Bobby Charles- Segment 6

And we're back on Inside Main. I'm Aaron Chadbourne. Thank you for being with us. We're in the final stretch. It's been a great day so far. And it's going to get even better. We are joined now by the newly official Republican nominee for Governor Bobby Charles. Bobby, I know I talked to you on election night on primary night and you had a healthy lead then, so it was looking pretty good. But now, after all of the ballots and flash drives and whatever they were doing in Augusta has concluded, you're officially the nominee. Congratulations. Well, thank you, Aaron. It's been a long battle. Of course, we then ended up with that nine-day drum roll. That was very exciting. But I think we're unified. I just am literally in a car coming back from our unity breakfast. And honestly, the vast majority of candidates were there, the ones that couldn't be, had really bona fides reasons, a couple of them. Not, they just couldn't be there. But, I mean, a unity breakfast that went two and a half hours. I mean, people, I mean, it was. It was extraordinary. And I think it's because everybody understands the stakes. And of course, yesterday I talked for quite a while with Senator Susan Collins and the stakes are high all the way across the state. And I've talked with the LePage people. We're in a vortex. We either get this right, this cycle, win the governorship, win the legislature. I want to say that one more time, win the legislature. You've been there. You know how important that is, Aaron. And, of course, when our Senate and then CD2 seat and, you know, get as much as we can done in CD1, or we're going to look back on this period of time and we're going to say, God, if I had only done this, if I had only done that. And I actually recently was looking up history and just trying to understand how this cycle fits into the history of Maine. beyond my own memory uh... and i i went back to nineteen sixty two that is the last time we having unbelievable data on our campaign we had great turnout we have the highest uh... recent turnout of young people coming out to vote for me which i think is incredibly promising we also have a large had a large number of independence uh... coming our way all of which was good but the last time that a governor a Republican gubernatorial candidate won by an all-out majority was 1962, John Reed. And I think we are on track. Our demographics look a lot like that. Both Governor McCurn and Governor LaPage won by pluralities, which of course we can do in our general. It's not ranked choice. But I think the beauty of all this is... Sometimes it is darkest before the dawn, and it does not matter whether I'm in Cumberland County, York. I mean, I did 14 events in three days just before the whole thing, and I will tell you the message is the same because the problems are the same.

People are just sick of being used and abused. They can't afford anything. They get the needles on the streets everywhere. Their schools are a train wreck, and they just can't stand the fact that they can't trust their government. So we're at a point now where we either make the change or we wish we had. So you mentioned that you're at the Unity Breakfast this morning, which is a typical thing that happens after a hard-fought primary where Republicans come back together and try to unite. It did get pretty bitter. And obviously, you were in the lead the whole race. And so there were a lot of different, you know, attacks on you, attacks back from your campaign to other people. How are you bringing that team together and how is it going? I'll tell you something. It startles me how fast. we can realize our own coincidence of interest. From my own perspective, even throughout the campaign, I was always influenced heavily by both Ronald Reagan and Colin Jerome Powell for whom I worked. And Reagan, I worked in his White House often on three years, and I worked. every single day all over the world with Colin Jerome Powell. And neither one of those men, they modeled the behavior you would want to see in a leader. Neither one of those men took anything personally. And I say that literally every morning we'd get this ugly gram, we used to call them snowflakes from Donald Rumsfeld, and you'd look at it. Everybody's looking at it at the same time. And not once in almost two years did I ever, ever hear. Colin Jerome Powell say a bad word about Don Rumsfeld. Same thing was true of Reagan. Reagan did not say personal things negative about other people, and even in the other party. And so what ended up happening, you look at it, yes, he responded with facts. Yes, he responded. They all responded with the necessary responses. But the fascinating part is on the personal front, they never took anything as personal. And that's just very, very difficult to do. None of us are born. with a thick skin you have to learn that and so on my count i'd literally go to sleep every night i i really didn't care what the super packs were saying about me it was all nonsense and i knew it and i kind of figured that the good sense of average maynors would cause them to know that it was nonsense and they did on the flip side of it we had more laughter in the room of the last two and a half hours jonathan bush cracking jokes owen cracking jokes robert wessel's cracking jokes jim liby i mean to be honest I think we all look at the world the same way, and I actually think all of us are going to work together, including Ben Midgley and Garrett. And I personally think over the months ahead and perhaps years ahead, and if we're really lucky decades ahead, Republicans are going to demonstrate what it means to be the adult in the room, to be fiscally conservative, fiscally responsible, to regain and maintain moral compass, and to put... to put the state back in a position where we trust our government again and and you know Aaron that is the part that probably got me off the couch I I could not bear to have one more thing happen where I can't trust the government and then look at these last nine days holy

