The Maine mansion
Why this seat
Open with Mills termed out, in a state whose ranked-choice generals rarely resolve the way first-round polling implies.
State of the field
Open on both sides, with independent candidacies a standing feature of Maine governor's races rather than a surprise.
The test
Maine holds if the second preferences behave as they did in the last two ranked contests. It moves if an independent reaches the final round, which the state's history says is not remote.
The mansion model runs separately from the Senate one. It carries less of the presidential result into the race — 0.45 of a point per point, against 0.78 on the Senate board — and allows a wider miss per seat, because a governor's race turns on a personal vote a national baseline cannot see. Both numbers stand: the simulated one and the one the desk wrote first.
| Held now | Democratic |
| On the ballot | Open (Mills termed out) |
| 2024 presidential margin | +6.9 |
| Modelled lean · 1σ | +7.3 · ±9.5 |
| Desk rating | 65% Democratic |
| Band meaning | A real advantage. About a third of them will flip anyway. |
Model call · governors-2026.1
77%
Democratic nominee wins
Open, and Maine's ranked-choice general elections rarely resolve the way the first-round polling suggests.
Nothing written on this page feeds that number. The method.
No candidate ledger is published for this seat. A ledger requires a completed first-party source pass — every candidate's own published policy pages, read on the same day, under identical headings and an identical word budget. Until that pass is done, printing a partial board would rate the campaigns that publish against the ones that have not, which is the asymmetry the Standard exists to prevent.
See a finished ledger — GeorgiaThe Georgia room
North Carolina · Senate · Class 2The North Carolina room
Maine · Senate · Class 2The Maine room