Angus King III sits down for a cup of coffee with The Rising Tide

From immigration to education to energy, candidate says the governor’s office is the ‘tip of the spear’ in today’s politics

Angus King III is running for governor of Maine. Campaign photo.

May 19, 2026

By John Epstein

On his way farther downeast to a forum for Democratic primary candidates in East Machias, Angus King, III, one of five Democrats contending to be governor in Maine, pulled into Ellsworth to talk about what he’d like to do should he win his party’s nomination and then get elected to the state’s highest office.

As the son of the former two-term Maine governor, and now independent U.S. Senator, Angus King, Jr., the younger King benefits from name recognition across the state. And similar to his father’s transition into politics, he is seeking elected office after a business career that focused largely on energy development projects.

During a 45-minute discussion at a booth in the Riverside Café, he shared some of his ideas on a range of  topics. 

Maine’s health care crisis

“I think hospitals might make what to a hospital is a rational decision to close a facility, but that’s not the right answer for society at large,” King said. He would like to convene discussions with large health care providers to “do what’s right for the 1.4 million people in the state.”

“For instance, we need to make sure there will always be a trauma center in Bangor because if we lost that it would impact the whole state,” he said. 

King emphasized what he calls an “holistic approach” to healthcare – “the right way to deploy the resources that we have.”

“There are things that technology can do that can improve healthcare in rural Maine,” he said. He proposes innovations such as school-based health centers, mobile health care, and expanded telehealth. King calls for early screening to reduce Maine’s burgeoning rate of emergency room visits. “We need to spend money up front on the preventive side to prevent catastrophic problems,” he added.

King condemns the impact that the Big Beautiful Bill has had on Mainers.“Creating tax cuts and paying for them by cutting people’s healthcare is an unconscionable decision,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to go bankrupt to get access to health care.”

He sees universal health care as “a great goal, but not a state-level decision.”   

King said for those who are concerned about health care “it’s very important for Maine to have a Democratic governor because blue states are where the ideas are going to come from. The federal government has abdicated its role.”

Education  

“Maine used to be in the top 5 in the country in test score results,” King said about education. “Now the state is near the bottom. It’s embarrassing.”

“Governor LePage drastically cut funding that really hurt schools and towns, and then there was Covid that set us back with schools being closed,” he said.  

“Test scores are terrible,” King continued. “Three out of four kids read below grade level.”  He recommends a focus on reading improvement. “If you can’t read, everything else gets harder, your economic future is worse,” he said.

King says he has a track record of getting people from opposite sides of an issue to come together. Video by John Epstein.

“I think every kid graduating from high school should have either a job, an apprenticeship, a training program, or a path to college,” King said. He proposes that businesses join with towns to improve education. “It’s all hands on deck.”

King also wants teachers to get more support. “We just passed a cell phone ban in classrooms and restrictions on social media, and that’s good: I think that helps teachers manage the classroom,” he said. “But how do we create career paths for teachers so that they can continue to build skills and get paid for better skills.” He also believes great teachers should be paid accordingly, while admitting that unions don’t go for that idea.

He stressed that there needs to be more accountability for schools. “We ought to measure the schools, let the towns and communities know how their schools are doing,” he said, emphasizing that schools that are having problems should not be penalized, which he calls the Republican approach. “Instead, you send in mentors for the teachers and tutors for the kids,” King said.    

King readily acknowledged that diminishing school-age populations across the Maine are causing towns to close schools and consolidate education with neighboring communities.  

“Towns need to decide what makes the most sense” he said. “Do you need two large facilities, when one will do?” King pointed to the greater Portland area where towns are embarking on coordinated regionalization. 

Immigration enforcement

“What the Trump administration is doing on immigration is profoundly un-American,” King stated. “I still believe in America and mostly because I believe in Maine, and the response that you saw from Maine people when that [ICE] surge happened.”

King lives in Portland with his wife and two children. “The surge was literally on our doorstep, and there were classmates of my son’s in high school who didn’t come to school,” he said. “But on the flip side there were neighbors who showed up to take kids to school, deliver groceries, or help people who were afraid to leave their homes.”

“The governor is going to have to be the tip of the spear on defending us against what the president’s doing at any moment, and it may be on immigration, it may be on cutting funding for schools,” he added. “You’re going to have to fight in the courts.”

He also said that, under state law, Maine’s state police, cannot support ICE activities.

Energy Policy

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to end wind and solar energy development, King is bullish on the future of clean energy. “We need more energy, and it needs to be lower carbon and affordable, and we need it soon,” he stated. “The president is sending us in the wrong direction.” 

But King, who has had a career implementing and managing wind, solar, and biofuel energy projects, thinks the arc of human inventiveness will prevail regardless of what Trump is doing. “The level of innovation and ability of the people who generate electricity in this country is very high. And very, very smart people who I worked with in the past are thinking deeply and constructively on how we continue on a lower carbon, affordable path for our energy system.”

Government and business partnerships

The beginning of his business career after graduating from Harvard Business School exemplified that concept. Government-sponsored affordable housing developments in multiple states were coming to the end of their terms and in danger of being sold off and subjected to market rates.  Using government tax credits, King structured the financing for the purchase of the housing and its renovation and then hired a firm that managed the housing, while keeping the rents affordable for the tenants.

“Big solutions require public-private partnerships,” King said. As governor, King said he would strive to bring “stake holders from across the state and across party lines to figure out how we’re going to solve housing, healthcare, energy – things that are really fundamental to everybody’s lives.”

King contended his business experience managing large projects in cooperation with government policy makers gives him a perspective that his Democratic opponents -- Shenna Bellows, Hannah Pingree, Troy Jackson and Nirev Shah -- lack.  There are also five independents and eight Republicans running for Maine’s highest public office.

“I have never sat in a meeting with anybody on a project and said, ‘okay, who’s a Democrat?’” he said. “To me the essence of how you get things done is to listen to people in the room – I don’t care what party they’re from – because if they’ve got a good idea, I want them in there.”

Asa for advice from his father? “He told me to be myself,” King said, adding he also seeks advice from several former friends and colleagues from his days working in the Clinton White House as an assistant to the director of communications, and later to the chief of staff.

Various polls in the past few months put King anywhere from second to fifth place in the Democratic primary, with Shah consistently out front. Still, King says the polls are moving in his favor, and he believes ranked choice voting will play a big role in the primary.

A recent Schoen Cooperman poll conducted for an unnamed “Democratic sponsor” at the beginning of May shows him in second place, with 23 percent, trailing frontrunner Dr. Nirav Shah, Maine’s former CDC director, who received 30 percent.

Another poll, run by the firm GQR in early May and sponsored by Pingree, put King in fifth place, with 12 percent.

 King told The Rising Tide that he had not made any agreements with other candidates to recommend each other as second choices. He also said he would not run as an independent if he doesn’t win the Democratic primary.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Rising Tide is reaching out to all gubernatorial candidates—Democrat, Republican and Independent—ahead of the primaries to conduct in-person interviews with them if they are in our area, or to submit answers to a series of questions from our team.