AUGUSTA, Maine — Two candidates at the top of Maine’s November ballot each presided over unique eras in our history: the recovery from the Great Recession and the stop-and-start stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It allows for easier head-to-head comparisons between former Gov. Paul LePage and Gov. Janet Mills — who are running in the Nov. 8 election alongside independent longshot Sam Hunkler — than most candidates in high-profile elections.
Both the former two-term Republican governor and his Democratic successor presided over trends that have challenged the state for decades, including an aging population. Their records cannot be divorced from global and national trends, such as the record-high costs and inflation of this moment.
Signs of their leadership are easy to see and some of the results may surprise you. Here are four graphs showing what changed and what didn’t under LePage and Mills.
The share of Mainers working is near record lows. How valuable is it?
One of the most-discussed economic measures in this campaign has been the labor participation rate, the share of working-age people working or looking to do so. It fell to a low in April 2020, just after the COVID-19 pandemic set in, recovered for a year and dipped again.
In September, it stood at 58.4 percent, only just above the pandemic low. LePage has mentioned it on the campaign trail, saying the next governor needs to get Mainers back to work, while Mills has most often pointed to a reasonably high level of economic growth after the worst of the pandemic and a record-low run of unemployment rates.
These things are not supposed to happen at once, underscored University of Maine economist Andrew Crawley. He suspected that the participation rate here has been affected by a mix of early retirements in the nation’s oldest state as well as slowness in tracking gig workers and shifts between sectors.
The pandemic “playing havoc” with this metric and others, he said. That situation has left him looking at more of them — including total employment and wages at a time of record-high inflation — to understand what is happening in the economy. The result is a “mixed bag.”
“I don’t think any of it is giving us a perfectly satisfactory picture,” Crawley said.
Federal aid — not so much the state budget — has driven record spending.
Mills’ first two-year state budget proposal rang in at $8 billion, a mark that was heavily criticized by Republicans. It was done by keeping the LePage-era tax code in place, marked by a 2011 round of income tax cuts. That led to a $6 billion state budget to open his tenure.
But adjust the LePage and Mills budgets for inflation and you see that the level of spending has not risen that much, since a $6 billion budget in 2011 roughly equals an $8 billion budget now.
What has changed is the massive influx of federal COVID-19 aid, which has changed the overall spending picture for the state. After you add in all the federal money that Maine spends in a year, LePage never saw more than just over $8 billion. Mills saw a whopping $11.7 billion come through in the 2021 fiscal year.
Taxes are higher under Mills, but they also grew under LePage.
LePage focused on income tax cuts during his tenure. He wants to eliminate it if elected by exempting pension income, something Mills began to do this year after signing a budget raising the exempt amount from $10,000 to $35,000 by 2025. She has also added to property tax relief programs, underscoring that state spending is deeply tied to city and town finances.
The conservative Tax Foundation tracks both state and local taxes and expresses them by state as shares of income. That has always found Maine well over the national average. Mainers paid 10.3 percent of their income in taxes in 2011, and it was 11 percent in 2018, when LePage left office.
It has risen to 12.4 percent during the Mills era, tracking with national changes that the foundation attributed to taxable income, activities and property values that rose faster than the overall economy. Record-high home prices here may have something to do with it.
The share of children on public assistance declined, except for one program.
You can see the larger economy and policy changes under both governors reflected in the numbers of children on public assistance programs: Medicaid, food stamps and cash assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, all of which have lower shares of children on them than when LePage took over after the Great Recession.
The only one to tick up during the Mills era is Medicaid enrollment. It could be partially because of Medicaid expansion for adults, which was passed by voters in 2017 but delayed by LePage before Mills implemented it in 2019. Studies have found that expanding Medicaid leads more eligible children to sign up for coverage. Nearly 14,000 parents and caretakers have it now.
A steadily improving economy spanning the LePage and Mills eras is one reason for the declining enrollment in these programs. But LePage-era welfare cuts were also major factors, including a 60-month limit for TANF passed in 2012 and then work requirements for food stamps two years later.