On Monday The Washington Post described Paul LePage as the likely winner in Maine’s second district. The same day, LePage accepted two televised debates. They’re set for 1 October on WMTW and 15 October on WABI. Matt Dunlap, the Democrat, had already agreed to both, and he’d asked for four.

For this site, the seat matters for a specific reason. Golden is a Marine who deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and for four terms he held a district Trump carried every time. That’s the kind of result we point to when we argue that military service helps Democrats in hard places. He isn’t running again, so the race to replace him looks like a test of the claim.

It’s a poor test. We’d rather explain why before the results arrive, so nobody can say we picked the lesson afterward.

Golden enlisted after the September 11 attacks. He served in the Marine Corps from 2002 to 2006, deploying to Afghanistan and then to Iraq. He came home to Lewiston, earned his degree at Bates College, and served in the Maine House before winning the congressional seat in 2018. His House website still describes him as a Marine combat veteran who brings that experience to national security votes.

His voting record is the half his critics on the left talked about most. He co-chaired the Blue Dog Coalition, the House caucus of moderate Democrats. In 2024 he declined to endorse Kamala Harris, and CBS News has listed votes where he sided with Republicans, including measures to avoid a shutdown and limits on Trump’s war powers. Golden has said repeatedly, Maine Public reported in June, that his willingness to cross party lines is how he kept winning.

Voters in the second district never had to pull those two things apart. They got the Marine and the crossover votes in one person, four elections running. Both came as a set. Nobody there voted for a veteran with a party-line record, or for a Blue Dog who’d never served. That’s the whole difficulty with using Golden as evidence, and it doesn’t go away because he’s leaving.

Golden’s coalition is already coming apart in public. Business and labor groups both backed him in 2024, Maine Morning Star reported in August, and this year they’ve chosen sides. The Chamber of Commerce endorsed LePage, while several major unions are with Dunlap. The National Rifle Association’s political arm endorsed LePage on 6 August at Maine Military Supply in Holden. It hasn’t endorsed Dunlap.

Dunlap runs to Golden’s left. He got into the race by running against Golden. He’s the state auditor and a former secretary of state, and he supports Medicare for All. He launched a primary challenge last October, citing Golden’s vote for a Republican funding bill during the shutdown. A month later, the day after the 2025 elections, Golden announced he wouldn’t seek another term.

LePage brings a different kind of name. He served two terms as governor and carried the second district in 2022 even as he lost the statewide race to Janet Mills by double digits. Trump endorsed him in December. He had the Republican nomination to himself in June, although an Army veteran from East Machias, James Clark, had entered the race against him last November.

Democrats took longer to settle on Dunlap. Its House campaign committee endorsed Joe Baldacci in the primary, and Dunlap beat Baldacci after ranked-choice tabulation on 19 June. On 20 August, the same day it added Nancy Lacore in South Carolina, the committee put Dunlap into its Red to Blue program.

Here’s the version of this story that flatters us. A Marine held a Trump-plus-nine seat for four terms. He retires, a progressive state official takes his place on the ballot, Cook rates the seat Likely Republican, and The Washington Post calls LePage the likely winner. The uniform leaves, and the Democratic edge leaves with it.

That story rests on thin evidence. The only general-election poll released since the primary came from Dunlap’s own campaign. Tulchin Research had him at 49 percent and LePage at 48 in July, with 3 percent undecided. Most surveys before the primary had LePage ahead. We’d discount a Republican internal showing the reverse in exactly the same way, and we haven’t found an independent poll of the general election.

Money looked lopsided early. In May, LePage had about $1.2 million on hand and Dunlap had less than $100,000, according to the federal filings CBS News cited. That gap predates Dunlap’s nomination and the national party’s help, so we won’t lean on it.

The strongest argument against us begins with Golden’s own account. He has said crossing his party is what won the district, and his record fits it: the Blue Dog leadership, the Harris non-endorsement, the votes with Republicans on spending and war powers. On that reading, the Marine Corps was part of his introduction, and his voting record did the persuading.

Dunlap’s platform sharpens the point. He’s running on Medicare for All in a district Trump carried three times. If he loses by a comfortable margin, the plainest explanation is ideology, and service never needs to enter the discussion at all.

There’s a harder version still, which is that Dunlap wins. The DCCC decided in August that the race was worth its help, and LePage lost statewide by double digits four years ago. A Dunlap victory would suggest the seat never needed a Marine, or a Blue Dog, to stay Democratic.

Our reply is modest. Golden’s 9.6-point gap over the top of the ticket came from a mix of things voters knew about him, and his service was always one of them. We can’t weigh that part, and neither can anyone else. Amy Fried, a University of Maine political scientist, complicates the ideology story too. She argues that Dunlap fits the district’s long habit of electing centrists better than his critics allow, and she notes that Golden ran as more of a progressive when he first won in 2018. If she’s right, even the plain explanation gets murky.

This race won’t have Maine’s attention to itself. Susan Collins faces Troy Jackson for the Senate, and Hannah Pingree and Bobby Charles are running for governor. With two statewide contests competing for airtime, the October debates probably matter more to Dunlap and LePage than House debates usually do.

After the vote, the comparison we’ll use is simple. Harris lost the district by nine points in 2024. If Dunlap’s result lands near that, the seat went back to its presidential lean once Golden left. If he runs well ahead of it, something besides Golden’s biography was holding voters in place. A midterm electorate isn’t a presidential one, so neither reading will be clean, and a result in between would tell us close to nothing.

We’ll report whichever of those happens. For now the seat has a Republican The Washington Post expects to win, a Democrat his party took two months to embrace, and, for the first time since 2016, no Jared Golden on the ballot.