Eric Lusk- Segment 6

For more than 20 years, Inside Maine has connected you with the state's top voices, diving deep into the political stories shaping our lives on 985 FM, AM 560, and wGAN.com. All right, let's go. Welcome back to Inside Maine on WGAN, our final segment of the show. I'm your host, Josh Filler. And for our final segment, we are joined by IOM Politics Team member Eric Lusk, who is live at the Republican State Convention. Eric, how are you this morning? Terrific. Having a nice weekend here at the State Convention. A lot of terrific people, a lot of great messages. If you wanted to see the different gubernatorial candidates make their pitches, this was a pretty good opportunity to do it. So, Eric, before we get into the specific candidates, can you give me a sense of the overall attendance of the convention? I think you have attended other conventions in the past. How does this one stack up to your prior experience? The first convention I ever attended was in 2006, and it was also in Augusta. You probably had, I would say, 1,500 people. This was closer to 1,000. And let's not forget, an awful lot of things have changed since 2006. to today, from a 20 years, but technologically, the advent of the personal cell phone device as your way of photographing things, sending messages, or getting addicted to the Internet weren't there yet. So I think you would be more realistic to compare this to the convention of 2022. which would have been another gubernatorial year. And the high watermark for headcount would have been in 2012, which saw record headcount thanks to disagreement. Disagreement brought a lot of people together back in 2012 as the...

The Patriot Movement, along with the Ron Paul crowd, had their high watermarks. So what's your sense overall of the mood? Are Republicans energized? Are they depressed? I mean, are they angry? Are they happy? What's the mood at the convention? I wouldn't say it is as angry as you might have expected after you have a governor who either... allows all sorts of crimes to go unpunished in the state of Maine. You know, let's just point to the Chinese drug cartels that have moved into Maine and the apathetic response by her attorney general or the legislators that voted Aaron Fry into office to be attorney general. There wasn't as much anger as I might have expected over the 25 tax cuts plus the kicker. You mean tax increases. Taxing. Sorry. Whoa. Wow. What was I? Freudian slip. You wishful. Yes. We all wish. Yeah. Yeah. The Janet Mills and tax cut don't typically go together in the same sentence. But it wasn't as angry as you might have expected. As you got into the speeches, You did hear people speaking up more often out of the cheap seats and the different county committees saying, yeah, what about this tax hike? What about that tax hike? And as you got into more of the speeches from the gubernatorial candidates, people began to get the scales off their eyes and say, yeah, what about this one? What about that one? And by the time you got done... With the last gubernatorial candidate, the energy had gotten up in the room. What you don't seem to get a lot of are the table-pounding speeches. You had an awful lot of candidates who were speaking. From a common sense perspective, if you want to look at the explosion of electricity costs, if you want to look at the explosion of health insurance premiums, if you want to look at the implosion of Maine's public school academic outcomes. People are able to speak about it in a common sense way because there really isn't anything to argue about in terms of the predicament Maine now finds itself in thanks to eight years of monoparty rule. So I think by the end of the convention, people were beginning to get more fired up.

Yeah, the whole, I was just ranting about that on the last segment that, you know, the only out the Democrats have over the last eight years is to try to blame Trump. And while I think that is ridiculous on its face, there are, I'm sure there are some voters out there that are susceptible to that nonsense. So speaking of the individual gubernatorial candidates, have they all had an opportunity to speak thus far or who's outstanding of anybody? All six of the gubernatorial candidates have had their turn at the microphone. And Paul LePage running for CD2, U.S. rep, had his chance to show that, yep, he's still the LePage we all know and love. Susan Collins is a little bit like having Elvis in the building. Yeah. When she's having her picture taken or somebody, she's taking her picture with somebody and they're passing out hats. My daughter managed to get a hat signed by Susan Collins, but my line would have been so long to get her to sign a hat for me that I settled on her great staffer, the incomparable Halsey-Frank. So I have a Susan Collins hat signed by Halsey-Frank. Well, congratulations. So of the gubernatorial candidates that spoke, did anybody stand out positively, negatively from your end in terms of how the people in the audience took it? You have five, you know, not counting Robert Wessels who spoke yesterday. And Robert Wessels is clearly one of the... most thoughtful people you're going to get up there but all six of them stood out in their own way none of these people is really a carbon copy or trying to fill up the same space in the Venn diagram as the others until you get to the issues when it came to the issues They were all hitting on the same things again and again and again. You did have some great taglines in there. Owen McCarthy's great tagline was make crime illegal again, which, I mean, it brought out a lot of guffaws. Jonathan Bush. explained how he would go about addressing what's going on in state government. He had focus on it, shred it. If it's not a good program after you focused on it, and if it is a good thing to be doing, put some water on it and help it grow. But he had a segment there with the shred it part that was really quite funny and saying, do we need this? No, shred it. Get rid of it. You had...

