AUGUSTA, Maine — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rolled out Maine’s first batch of endorsements in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, naming a well-connected lobbyist and two young lawmakers to a leadership team on Wednesday.
It comes at a crucial time for DeSantis’ flagging campaign. Former President Donald Trump remains the clear favorite to recapture the party’s nomination in part because the governor’s stronger standing in national polls in the winter eroded into the low teens this summer.
Despite that, he still seems to be the top non-Trump option. One factor is lingering angst about Trump from the political class to the grassroots. Mainers spanning both categories said last fall that they thought DeSantis would be a better opponent for President Joe Biden, nodding to Trump’s legal troubles that now amount to four indictments in federal and state courts.
DeSantis’ Wednesday endorsements in Maine could tweak Trump’s campaign. The biggest name on the three-person list is lobbyist Josh Tardy, a lobbyist and former legislative leader who chaired the former president’s 2016 run in Maine and won a spot on the Republican National Committee in 2019 with help from the Trump political organization.
“He is truly the only candidate who can defeat Joe Biden and get the job done for Americans with no drama and no excuses,” Tardy said of DeSantis in a statement.
Tardy will serve on DeSantis’ Maine leadership team alongside 29-year-old Maine Senate Minority Leader Trey Stewart, R-Presque Isle, and Rep. Reagan Paul, R-Winterport. People in these roles typically serve as local surrogates for presidential candidates at events and in the media.
Tardy and Stewart are reasonably mainstream Republicans. The lobbyist initially endorsed U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida during the 2016 primary that Trump won. Tardy also served as 2020 campaign chair for U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist who voted to convict Trump on a Democratic impeachment charge related to the deadly Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.
Paul is a harder-line conservative. During her 2022 campaign in a swing House district, she broke with most Republicans by endorsing strict limits on abortion and touted the endorsement of Seth Keshel, who has worked nationally to push Trump’s false claims that he beat Biden in the 2020 election.
“Joe Biden is accelerating America’s decline and endangering my generation’s future,” she said in a statement. “We need a young, conservative leader in the White House with a fixed moral compass who will fight for the American people again.”
Trump is sure to have ample grassroots help in Maine, but his top surrogate of the past here looks to have left him behind. In an interview this spring, former Gov. Paul LePage, who chaired Trump’s 2020 Maine campaign, blamed the former president for Republican losses in a 2022 election in which LePage came up short in a return bid against Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat.
The primary campaigns are now most focused on early-voting states, including Iowa and New Hampshire. Maine’s primaries will be held alongside roughly a dozen other states on March 5, 2024, which is known as “Super Tuesday.” They will be open to unenrolled voters for the first time under a change passed by the Democratic-led Legislature in 2022.