Politics
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Before a Monday get-out-the-vote event, Deane Stern approached Nirav Shah to show him a card trick, share stories and get to know the Democratic gubernatorial candidate better.
That kind of interaction “is what I’m doing every day,” Shah, who has led almost every primary poll for months, said.
With broad support from Mainers who came to know him as public health chief during the COVID-19 pandemic, Shah has pulled off a trick of his own, bursting to the front of a Democratic field full of insiders without any official backing from current or former state lawmakers in Augusta and increasing criticism from both institutionalists and those on his left.
“A large portion of my campaign and our energy has been spent sort of saying, ‘You know me from this really tough time,’” he said. “‘Now let me pull back the curtain on the other things that I’d like to do to help the state.”
The trust he’s built with voters both during the pandemic and in dozens of events across the state has been evident in public surveys and internal polling by both Shah and opponents. A New Hampshire University poll last week showed him tied with former state Senate President Troy Jackson at 28% first-choice support. In every other survey, Shah has led the field.
Jackson has usually been bunched with Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, also a former state senator, and former House Speaker Hannah Pingree. Unlike Shah, all three have several endorsements from Maine-based political groups and current and former lawmakers. Shah boasts just two elected officials — a mayor and a sheriff — and a smattering of groups.
“His relationship with Mainers is more direct,” Robert Long, a former Bangor Daily News editor who served as the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention spokesperson under Shah during the pandemic, citing more than 220 unscripted public briefings. “A level of trust between him and Maine people developed over that difficult time.”
That same trust has eluded Shah when it comes to legislators so far. His recent proposal of six executive orders led multiple Democratic sources to draw comparisons to the strongarm tactics of President Donald Trump, whom Shah and his four opponents have all said they’d stand up to from the Blaine House.
“We have a president who thinks he alone can fix it and bulldozes the legislative branch,” Rep. Adam Lee, D-Auburn, said. “We don’t need that in a governor as well.”
Gov. Janet Mills, who gave Shah his pandemic platform and presented him with a case of Diet Coke, his favorite drink, at his last briefing on the virus, backs Pingree. She commented on a Facebook post by Lee joining in on criticism of Shah’s proposed orders, saying one amounted to something the state couldn’t do and another was already in motion.
Pingree, who is backed by Mills and is part of the ranked-choice slate with Jackson and Bellows endorsed by U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, is also supported by some health officials who worked with Shah, including former Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew and Lisa Letourneau, a DHHS senior advisor.
Shah, a lawyer with a medical degree, said his proposals were not meant to “run roughshod” over the Legislature the way Trump has. He added that there may be policies in place around his proposals, but that the directives show the public, agency leaders and lawmakers what his team will focus and deliver on.
“He has a way of listening and quickly seeing what the other person is saying,” York County Emergency Management Agency Director Art Cleaves, another endorser, said. “That’s what it takes to work with a legislative group … and still make decisions and be firm.”
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Shah moved to Maine for the CDC job in 2019 at a difficult point in his career after both of Illinois’ U.S. senators called for his resignation as public health chief under a Republican governor. That centered on his response to a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in a veterans’ home that he did not make public or family notifications on for six days.
In response to a question at the Bangor event, he acknowledged communication errors and said he applied the lessons from them during the pandemic. But the episode was featured in an attack ad against him from a progressive group aligned with Platner. Some Democrats fear both that and his short history in Maine will be dangers for him in a general election.
Despite Shah’s ideological differences with Platner, Long suspected Shah is benefiting from the Democratic anti-establishment streak that lifted the Senate candidate over Mills, who ended her campaign in April. Some voters are backing both in part because they’d rather “vote for a mushroom” than longtime politicians like the governor or U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, he said.
“He approaches it like public service as opposed to loyalty to an ideology or a party,” Long said of his former boss.
