Representative John Baldacci

John Elias Baldacci (born January 30, 1955) is an American politician who served as a Representative from Maine in the United States Congress from 1995 to 2003 and as the 73rd governor of Maine from 2003 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he also served in the Maine Senate from 1982 to 1994 and earlier on the Bangor City Council. Over the course of four terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, Baldacci contributed to the legislative process during a significant period in American history, serving on the House Agriculture Committee and the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and representing the interests of his constituents in Maine’s Second Congressional District.

Baldacci was born in Bangor, Maine, on January 30, 1955, into a Catholic family of Italian and Lebanese ancestry. He grew up in Bangor with seven siblings and was involved from an early age in the family business, Momma Baldacci’s restaurant, which became a well-known local establishment. He attended public schools in Bangor and graduated from Bangor High School in 1973. While working in the family restaurant, he pursued higher education and later received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Maine at Orono in 1986, grounding his political career in a strong understanding of history and public affairs.

Baldacci entered public life at a young age. In 1978, at the age of 23, he was elected to the Bangor City Council, his first public office. Building on this local experience, he won election to the Maine Senate in 1982 from a Bangor-area district. He was reelected twice and served a total of 12 years in the state Senate, from 1982 to 1994. During this period he developed a reputation as a pragmatic Democrat focused on economic development, education, and constituent service, and he established the political base that would support his later bids for federal and statewide office.

In 1994, following the retirement of his cousin, United States Senator George J. Mitchell, Baldacci sought federal office and ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from Maine’s Second Congressional District, a seat being vacated by Representative Olympia Snowe as she ran for Mitchell’s open Senate seat. In one of the few Democratic pickups in the 1994 election cycle, he defeated fellow state senator Rick Bennett, winning 47 percent of the vote to Bennett’s 41 percent. He took office on January 3, 1995, and would never again face a contest as close, winning reelection three times with well over 70 percent of the vote. Serving four terms, from 1995 to 2003, Baldacci sat on the House Agriculture Committee and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, where he worked on issues critical to Maine, including rural economic development, transportation projects, and agricultural and forestry policy. His service in Congress coincided with a period of major national debates on budget policy, trade, and federal reform, and he participated actively in the democratic process on behalf of his largely rural district.

Baldacci was elected governor of Maine in 2002 as a Democrat, winning the gubernatorial election with 47.2 percent of the vote. He defeated Republican nominee Peter Cianchette, who received 41.5 percent, Green Independent nominee Jonathan Carter, who garnered 9 percent, and unenrolled former Democrat John Michael, who received 2 percent. Baldacci was sworn in as governor on January 8, 2003. During his first term, he faced a $1.2‑billion budget deficit and addressed it through budget cuts, consolidation of government functions, and fee increases, while refusing to raise broad-based taxes in keeping with a central campaign pledge. He won approval for several major initiatives, including the Dirigo Health Care Act, which sought to expand access to affordable health insurance; the creation of the Maine Community College System, which transformed existing technical colleges into a broader community college network; and the establishment of Pine Tree Development Zones, enacted in 2004 to offer eligible businesses significant state tax reductions for up to ten years in exchange for creating new, quality jobs in targeted sectors or relocating such jobs to Maine.

In the 2006 gubernatorial election, Baldacci ran for a second term against Republican state senator Chandler Woodcock, Independents Barbara Merrill and Phillip Napier, and Green Independent candidate Pat LaMarche. In a four-way race in which Merrill and LaMarche were seen as drawing votes from Democratic-leaning constituencies and Woodcock’s social conservatism prompted some Republicans to look elsewhere, Baldacci was reelected with 38.11 percent of the vote. Woodcock finished second with 30 percent, Merrill received 21 percent, and LaMarche 10 percent, enough to maintain ballot access for the Green Independent Party. Baldacci was inaugurated for his second term on January 3, 2007, in Augusta. As governor, he was a member of the National Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association and continued to emphasize health care access, education, workforce training, and economic competitiveness. The Maine Community College System expanded rapidly, with enrollment growing by 42 percent in its first three years and new satellite campuses added; legislation he supported allowed credits and degrees from the community colleges to transfer to the University of Maine System, strengthening pathways to four-year degrees.

Throughout his eight years as governor, Baldacci pursued an agenda of administrative reform, regionalization of local services, and energy policy innovation. He advocated the consolidation of school administration, proposing to reduce Maine’s 152 school districts into a smaller number of Regional School Units to cut duplicative administrative costs and redirect savings into classrooms. In his second term, he continued efforts to streamline government services and maintain fiscal discipline, and when the national recession hit in 2008 he responded with further consolidation measures while avoiding increases in state income taxes. He left office in 2011 with a budget surplus and a replenished “rainy day” fund. Baldacci also promoted regionalization of local government services more broadly, a sometimes contentious policy aimed at reducing administrative overhead and improving efficiency.