crow. I mean, it's just, you know, I mean, really. It's funny because, like, I've been through it before, and I've been in other races that went to rank choice voting. And when you actually see it done in person, it, it boggles the mind that this is how we actually do it. And I'm hoping that the Democrats having just watched it, like when they go back to whatever. weird government jobs they all have. They do something to help us make it make more sense because it doesn't make any sense. I want to ask about that personal point, though, because I think it's always easier when you're the candidate to disassociate yourself from it. But what I've observed is that it's really tough on candidates' families. I don't know. I've met your whole family. I met your daughter. I met others. Like, how is your family handled having you in the public? Because this is the first time you've been on the ballot. This is a very different experience. How is your family handling that? I think to be honest, everyone in somebody's family keys off the person. So suppose you are, and this is a real instance, at one point, not in this election, but we were all out in a boat and a lightning storm came out of nowhere. And, you know, if you're, if you are the individual in the family who needs to model calm and you do model calm, everyone will be calm. And if you're an individual who does not take things personally, and I think it's taken me decades to figure out that little magic, but I don't take anything personally, then they follow that. I think that probably the reality is we all, and I went through this both on the professional side and the personal side in different situations, we all feel worse. Ironically, we feel worse for someone who's getting attacked that we are close to than we would feel if we were getting attacked ourselves. It's like if you're deployed somewhere, you know you're on the front lines, you know you're doing it, whatever you're doing, you're doing it. So you don't really worry about it. the person back home worries about it. So I think the real answer to the question is if you model what you really believe and then others key off that, it does not really cause that kind of an impact. The part that I always, particularly with my daughter playing a bigger role in this campaign, and she may have had, you, you, it's the same thing in reverse. I don't like to see someone take a pot shot in some, you know, online. comment about her but you know she's tough and you know everybody's tough and and they know they know that it's just a political campaign and i i guess i'll underscore that within the republican party um david Jay Jones and i have had a great conversation by phone and very different tenor from what you see on a stage and jonathan bush and i have had and and um i mean we were all talking today one-on-one's i mean owen I think what's going to happen, and Aaron, you know this because in some ways I think it probably happened around the page. I'm remembering in particular Bruce Poliquin, leaning in very hard to help. But even more now, we do the things we absolutely have to do. If you absolutely have to, I don't know, make sure that the furnace is working, that's what you do. You absolutely have to do it. And then we have a bunch of a list of things that we think we should do.

We're in a moment right now in this state, and most Republicans know it, and many conservative Democrats know it because they're converting. I talk to them all the time and unaffiliated voters. They understand that if we get the third term of bills in the form of Pingree, if we get... continued price hikes inability to get taxes under control wild-eyed spending you know drug traffickers continuing everywhere schools going through the the floor business is going out of business by the hundreds a year which they are if we have this unaccounted for fraud in Medicaid and all across the government with this state will not survive we will chase our tax base out of the state we will become a more impoverished state we will end up with the coast which has lots of out-of-state money and big houses and they'll start putting Bill Gates around those houses and we're gonna start living like me out in the woods going you know where's the next job i mean and so we need to reverse that we're on a vicious cycle we need to get on a virtuous cycle we have 25 point plans on everything from the cost of electricity to getting the drug traffickers out to getting good addiction services in to getting our schools back and the truth is it's not rocket science We've invented the wheel already. All we got to do is go back to stop. Stop trying to roll the thing forward on cinder blocks, start rolling it forward on a wheel. You're listening to Inside Maine. I'm your host, Aaron Chadbourne. We're joined by the Republican nominee for Governor Bobby Charles. And Bobby, you just said, you know, I know you weren't listening earlier because you were at the Unity Breakfast. But I said, you know, the real message has to be like, this is a third term of Janet Mills. And nobody wants that. I can't imagine it. But you're going to have to appeal to independents and Democrats. And obviously, when you're in a primary and particularly the nature of this primary, you had a lot of messaging that appeals to conservatives to kind of. of base voters. Curious, what do you think the key is to building that broader coalition that you're going to need to have the types of numbers you were saying that you hope to have to be able to win? I think it's three things, and they're very tactical, very specific. One is I need to get in front of as many people as I can in person, and I will welcome invitations already do. We talked with, I think we calculated tens of thousands of Mainers, and those are the Mainers that came out. I think when it was all done, we were 60.3 to 39%. Why? Because the people who know me, we had people in the back of the room, often Democrats, come up afterwards. and convert on the spot to saying i want to vote for you you you're saying everything i believe so part of it point one you got to be in front of people point two is you have to stay with the big issues there's all kinds of per you know peripheral issues if you're going down a river there's always eddies you can get caught in those are not worth getting caught in and you know they whatever the the other side throws up and i you know they they they they put out you know

