Maine voters wanted limits on political spending. What they got was another Big Money race.

In the meantime, Maine’s governor’s race and other key elections are being run under the same rules the law was written to replace.

Hannah Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House and now the Democratic nominee for governor, built her campaign on volume, not size. 

By January, her filings showed contributions from more than 1,800 individual donors with roughly 40% of her $1.4 million made up of gifts of $50 or less. 

Pingree will now face Republican Bobby Charles and independent Rick Bennett in the November general election and her campaign has seemingly shifted away from courting small-dollar donations. The latest filing shows that between late May and mid-July, the candidate received just over $900,000 with only about $40,000 coming from donations of $50 or less.

What’s more, a Democratic Governors Association-aligned super PAC, Pine Tree State Prosperity, has committed $11 million in ad spending through Election Day, more than every other outside group in this race combined. Right now, a single donor can give an unlimited sum to that group and dominate the airwaves. 

That was the case in the Republican primary, when one outside group spent more than $2 million backing a single candidate, former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason. The money came from just two people, Illinois shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and New York investor Thomas Klingenstein, funneled through a super PAC called Restoration of America. Mason was a paid consultant for Klingenstein in 2022. He lost the primary anyway, but two donors were able to outspend what took others thousands of donors and months of town halls to raise. 

As a state senator, Bennett, a former Republican now running for governor as an independent, was one of Question 1’s most vocal supporters when it went before voters in 2024, and now he’s an intervenor in Dinner Table Action v. Schneider, the pending case that will determine whether the cap he helped pass gets to take effect. But even his super PAC, Maine Wins Together, has taken in roughly $100,000 from just two individual households.

The legal theory that keeps this law blocked comes from a 2010 case called SpeechNow v. FEC, which found that since super PAC spending isn’t coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, the money donated to the super PACs can’t corrupt that candidate either. 

But in practice, that theory has allowed just a handful of wealthy individuals to spend more than thousands of others combined. 

The First Circuit will likely rule before the end of 2026. When it does, it will decide whether the next race, and the one after that, gets to run under the limit voters have asked for. Until then, Maine’s governor’s race is worth watching for a simple reason: it’s showing us the exact thing Maine voters chose to stop.

SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX.