Paul LePage is 78 years old and just won Maine's 2nd Congressional District with 50.8% of the vote. His opponent, Democrat Matt Dunlap, pulled 49.2%. That's a Republican flipping a House seat in New England — the region where the GOP is supposedly extinct.
It was the only Republican flip in the entire country that didn't require redistricting to pull off.
The seat opened up when Democratic Representative Jared Golden retired rather than run again. Golden had survived in the district for years by branding himself as an independent-minded moderate — the kind of Democrat who says things like "If Canada thinks they're better off without our goods, I wish them good luck" to the Portland Press Herald and hopes nobody notices which party he caucuses with. He read the room and got out. LePage read the same room and walked in.
LePage isn't a mystery candidate. He's a former two-term governor of Maine and a Trump ally in a state where that label is supposed to be a political death sentence. President Trump carried Maine's 2nd Congressional District by 9 points in 2024. The district wanted what LePage was selling. Dunlap didn't have an answer for it.
The media narrative heading into the midterms was that the Republican Party was finished — overexposed, fractured, dragged down by association with Trump. Pundits spent months writing the obituary. The cable news chyrons were already set. And then a 78-year-old Trump ally flipped a seat in one of six New England states where Republicans supposedly can't win a student council election.
Texas's 32nd and Tennessee's 9th also went red, but those were redistricting products — lines drawn on a map by state legislatures. Maine's 2nd was different. Same lines. Same electorate. Different result. That's not a cartographer's gift. That's a voter's choice.
The broader midterm picture wasn't pretty for Republicans — nobody's pretending otherwise. But the media's favorite framing requires the GOP to be losing everywhere, in every demographic, in every region, with no path forward. Maine's 2nd is a problem for that story. You can't write "the Republican coalition is shrinking" when it just expanded into territory Democrats held for years.
Susan Collins has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997, proving a Republican can survive in the state long-term. But Collins built that career by carefully distancing herself from the party's base. LePage did the opposite. He ran as exactly who he is — a blunt, Trump-aligned conservative — and he won anyway. In Maine.
The Democrats also flipped the Maine Senate seat from red to blue, with Troy Jackson, 58, taking that race. So it wasn't a total wipeout in one direction. The state split its tickets, which is what states do when voters are making individual choices instead of following a party line.
LePage won by 1.6 points in a state the national media had colored solid blue on every projection map since September.
The obituary was premature.