You know, he's an extremist. Well, why is he an extremist? Well, because let's go back. Let's look at my data points. Let's look at what I stand for, what I'm going to deliver. I want to roll back hundreds of Democrat-driven... unfunded mandates on towns and counties so our property taxes come down. Is bringing property taxes down a radical idea? I don't know. It is for the Democrats, but it's not for me. Get income tax out of here as close to zero in four years as you can get it. I've got names that I will begin to roll out really smart people who say absolutely you can do that. Imagine if most working mayors were able to take home on average $5,000 more a year. That's going to pump the economy. It's going to give you discretionary income. It's going to make it more. easy for you to live, groceries heat, electricity costs. I've got Jim Lebrecht. I've got a whole team of energy experts. I've sat down with the head of CMP and the vice president of CMP. We want to restore competition in this state. Jim Lebrecht and that team will, we think we can get energy costs down by doing a bunch of very concrete things, maybe 40%. Those three things all by themselves should be a walk-off home run. And then when you get drug traffickers out of here, you get the addiction services, which they, instead of doing real addiction services, Aaron, what they do is they give away needles in Narcan. That is wrong, okay? Narcan has a... potential treatment and good life and that's not what they do in this state i have great relationships with the federal government i can bring that money to maine so we get rid of the drug traffickers we put the illegal aliens on a conveyor belt out using due process we get our schools back in shape stop all this ideological crap that comes out of augusta and get back to teaching reading math the basics you know science trades even things like home i get back to teaching real stuff And then you impanel grand juries and you go after the crime. That is something. All of those points, honestly, it's a Venn diagram with a near perfect overlap with the priorities, the big priorities of the traditional Democrats and the independence. And that's why we're going to win big. Yeah, I think. I think those are all the key things that people care about. And I just, I really hope that, I mean, there's obviously this overlay. And I was glad to hear you say you've been talking to Susan Collins of the midterm election. And you're going to have Graham Platner fanning the flames, turning out the most radical voters. You're going to have a lot of Democrats that are showing up to vote against Trump. And so I just like what I worry about Bobby is how do you break through that noise? Because they're going to spend so much money against Susan. It's going to be all about Trump. Like I think the. Things that you're talking about are the important things that matter to people's lives. Yeah, I think you have to say over and over and over again, which people know about Susan Collins, and I think they will gradually get to know about me. These people are their own people. Bobby Charles is Bobby Charles. That's who he is. And he's done all these things with his life, and he's a service-oriented guy, 10 years, Navy intelligence, a lot of public service.

It sounds crazy to say that, but I've enjoyed getting to know so many people over the past 14 months. It just, it was like, boom, and it was over. Now we've got four and a half months. And so I think the opt tempo is going to rise. I will be all over the southern part of the state. I will be all over the northern part of the state. And I just encourage people participate with me. Lean in. This is your state. We get this one shot, this one chance to save it. So vote for Susan Collins. Vote for me. Vote for Paul Lepage. And let's get this thing done. As we used to say, let's get her done. If they want to get involved, they want to find out more, if they want to invite you to something, where can they go? Just go to bobbyformain.com. And, of course, Joel will kill me for saying this. But if you want to send an email, send it to Joel at bobbyformain.com. We are also integrating in. great members of other campaigns, Garrett Mason's campaign manager, Dale Craft Jr. and also his father were there today, but he's going to be integrated into the campaign leadership team. We're going to bring some great fundraisers in. Look, this is a many-hands-makes-light-the-load mission. And so I say go to bobbyfor-main.com, volunteer, email these folks, and you know what? This is ours to win. Bobby Charles, Republican candidate for governor. Thanks for joining us on Inside Maine. Good luck in the fight ahead. Thank you. I'm headed up to the moose lottery. I think I might get a different reaction this year. I hope that's the case. Have a great time. Yes, sir. All right. Take care. Well, that is it for our show today on Inside Maine. I want to say thank you to Bobby Charles, to Rick Bennett for joining us. Hannah Pingree was also invited. She, of course, was kind of the last one to find out that she's the candidate. She's going to try to be with me on a different day. She'll hopefully be on with Matt later this week. But the general is on, and we're here for it, and it's going to make a spirited time. Thank you for being with us and Inside. Maine. I'd like to urge all of you to go have a great day now. Go enjoy the weather. Turn off, I mean, no, keep listening to WGAN, but get out there. Enjoy the beautiful Maine sunshine. You can have ear pods. It was good to have them both on, though. We started and ended the show with two of the main candidates for governor. I think we did well. All right, guys, have a great day. Have a great week. And we'll be back on Inside Maine next week. I'm Aaron Chadbourne.