Five of the seven Republicans seeking to replace Gov. Janet Mills will meet at 7 p.m. Thursday at a debate hosted by CBS 13 and the Bangor Daily News.
The candidates attending are entrepreneurs Jonathan Bush and Owen McCarthy, lobbyist and former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, real estate agent David Jones and former fitness executive Ben Midgley. The debate will be carried on the air in the Portland market and on the news outlets’ social media pages and websites.
Lawyer and former federal official Bobby Charles has chosen not to attend, and Robert Wessels, a former Paris selectman running a longshot campaign, did not meet the criteria for the debate, which includes securing at least 5% in an independent poll of the race.
Charles has been the polling frontrunner and was a focus of the last debate in the race on Tuesday. Rival campaigns have turned up the dial on their attacks over the past day or so, with a pro-Bush group running an ad featuring an AI-generated depiction of Barack Obama patting Charles on the shoulder.
