This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
If you’ve gone to a Democratic campaign rally recently, chances are you’ve heard a version of the following sentence: This is the most important election of our lifetime.
Jared Golden isn’t buying it. The third-term House Democrat from Maine thinks America will be just fine if Donald Trump returns to the White House. “No matter who wins the presidency,” Golden told me last month at a Dunkin’ in his district, “the day after the election, America is going to get up and go to work.”
Golden may not think the presidential election matters all that much, but his constituents might end up deciding it. Maine is one of only two states that awards an Electoral College vote to the winner of each of its congressional districts. The easiest path to a Kamala Harris victory does not depend on her winning the electoral vote in Golden’s district, which Trump captured twice. But if the race is exceptionally close, the district could determine which party controls both the House and the presidency.
After the assassination attempt on Trump in July, Golden called on both parties to stop making “hyperbolic threats about the stakes of this election,” as he wrote on X. “It should not be misleadingly portrayed as a struggle between democracy or authoritarianism, or a battle against fascists or socialists bent on destroying America. These are dangerous lies.”
The Harris campaign has deemphasized the democracy-versus-autocracy framing that Golden condemned. But his nonchalance about a Trump victory still separates him from nearly everyone else in his party. Several of Golden’s House colleagues told me they believe he has trivialized the danger of a second Trump term. “He’s deliberately soft-pedaling a very grave threat to constitutional democracy,” Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia told me.
But as one of only five House Democrats who represents a district that Trump carried in 2020, Golden has good reason to avoid sounding alarms about the former president. He is virtually the only Democrat trying to lower the stakes of the election. That might be how he helps his party win it.
Outside the halls of the Capitol, Golden does not exactly radiate politician. When I met him at the Dunkin’ in Rumford, Maine, the 42-year-old arrived in his Chevy pickup and wore jeans and a T-shirt that showed off the tattoos running down each of his arms. Many lawmakers walk into restaurants in their districts as minor celebrities, glad-handing everyone in sight. Not Golden: During our interview, he spoke so softly that I had the feeling he didn’t want anyone to know we were talking about politics.
To the frustration of many Democrats, Golden is hard to pin down. He’s said he won’t vote for Trump, but he has refused to endorse Harris. Ask him to describe his ideology and he’ll respond with a paradox: progressive conservative. He rejects the left/right framing of American politics as well as labels such as “moderate” and “centrist.” He’s progressive on abortion and gay rights, unions, and taxes. He’s more conservative on border security and federal spending. A gun owner and a Marine, Golden opposed an assault-weapons ban until last year, when a mass shooting in his hometown of Lewiston changed his mind. When state Democrats took up gun-control measures after the massacre, Golden criticized them for not going far enough.
Golden won his seat in 2018, defeating the Republican incumbent, Bruce Poliquin, by just 3,500 votes with the help of ranked-choice voting, a system that Maine became the first state in the nation to use that year. In 2022, he beat Poliquin again, this time by 19,000 votes. His opponent this year, Austin Theriault, is a Trump-endorsed NASCAR driver turned state legislator. There’s been no public polling of their race, but prognosticators rate it as a toss-up.
Long before Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, turned “normal versus weird” into a national campaign message, Golden had been using it to distance himself from political opponents—some Democrats as well as Republicans. But if Walz’s vibe is friendly dad and football coach, Golden comes off as more of an introvert. “He’s not a flashy, ‘see me, see me’ type of a person,” Craig Poulin, a former president of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine who has known Golden for years, told me. That became clear to me when I joined Golden at a ribbon-cutting for a nonprofit that was building a camp for wounded veterans. Even though he had secured federal funding for the group, Golden declined to join the ceremonial photo they took in front of a new dock, because, he told me, he hadn’t raised money for that part of the project. Later, when an aide tried to take a photo of him with a group of veterans, Golden waved him off.
Despite Golden’s reserve, his political ambitions seem to be growing. Along with two other Democrats elected in Trump districts—Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State and Mary Peltola of Alaska—he has tried to revitalize the House’s Blue Dog Coalition, long a bastion of conservative Democrats. And some Maine Democrats believe he is eyeing a run for governor in 2026. “Never say never,” he told me, not quite denying interest in the job.
As for 2024, Golden’s serenity about the presidential election has less to do with his feelings toward the Republican nominee than his conviction that the country can contain Trump. “We withstood whatever he brought at us last time around,” Golden told me after I pressed him to explain why he disagrees with Democrats who argue that Trump would be more dangerous in a second term. “I’m skeptical that there’s some kind of grand master plan afoot to destroy American democracy. And I’m skeptical that his many voters think that’s what they’re signing up for, or that they’ll just stand by and let their freedom and democracy be taken away by the man even if they voted for him. So, yes, I have a lot of faith in the country and the people.”