Baldacci’s tenure was marked by significant initiatives in civil rights and energy and environmental policy. In 2005, he introduced and signed legislation expanding Maine’s civil rights law to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Similar measures had twice been overturned by referendum, but this time voters upheld the law, making it a durable part of state statute. On May 6, 2009, he signed legislation legalizing same-sex marriage in Maine, becoming the first governor in the United States to sign such a law where it had not been previously mandated by a court decision. Although the law was narrowly overturned by referendum on November 3, 2009, same-sex marriage was later restored by a citizen-initiated referendum on November 6, 2012. In energy policy, Baldacci worked to reduce Maine’s heavy dependence on oil for home and business heating—estimated at 86 percent when he took office, declining to about 76 percent by 2011—by promoting wood pellets, wind, solar, biofuels, and wave technologies, and by creating the Energy Efficiency Trust. He advanced new Renewable Portfolio Standards to attract alternative energy investment and supported offshore wind research at the University of Maine, which drew federal attention and Department of Energy grants. He also led Maine into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first cap-and-trade consortium among East Coast states, which brought tens of millions of dollars—reported at $83 million—to Maine for weatherization and energy-efficiency programs.

In economic development and corrections policy, Baldacci’s record was mixed and sometimes controversial. Pine Tree Development Zones, central to his economic strategy, were intended to spur job creation and investment; however, a later report released in 2014 concluded that over their first decade the PTDZ program cost Maine approximately $457 million and was ineffective in generating sufficient economic returns. In corrections policy, Baldacci twice advanced proposals to send Maine prisoners to the privately run North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre, Oklahoma, operated by Corrections Corporation of America, to alleviate overcrowding at the Maine State Prison in Warren. The 2007 proposal drew criticism from groups such as the Maine Civil Liberties Union, which urged alternatives such as supervised release for nonviolent offenders and sentence commutations for model inmates, and the legislature ultimately rejected the plan. A similar proposal resurfaced in 2009 and attracted scrutiny in part because Corrections Corporation of America had indirectly contributed to Baldacci’s reelection campaign and had hired his cousin and adviser, Jim Mitchell, as a lobbyist.

Baldacci’s governorship also featured efforts to expand research and development and to strengthen regional cooperation. He promoted a series of statewide bond packages, approved by voters, to support research and development in sectors such as biomedicine, composite materials, and forest products at Maine’s leading educational and research institutions. He convened regional leaders for conferences on energy infrastructure and cross-border cooperation and, in February 2008, hosted an official visit to Maine by New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham, the first such visit by a sitting head of a Canadian province. Graham addressed a joint session of the Maine Legislature and called for increased cross-border trade, tourism, transportation links, and collaboration in energy and education. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Baldacci, serving as a superdelegate, initially pledged his support to Senator Hillary Clinton despite Senator Barack Obama’s victory in the Maine caucuses; by June 2008, as Obama secured the nomination, Baldacci publicly endorsed him.

After leaving office in January 2011, Baldacci remained active in public policy and regional affairs. He has served as vice chair of the board of the non-partisan Northeast-Midwest Institute, a Washington-based, private, nonprofit, and nonpartisan research organization dedicated to promoting economic vitality, environmental quality, and regional equity for the Northeast and Midwest states. He has also been noted in discussions of Arab and Middle Eastern Americans in the United States Congress, reflecting his Lebanese heritage. Outside of formal office, he has maintained an interest in energy, economic development, and education policy and has appeared on national public affairs programs, including C‑SPAN.

In his personal life, Baldacci lived in the Blaine House in Augusta with his wife, Karen, and their son, Jack, during his gubernatorial tenure. His wife, Karen, has been active in literacy and public health; she headed Maine Reads, a nonprofit umbrella organization for the Read With ME program, which was privately funded by Verizon, and later worked as a registered dietitian with the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program in Portland. Baldacci’s family is prominent in Maine public life. His brother, Joe Baldacci, has served in the Maine Senate. He is a first cousin once removed of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell and a second cousin of author David Baldacci, and he is also related to State Representative Chris Greeley, who, like Baldacci and Mitchell, is of half-Lebanese descent. Baldacci has held a technician-class amateur radio license with the call sign KB1NXP, which expired in 2018.