Caribou Republican City Committee

10/14/2026

With less than three weeks to go until Election Day, the three chief candidates for Maine governor will face off in an hourlong debate hosted by Maine's Total Coverage at 8 p.m. Thursday.

10/14/2026

🚨Maine Democrats love to blame natural gas for the explosion in our electric bills. It’s the convenient excuse—and it’s dishonest.

Look at the numbers. Maine’s retail rates are up nearly 90% since 2015. New England overall is up about 50%. Vermont is up roughly 40–45%. Same ISO-NE grid. Same winter gas constraints. Same price spikes that hit the entire region. That shared problem does not explain why Maine pulled so far ahead of Vermont.

Those gas constraints themselves are policy, not destiny. Decades of opposition to new pipeline capacity—driven by the same environmental and political priorities that shaped Maine’s renewable mandates—kept the region short of infrastructure. The resulting winter price spikes were foreseeable and avoidable. They are not an act of nature; they are the product of choices.

ISO-NE’s own numbers destroy the gas-only excuse. In August 2026, real-time wholesale electricity prices jumped 33% year-over-year while average natural gas prices fell nearly 12%. Electric prices rose sharply even as gas dropped. That is not a gas story. It is a policy and market-design story, and pretending otherwise is deliberate misdirection.

What does help explain Maine’s steeper climb is policy. Democratic-led expansions of Net Energy Billing created a subsidy machine that grew far beyond its targets and dumped $200–235 million a year in stranded costs onto non-participating ratepayers. Add RPS mandates, RGGI carbon payments baked into supply prices, Efficiency Maine charges, residual stranded costs, the transmission upgrades required to move intermittent solar and wind, and the storage and capacity that intermittency demands. These are not free. They compound. They show up in your bill whether they’re labeled “public policy,” “transmission,” or buried in the supply rate.

The Maine Chamber of Commerce—not a partisan shop—has been straight about it: public-policy costs are real, and affordability has been sacrificed. Focusing only on gas lets the people who wrote these programs pretend their choices had nothing to do with the outcome. Mainers are paying the price for that evasion.

The graph shows the gap. The gas excuse doesn’t survive contact with the data. Every major driver—pipeline constraints, Net Energy Billing, RPS, carbon charges, transmission for intermittency, storage—traces back to policy choices. Maine Democrats own the results.

(Graphic from the Maine Chamber of Commerce)

10/14/2026

WATCH LIVE: CBS13 and FOX23 host a debate focused on the race for t...

10/13/2026

Do you know that it is your local House/Senate candidates that choose your Secretary of State!? Vote wisely!

10/12/2026

There’s only one choice…

VOTE FOR BOBBY CHARLES TODAY!!!

Early VOTING is here so make sure you use it to WIN!!!

10/12/2026

10/12/2026

Two lifelong Augusta insider / career politicians are not going to fix Maine’s problems. They’ve caused the problems. Vote for change, not more of the same.