Independent expected to align with Democrats
Angus King ran for the U.S. Senate for the same reasons Sen. Olympia Snowe decided not to seek a fourth term: because Congress is broken.
“I had no intention of getting back into politics,” King said in an interview. But, when Snowe said she could no longer get anything accomplished in the current climate of intransigent partisanship, King decided the remedy might be an independent, such as himself.
He’ll get the chance to test his theory after winning a six-way race that featured four independents, including King. It was also a campaign that saw Republicans spend more on ads promoting the Democratic candidate, Cynthia Dill, than her own party did, in an effort by conservative super PACs to split the progressive vote.
Although King will join the Senate as an independent, most observers believe he’ll cast a majority of his votes with the Democrats. King supports the Affordable Care Act and same-sex marriage, and is pro-life. He also endorsed Barack Obama in the presidential race.
King was first elected governor of Maine in 1994 and was re-elected in 1998 by a wide margin. He is best known for the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, a state-funded program that is supplying every seventh-grader and eighth-grader in the state with an Apple laptop.
King, 68, already was a familiar face to Maine voters when he ran for governor after hosting and co-producing Maine Watch on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network for 18 years.
During that same time period, King became vice president of Swift River/Hafslund, an alternative-energy development company.
Later, he founded Northeast Energy Management, an industrial energy-conservation company.
— William Cummings