Angus King

FREEPORT — See that guy over there helping gather firewood for families in need? Recognize him at all?

If not, here’s a bit of info. He was born in Skowhegan and mostly grew up in Topsham with his mother, father and two brothers. His parents divorced when he was 10, and he mostly lived with his mom while spending Monday nights and every other weekend with his dad, a lawyer in Brunswick.

Summer jobs as a teen included working as a carpenter’s assistant and on a lobster boat. After going to a private high school in New Hampshire, and before he started at Dartmouth College, his father’s alma mater, the world of politics came knocking.

The young man slept on couches in Boston while volunteering for the 1988 presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis. He took off the first half of his senior year to help Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, and then got to work in Clinton’s White House.

He eventually turned to business and worked for an affordable housing developer before leading a renewable energy firm.

What do you think after hearing all that? Oh, and one more thing — he was the scheduler for his dad’s victorious 1994 Maine gubernatorial campaign.

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His name is Angus King III, and the 55-year-old is running this year for Maine governor as a Democrat. His dad is U.S. Sen. Angus King, the 81-year-old independent who caucuses with Democrats and who was Maine’s governor from 1995 to 2003.

The younger King’s resume is impressive on its own, albeit filled with plenty of privileged experiences. And yet, in a midterm election year that has already seen Maine Democrats gravitate toward newer faces like U.S. Senate contender Graham Platner over establishment picks like outgoing Gov. Janet Mills, it feels like King’s name could both help and hinder him among primary voters come June 9.

King’s not the only gubernatorial candidate navigating that tightrope— former Maine House Speaker Hannah Pingree and healthcare executive Jonathan Bush each come from politically-connected families.

And King’s father routinely has the highest favorability ratings among Maine politicians in polls. The junior senator endorsed his son in a video in which he told independent voters to participate in the semi-open primary and reminded them they are not voting for him, but for “Angus one, two, three.”

Alluding to the four other Democratic candidates who have worked in state government, King said he is “the only one with any sort of real business experience.” But it still begs the question: Does having a business background, along with plenty of political connections between Maine and Washington, really serve as a selling point for a Democratic candidate nowadays?

While volunteering in April at the Freeport Wood Bank and wearing a blue button-down with khakis and a ballcap, King projected confidence that he is the best choice both in June and November, and that he has proven he can work “in the middle and find a way to get things done.”

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EXPOSED TO THE WORLD

Angus Stanley King III was born July 31, 1970 at Skowhegan’s Redington-Fairview General Hospital. The oldest of three boys, he lived in the nation’s capital from the ages of 3 to 5 with his family while his father worked for then-U.S. Sen. Bill Hathaway, D-Maine.

The family moved back to Maine and settled in Topsham next to the local elementary school. King enjoyed lots of time outdoors sledding and playing baseball, recalling how his parents focused on “our education and exposing us to as much of the world as they could.”

After his parents divorced, King and his two brothers, Duncan and James, spent most days with their mom, Edie Hazard (now Edie Hazard Birney), who was the office manager at a local law firm and went back to Bowdoin College as a nontraditional student.

King’s first foray into politics was helping assist the press secretary for the Dukakis presidential campaign, which he said was “unbelievably energizing” despite the former Massachusetts governor ultimately losing in 1988 to George H.W. Bush.

After working for the Clinton-Gore campaign in 1992 and then wrapping up at Dartmouth, he worked as his dad’s scheduler for the successful 1994 gubernatorial campaign. He was 24 at the time, and King said he was living “every kid’s dream to tell your father where to go every day.”

Once his dad won the Blaine House, King shifted to the White House and worked as the research director in Clinton’s communications office.

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“What that meant was I knew one page about everything,” King said, fondly recalling how he was tasked with finding people who “knew all of the things” about various issues and then summarizing Clinton’s different policies.

He wrapped up his Clinton administration experience as the “domestic policy bird dog” for White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, calling it “the greatest job you could ever imagine.”

“As I looked around the building, the people who I looked up to the most were people who had had successful lives outside of government mostly and then had come to Washington to have an impact on literally millions of people’s lives,” King said. “That was totally inspiring, and I wanted to be like those people.”