Ben Midgley come out saying, I'm not simply going to ID problems, I'm going to solve them. And it was remarkable to listen to Garrett Mason rattle off the different things that he had done while he was in the legislature during the... during the LePage eight years in office and how hard the Democrats work to undo everything that Garrett Mason as a state senator and Paul LePage as a governor put into place. The amount of backwards... traveling we've done on education with keeping a lid on the size of state government on making it easier to build housing. It was really remarkable what has happened in the 16 years since Garrett Mason first became a state senator and now that he is running for the governor's office. You had David Jay Jones explaining how it was he got a start. in industry and business one way or another. And if you've been following his campaign over the last six, eight months, he goes places and points out the elephant in the room in Lewiston. He points out the elephant in the room in a public school board meeting. And, you know, these are six highly motivated, very thought. very, very well thought out people who have had to succeed in the private sector as opposed to simply being in the government sector or the non-government organization outfit, the, you know, air quote, non-profit sector. They've signed the front of, these guys have all signed the front of a paycheck. Yeah. So I know that obviously there's not a nominating process at the convention. The primary is going to be in June, which is literally right around the corner. Is there going to be or has there been a straw poll of any kind among the delegates and the candidates? You had a straw poll today. You know, you would get your credential punched when you showed up to... vote in the straw poll so nobody was going to be able to vote twice it's pretty pretty simple way of managing who gets to vote at all if they've already voted once you can't unless you steal somebody's credential um to get in and we'll we'll probably find out the straw poll at the in a day or two okay Yeah, that'll be interesting. I mean, obviously, a thousand people. It's not the, it's not the entire party. But it's, I think, a pretty good indicator of where the activist base is at. I mean, these are obviously some of the most active people in the Republican Party in the state. Any sense from you, Eric, as to who's going to win that straw poll? I had, if I had to guess.

It would be Bobby Charles, who gave a very interesting speech, and unfortunately, given how he clearly works on the material, he could have gone on for another five minutes instead of trying to get all of his material into one 13-minute speech. But I would say it's going to come down to Ben Midgley and Bobby Charles. In the straw pole or in the actual race itself, do you think? In the straw pole here. Yeah. Interesting. Because let's not forget, if you're going to have a two-and-a-half-day event and a lot of it's going to take place on Thursday night and then on Friday, that's during the working week. So if I can't go on Friday, because I'm in the workforce, am I going to bother to go on Saturday? Eh, maybe not. But if I'm retired, then I'm probably more likely to go for the whole shooting match. And one issue you've got is, are you getting people under the age of 30 there? And the Ron Paul movement. definitely brought out younger people, folks under the age of 30, in ways that we have not seen since. Yeah, well, that's a good point. I mean, is it a gray convention? I mean, obviously it's not a scientific assessment, but your observation as a participant, I mean, is it more gray or not, do you think? I think the median age, half above, half below, is probably going to be... mid, maybe late 50s back in 2012, your median age was probably all the way down at about 40. Yeah, I mean, older people tend to be more conservative. They also tend to vote more as well. So I don't think that's a huge, a huge shock. So I want to move to the U.S. Senate race. Obviously, Susan Collins is the clear frontrunner, but she does have some challengers. Was anybody on her on the right? Did they speak? Or was it just Susan that spoke on the Republican side? It was just Susan Collins. I think there's a general feeling with Janet Mills coming out with tax increases and then saying no to the rank and file Democrat legislators that she vetoed the ban on a data center in Maine until the end of 2027. She vetoed it. I think the energy is very clearly over on the Plattenor side, and the conversation is fairly commonly what is going on over in the Democrat Party when somebody with all of the bad antics, you know, could be a tattoo, could be discussing how women should deal with rape according to Graham Platner.