Golden’s Democratic critics say that they, too, have plenty of faith in the American people. But they see his attitude as dismissive toward voters who take both seriously and literally the former president’s musings about seeking revenge against his enemies or becoming a dictator on “day one.” “Mr. Golden can interpret it any way he wants, but he doesn’t get to lecture the rest of us about how we interpret it,” Representative Connolly said.
Even at one of Golden’s own campaign events, I encountered people who weren’t enthused about voting for him. “There’s a lot of people scratching their heads right now,” Linda K. Miller, a Democratic candidate for the state legislature, told me at a cookout that Golden hosted. Miller said that she and other party loyalists felt “forced” to support him “because he is a Democrat right now.” As she explained, “We need those seats.”
As Golden sees it, normal people are more concerned about the cost of groceries and home insurance than they are about the erosion of democracy. He scolded some in his party for trying to claim credit for lower inflation and a strong economy. “It’s like, Inflation is down. Isn’t everything great? And people are like, But it’s still way more expensive to live than it was five years ago.” Before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Golden began airing a campaign ad that called the president “unfit to serve a second term” and touted his opposition to Biden’s “electric-car mandate” and pandemic stimulus package, both common Republican targets. “There’s a feeling he’s giving up too much to pander to Trump voters,” Nickie Sekera, a water conservationist running for the state legislature, told me.
That ad, along with Golden’s refusal to endorse Harris, has led a few Maine Democrats to worry that he might be preparing to leave the party, following the examples of Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Golden told me there was no truth to the rumor, before offering the strongest defense of the Democratic Party that I had heard him give. “We’re the party of the working class; the party of working people; the party standing up against the worst excesses of free trade; the party of choice; the party of health, civil rights, good governance, anti-corruption, campaign-finance reform—all these things that I’m fighting for,” he said. “That’s what being a Democrat means to me.”
Most of the Democrats I spoke with said that they trusted Golden’s sincerity and commitment to the party. They also trust that, after three victories in a swing district, he knows his voters better than they do. “He is of his people,” David Farmer, a longtime Democratic consultant in Maine, told me. Farmer disagreed with Golden’s attitude toward a potential Trump win, saying it reflected the worldview of “a former Marine white male in a traditional family relationship in a more rural part of a rural state”: For people “that don’t have the same advantages as the congressman, it is clearly an existential threat.” At the same time, Farmer said, Golden’s view “probably represents the independent-minded voters who are told every four years that this is the most important election ever. And for them, their lives change around the edges.”
Golden is no longer as sure as he once was that Trump will win the presidency. “It’s somewhat evident that it’s a tighter race,” he told me. But he still has no doubt whom his constituents will vote for: “I can tell you Trump’s going to win my district by a healthy margin.”
One organization that disagrees with Golden’s prediction is the Harris campaign. Shortly after I left Maine, I got an unexpected call from a Harris spokesperson, who insisted that the campaign had no intention of ceding the district’s electoral vote to Trump. He may have won it in both 2020 and 2016, but the Harris campaign and other Democratic committees have now opened 14 field offices in Maine; nine of them are in the state’s Second Congressional District—Golden’s district.
A few days later, the University of New Hampshire released a poll finding that Harris had a five-point lead in the district—just within the survey’s margin of error. Trump carried the district by seven points in 2020. But before he came along, Democrats routinely won it.
If Harris carries the “blue wall” swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin but loses the other battlegrounds, she would be one vote short of the 270 needed for the presidency. That final vote would more likely come from Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, in Omaha, a wealthier, more educated area that Biden won by seven points in 2020. Golden’s district offers another route, however, which could become crucial if Nebraska Republicans enact a last-minute change that would award all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner.
Yet if they had to choose, national Democrats would probably prioritize Golden’s campaign in his district over Harris’s. To retake the House, Democrats will need a net gain of four seats, which would be much harder if Golden loses. And Harris won’t be able to get much done without a Democratic Congress.
For that reason, Democrats in D.C. don’t seem to care much about Golden refusing to endorse Harris. Candidates like him highlight the Democrats’ embrace of “authentic independent thinkers,” Representative Suzan DelBene, the chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, told me when I asked her about the snub. “That’s a huge difference between Democrats and Republicans.” The GOP, she noted, pushed out lawmakers who did not line up behind Trump.
Golden will likely benefit from the boost in Democratic enthusiasm that Harris has generated even while he stands apart from her campaign. He is betting that few Democrats in his district will cast votes for Harris without also marking their ballot for him. That has left Golden free to chase Trump voters, and he has attracted plenty.
The dynamic was on display at the cookout I attended, where the talk turned to politics after people had finished their burgers and “red snapper” hot dogs. Kyle Nees, a veteran supporting Golden, wasn’t a fan of either Harris or Trump. “I don’t think the Founding Fathers ever wanted it to be a choice between shitty and shittier,” he told me. Most of the veterans Nees knew were “hard-core Trump supporters.” “But,” Nees added, “they’re all in for Jared.”