Entering the business world after that made sense to King, and it is part of the tension behind him as a candidate: He believes his business leadership — not his political background — makes him the best pick for governor, and yet politics gave him many opportunities.

He started as a consultant at Bain & Company and eventually made it back to Maine to help build affordable housing with developer Joe Wishcamper. After about seven years in housing, he joined the now-former First Wind to support wind and solar projects.

King would follow Kurt Adams, his boss at First Wind, to natural gas provider Summit Utilities, and King then founded the Summit subsidiary Peaks Renewables in 2021. His firm has worked to convert cow manure at its plant in rural Clinton into renewable natural gas, or biomethane. While King stepped aside to run for governor, Peaks continues to pursue other waste-to-energy projects.

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Adams, the president and CEO of Summit, said King was an astonishingly quick learner when moving from housing to the renewable energy space. He is also his “own man,” Adams said.

“He’s got this magical trifecta, which is really effective in any vocation in life,” Adams said. “He is shockingly smart. He works as hard as anybody I’ve ever met, and he can get along with anybody.”

WINNING THE MIDDLE, BUILDING THE HOMES

Happy with his life as a businessmen, King wasn’t going to run for just anything. Being with his family is important to him too. King and his wife, Cricket, live in Portland and have a son and daughter who are 18 and 20, respectively, along with a black lab, Snowy.

“Being in Congress is the worst job you could possibly imagine,” he said, especially bemoaning the travel schedule.

Being governor, on the other hand, is “the best job in Maine,” he said. But the state’s current problems are serious: King views the big ones as housing and energy costs along with how “our schools have gone from best to worst.”

That makes his job experience especially relevant, he said. His campaign website includes policy blueprints, such as having every Maine student reading by the end of 3rd grade using the phonics-focused “science of reading” method; being “smarter” with solar subsidies under the net energy billing program that led to cost complaints under the Mills administration; and building 10,000 homes per year across all income levels by the end of his first term.

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He has resembled his father by taking a more moderate approach than his four Democratic primary opponents on certain issues, particularly by not committing to supporting sweeping tribal sovereignty legislation that Mills had previously blocked in favor of narrower changes.

He was the only Democrat at an April debate to not outright back the data center moratorium that Mills vetoed because it did not include a carveout for a Jay project. He called the question about whether he would have vetoed the measure a “hypothetical,” but warned against changing rules midstream for developers.

King thinks it is “pretty easy to stand out” in the June primary, nodding to how his four Democratic opponents all have state government experience.

“If everything were working well in our state, there are four people who have spent their lives in state government, and I wouldn’t take away anything from that,” King said. “But I genuinely don’t believe that’s the experience that’s called for right now.”

Still, there’s evidence voters are not seeing King and his resume with as much enthusiasm. The latest University of New Hampshire poll of the race came out Wednesday and put him last, garnering 7% of first-place votes from voters in the ranked-choice primary. A February survey from UNH also had him in last, though a May poll from Pan Atlantic Research had him second.

Peaks Renewables President Lizzy Reinholt, who previously worked in Democratic politics, said King “wants people around him who are going to disagree.” Something that can make it tough for a candidate to stand out in polls and among louder voices is one of his leadership traits, she added.

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“Getting credit is not part of the equation for him,” Reinholt said.

Several former Clinton press secretaries joined King on a virtual press call this month to share their support. One of them, Joe Lockhart, also worked with King on the Dukakis campaign and acknowledged in an interview that times are “tough” for career politicians.

“Voters are looking for something different right now. They’re looking for an approach that is built on something other than politics and ideology,” Lockhart, who lives near Yarmouth on Littlejohn Island, said. “That kind of defines Angus.”

King and his supporters think he’ll win over the middle in both the primary and general elections. In the meantime, he loves to find time to fish, hunt and paddle, and he plays hockey every Thursday morning at 8 a.m.

“I’m not great at it but have a hell of a lot of fun. It’s a good group of guys, and it’s really a happy hour of my week,” said King, who donned pads and skates in one of his campaign ads.

He is standing by his approach, and he feels it’s his own.

“It’s not the sexiest, it’s not the most — I don’t know. It’s just not divisive,” King said. “And so it may not get a lot of attention, but it sure is the way you actually accomplish things.”