LEWISTON, ME — Matt Dunlap, the Democrat running for Congress in Maine’s Trump-supporting 2nd District, prefers to campaign without the support of incumbent Rep. Jared Golden, the centrist Democrat who is retiring after winning the seat four times.
“I think, given what we've been hearing from people across the state, I'm better off on my own,” Dunlap said when asked about the importance of securing Golden’s backing during an interview in Lewiston over the weekend. “I'm not looking for an endorsement from Jared Golden. I haven't asked for one. He hasn't offered one, and we're just going to leave that by the side of the road.”
Dunlap, the current state auditor who also served as secretary of state, is facing well-known Republican former Gov. Paul LePage in a deeply competitive district that chose Trump three times.
Still, Golden isn’t trying to mend fences.
“Usually by this stage of a campaign, a candidate knows who they are running against. Matt Dunlap should know by now he’s running against Paul LePage, not me,” the congressman wrote in a statement to Spectrum News. “This comes across as someone scared of losing, and seeding the ground to shift the blame if he does.”
The unusual public rift between the two Maine Democrats follows a tense start to the election cycle.
Dunlap initially joined the 2026 race as Golden’s opponent, not his successor. The 61-year-old launched his congressional campaign a month before the incumbent announced his retirement.
Once the primary opened up, Dunlap made his strongest statement yet, defeating state Sen. Joe Baldacci, whom Washington Democrats backed for the seat.
Now the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which endorsed Baldacci, is praising Dunlap and shoveling resources into his race through its Red to Blue program.
“Mainers know Matt Dunlap is the independent, Maine-first leader the 2nd District needs — that’s why he is on track to win this race,” DCCC spokesperson Riya Vashi told Spectrum News in an email.
In positioning himself against Golden from the jump, Dunlap is betting that this congressional district — thought to be winnable only by a more conservative Democrat, if a Democrat at all — is ready for a leftward shift.
Though he rejected any ideological label in his interview with Spectrum News, Dunlap snugly fits the mold of a rural progressive.
He supports Medicare for All, co-chaired Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign in the state, and lists universal child care as part of his cost-of-living pitch. He is also a sportsman and a notable Second Amendment advocate.
Though he didn’t appear with Sanders during the Vermont progressive’s recent visit to the state to campaign with Senate candidate Troy Jackson, Dunlap insists this was the fault of a scheduling conflict.
“If he was here right now, I’d stand with him,” Dunlap said of Sanders. “We scheduled all this stuff a month ago, so this came in over the top of that, we just couldn’t break the dates we already set.”
For all of Dunlap’s firmly progressive messaging, he seems to know he’s not seeking a seat in Massachusetts.
His website has subtly moderated in recent months.
An analysis of mattdunlapforuscongress.com using the Wayback Machine shows he changed a heading on the “Priorities” page from “Medicare For All” to “Healthcare,” and dropped an entire section called “Our Democracy,” which accused Trump of trying to undermine American democracy.
“In a primary, you have to show that you're the best Democrat to represent your party in the general election,” Dunlap said. “The general election, I'm just Matt Dunlap, and I have my whole tapestry of my record going back 30 years as a state representative, chairing three different committees, the work I did as secretary of state. I think that matters to people, not what label you can apply to somebody.”
The LePage campaign pounced on the news of a rift between Dunlap and Golden. “Matt Dunlap is so radically liberal, so extreme he is even attacking Democrat Jared Golden,” political consultant Brent Littlefield said in a statement. “Dunlap is too far left for Maine’s 2nd District.”
Golden, to be sure, has his liberal views, too. He co-sponsored the union-backed PRO Act, called for a federal assault weapons ban following the Lewiston mass shooting in 2023, and firmly supports abortion rights.
But he also makes appeals to the center and right that go far beyond what most Democrats can stomach.
Golden has offered consistent public support for Trump’s tariff policy and wrote an op-ed in the Bangor Daily News titled “Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine.”
The 44-year-old Marine veteran caused further uproar last month when he endorsed GOP Rep. Mike Lawler, who is locked in a competitive New York congressional race that national Democrats view as a prime target for a flip.
With all his dips across the aisle, Golden just barely won reelection last time around, edging out Republican former state legislator and NASCAR driver Austin Theriault by less than a percentage point in 2024. Trump won the district by 9 points.
Two years later, with Dunlap and LePage racing through the final three weeks before election day, polling suggests anything could happen.
The Cook Political Report labels the contest “Lean R.” However, a survey from the University of New Hampshire in late September showed a statistical tie between LePage and Dunlap.
Andrew Smith, a pollster at the university and a political science professor, said that while LePage has higher name recognition, the dynamics of this midterm year complicate the contest.
“Even in a district that maybe leans Republican in a presidential election year, in a midterm year with an unpopular president, a lot of those Republicans are just going to stay home,” Smith said. “And Democrats are far more motivated than Republicans are. LePage could potentially pull this one out, but it's going to be a hard challenge for him to pull that race out, just by the fundamentals of the election.”