that people look at Susan Collins and say, please, you've got to win this thing. Yeah. Well, interestingly, there was some news out of Washington, and I'd be curious if this had any traction at the convention. The Department of Homeland Security is being funded temporarily by President Trump under executive order, but that money is going to run out. The Republicans are now going to use reconciliation to fund the department. long term once and for all. But as part of the reconciliation process, Senator Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Louisiana made a motion basically to attach the SAVE Act to the DHS funding bill through reconciliation. And Senator Susan Collins was one of four Republican senators that voted against it. Has that come up in the convention? Are people upset about that? Did she have to explain that to anybody? Or are people not even aware of it? I don't think people were aware of it. I did ask some Colin staffers what they thought would happen with the SAVE Act. And the general impression was it ain't going to happen in 2026, which of course raises the issue. If the Republicans were to lose control of the House of Representatives, then the Save Act isn't going to get out of the House and wind up in a reconciliation with the U.S. Senate, even if the Republicans were to increase their majority in the U.S. Senate. So it didn't come up here, but... The impression I had from Colin Staffers was the SAVE Act is not happening in 2026. Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that it's not. I mean, I think I have not heard an explanation. My assumption is that the vote against it was because it's not reconcilable. It's just not the kind of bill. It's a policy bill. And reconciliation is supposed to be about funding and that you can't pass the SAVE Act using reconciliation to do so would effectively. be a backdoor way of ending the filibuster, which I know she's on the record for opposing. But I'm just, I'm wondering if this is potentially going to cause some friction. But if people are, people may not even be aware of it. So I guess maybe so much the better, but had to ask. I think by and large, Maine Republicans are going to look at the candidacy of Graham Platner a couple of months from now after, by all appearances, he is going to smoke Janet Mills by 15 plus points in the polls. people are going to look at Graham Platner and they're not going to think about the Save Act anymore. Yeah, when you're faced with a socialist who has a Nazi tattoo, I think the choice is quite clear for anybody on the right. Whatever misgivings you may have, it's all hands on deck. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Eric Lusk, eye on politics. Thanks for being with us this morning and being our eyes and ears at the state convention. We appreciate it. Great speaking with you. And I look forward to more commentary from my friends at the press herald to tell me what I missed. I'm sure. Very good. Thanks. Bye-bye. All right. That was Eric Lusk from our eye on politics team every Wednesday here on WGAN, the morning news show. Interesting assessment there of the state convention. The fact that, you know, all the candidates seem to have done well, I'll be very interested to see how the straw poll figures in this. Obviously, it's not a... a tell-all by any stretch, but I do think it may be a good indicator of where the energy and excitement may be for any one of the number of Republican candidates. And yeah, you know, Susan Collins had to ask about the SAVE Act, be interested to see if that does get any traction. If it does, it would be on the right. But as Eric said, and I agree completely. Whatever misgivings people on the right may have with Senator Susan Collins. The choice between her and Graham Platner could not be starker. It just could not be more clear, more obvious. Graham Platner is cut from the most radical element of the left. Whether he believes any of this stuff, I don't know. He says he's an oyster farmer, and now we find out the only client he has is his mother. I'm not sure you can qualify as an oyster farmer. Yes, you have a job, but your job is you work for your mom and you go out and get oysters for her restaurant. So slightly different take on the same act. But regardless, we'll have to wait and see. Graham Platner's not the nominee yet. But as Eric said, I expect him to smoke Janet Mills in the primary. I've said that from the beginning. In fact, I've openly questioned whether Janet Mills would see it all the way through. But we'll have to wait and see come June. But that is going to do it for all this morning. We appreciate you listening here on Inside Maine on WGA. And, of course, we'll be back next Saturday here on the radio. But for now, we're going to sign off and have a good day.