millions of dollars at it with Matt Dunlap as the guy instead of Joe Baldacci as the guy. I'm sure they'll ultimately, you know, decide to do that because they want the majority so bad they kind of need to. But ultimately, how do you now assess this race that you know that it's Dunlap v. LePage? Well, I'm going to admit that I laughed out loud at some of those articles. I truly laughed because it was like the Democrats woke up and realized that they screwed it up. look here's the i'm happy it's mad dunlap that's great but we can't take anything for granted the second district is half the state of maine if you're out there listening and you live in the second or the first either one really we can't take anything for granted in any race because even if paul the page is up nine points or 11 points on mad dunlap the turnout that we have in that race for paula page is going to pay dividends for bobby charles and Susan Collins and all the other candidates so my number one enemy in this election cycle is complacency we can't be complacent we can't take anything for granted and i think what the democrats would really love for us to do is to fall asleep in this race and then wake up in september and discover that it's a three-point race so i say just keep pounding away let's expose all of Matt Dunlap's horrible liberal ideas where he just lines right up with Hannah Pingree and Graham Platner and Bernie Sanders. Let's talk about all this stuff and let's get it all out in the open this summer, however we can so that we leave nothing on the field and we, you know, work towards a real sound victory in this race. And over on the Senate side, before I let you go, Jason, you know, the inevitable question that I'm probably going to ask you from now until November every single week is about the Graham Platner v. Susan Collins calculus. He's continuing to, of course, be scandal-plagued as always every day brings new Reddit posts, which is fun. But, you know, polling is starting to show that Susan Collins is actually in a stronger position now. You know, a lot of the stuff that he's been saying and doing has been, I think, well answered by the Susan Collins campaign. A lot of the criticisms over the Iran war and all that stuff. She's been clapping back at him about, which is good news. How do you view where that race stands now right now, though? I was talking to some folks yesterday. who cannot believe that Plattenor is a serious candidate. They're like, I mean, this guy's going to lose, right? And, you know, the thing I said back to them is, I certainly hope so. I would put my money on Susan, but this is going to be a tough, tough, close race. And, you know, you're going to underestimate that guy to your own peril. How do you view it? Yeah, I think I'm more or less in the same place. I don't know that back when we all discovered that he had a Nazi tattoo, I don't know that we expected that that would be almost lost in the,
The shuffle sometimes with the other, you know, strange assemblage of issues that this guy has. But he's still got money. He's still got some kind of weird hypnotic control over his base. I think that voters in the middle are going to start waking up more and more as we go forward. But, you know, the guy has just a stranglehold on Democrat-based voters. We may need to, you know, send some professionals to check in on them and see why. What does that mean for them, though? I mean, when you look at what happened in New York with their primaries and the Zohran Mamdani effect and there, I mean, there's national democratic elite circles that are panicking over all this stuff. It seems that they are increasingly bewitched, they being the Democratic voters, by these types of candidates, you know, sort of top to bottom. What do you make of that? It's like they don't realize that every time communism's ever been tried or socialism's ever really truly been tried, it's failed. It's like they're just, they're chasing this textbook ideological dream that somebody taught them around a campfire on, you know, some Peace Corps trip somewhere. And they see somebody come along that promises them that. And they just, they are entranced by it. And it's kind of the same. thing they have with Bernie Sanders, and they just ignore the fact that Bernie's never accomplished anything. You just give speeches and doesn't do anything for anybody. And I think that's what they want. They just want the candidate that's going to whisper or, I guess in Graham Platner's case, growl sweet nothings into their ear so they can live in this fantasy land. But, you know, I think also they don't have enough experience with normal guys to really understand that Graham Platner is not normal. Well, unfortunately, we have to stop there because we're out of time. Jason Savage, executive director of the main Republican Party. Always nice to talk to you on a Thursday. We'll talk again next week, sir. Appreciate it as always. Thank you very much. Have a good one.