By Paul H. Mills
We have a lot of trouble making up our minds. In the last four years we’ve gone from a Democratic legislature to Republican and then back to Democratic. Our Congressional delegation for the last 18 years has been evenly divided between two Democrats and two Republicans.
Back and forth we go.
As Michael Barone in the Almanac of American Politics observes, we live in a time when voters, “Instead of forming themselves into two coherent and cohesive armies, wander about the field, attaching themselves to one band and then another, with no clear lines of battle and no landmarks to rally beside.”
We seem quite possibly poised on the brink of another election when the phenomenon will continue, a time when an election may at many stations on the ballot erase the results of the last one. We’re not, however, the first era to experience the electoral pendulum’s heavy swing.
At no time and in few other places, for example, was the shift as dramatic and sudden as that which struck Maine just a half century ago at this time, 1964.
Going into the election, Maine was colored one of the deepest reds of them all. In the most recent presidential election we had been the sixth strongest Republican state for GOP nominee Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy. By the next presidential election, 1964, we gave the GOP’s Barry Goldwater the lowest vote percentage of all but three other states in the country, backing President Johnson over the Arizona senator with 69 percent of the vote.
The bungee cord swing of 1964 didn’t stop with the presidential voting. In the previous election Maine had bestowed on the Republicans overpowering dominance of the Maine Legislature, elephants stomping on donkeys by 29 to 5 in the senate, 110 to 41 in the House. (It would be the last time in our history when any party would command over two-thirds control of both branches at once.)
In 1964, Senate Democrats routed Republicans so thoroughly the numbers were exactly reversed. Democrats won by the same 29 to 5 seats the GOP had controlled Maine’s most exclusive club on the eve of the election. The party of FDR in a state that was one of only two never to vote for him thus took charge of Maine’s upper chamber for the first time in 54 years.
The Republican carnage in the House left almost as much blood on the floor as in the Senate. The GOP loss of 40 seats there was similarly unprecedented for any party since before the Civil War. Its new speaker, Dana Childs of Portland, epitomized the shift. Ten years earlier he had been the House floor leader for Republicans. Now as a Democrat he became the chancellor of its fortunes there.
At the state legislative level, the election also featured the introduction of a number of freshman House members whose names would help define many of the most prominent policies in the five decades since. Thirty-year-old Joe Brennan, for example, would go on to become both a two term governor and congressman. Three of the freshmen, including Brennan, Jim Erwin of York and Augusta’s Jon Lund, would go on to serve terms as the state’s Attorney General.
Another freshman, 23-year-old John Martin of Eagle Lake, would rise to become the House speaker for a record 19 years. The House is a body to which, after a two-year hiatus, he is this year seeking to return.
Freshman Harry Richardson of Cumberland, would go on to become one of the more influential legislative leaders of the next decade, nearly missing out on becoming the GOP gubernatorial nominee in 1974.
If by so suddenly switching horses Maine voters were expecting a revolution in the way Maine government would be conducted they didn’t get it. There were no major changes in the state tax codes, for example. (The GOP had already upped the sales tax the previous session.) Democrats did pass the Fair Housing Civil Rights bill, though in this they were following a course set by their GOP predecessors who had in 1959 put a Public Accommodations bill on the books.
Though Democrats passed a bill legalizing Sunday liquor sales, it was soon overturned in a citizen initiated people’s veto referendum.
Democrats were successful, however, in expanding access to the court system when it enacted a comparative negligence law. This got rid of a barrier that had frequently precluded relatively innocent victims of car accidents and other mishaps from obtaining private – usually insurance funded – compensation for their injuries.
Moderation for the most part seemed to be the norm. Even though the Blaine House continued to be occupied by a Republican – not up for election at the time Democrats took over the legislature in 1964 – confrontation was largely avoided. To be sure, partisanship was exercised by a governor who wielded his veto pen 12 times in the session when he had only done so once in the previous legislature. He nevertheless was not as ardent a practitioner of veto exercises as such governors as Baxter, Longley or LePage.
When both the GOP governor and the entire Legislature stood for re-election two years later, voters replaced the governor with a Democrat but at the same restored Republicans to the Legislature. The 29 to 5 Democratic margin in the Senate was now 24 to 10 for the Republicans with voters pulling the levers for a similar though less dramatic reversal that placed the reins of authority back in the hands of the GOP in the House.
The 1966 shift occasioned a confusion in party identity that today’s observers would find a bit baffling. Though the parties did adhere to their traditional roles when it came to organized labor, taxation issues during the session were a different matter. The GOP led legislature, for example, pushed for increasing the sales tax from four to 5 cents to help fund aid to public schools while the Democratic governor and his allies in the Legislature opposed any attempt to either increase existing taxes or impose new ones.
The resulting stalement was so intense it occasioned a brief shutdown in state government at the end of the 1967 session in July. It was resolved only by a special session compromise in September that increased the sales tax by a half cent.
Abortion legislation had already emerged as a contentious item but as with tax issues party alignment was not what it might be today. Most Republican legislators favored easing restrictions while a majority of Democrats then serving voted against liberalizing the law. (Enough Republicans sided with the Democrats, however, to block such legislation.)
In any event, the mid-1960s shake-outs in party control illustrate that partisan preferences shifted even more dramatically then than they do in our present era. What seems to have also changed, however, is how each party now more acutely interprets its mandate and the ideology it applies once it is placed in power.
Paul H. Mills, is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail:pmills@myfairpoint.net.
