King is seeking to succeed term-limited Gov. Janet Mills. Both are Democrats.
May 6, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT
By Ben Kamisar
Angus King III, an energy executive and a son of independent Sen. Angus King Jr. of Maine, will run for governor as a Democrat, he announced Tuesday.
King wants to follow in the footsteps of his father, who served two terms as governor from 1995 to 2003. And he’s vying to replace term-limited Gov. Janet Mills, the longtime Maine Democrat who has made national news in recent months tangling with President Donald Trump’s administration over policies for transgender athletes.
In an interview with NBC News ahead of his announcement, King emphasized that, during his career in the private sector, he’s been “building things that solve problems and help people.”
“If you were ever going to do it, now is the time. Right now, people are struggling, are scared. We just have a host of challenges that make life really hard,” King said of leaving private life, where he’s worked on issues like renewable energy and affordable housing, to seek public office.
“Right now, I’m going to run for governor to build a better Maine.”
King becomes the second major Democrat to jump into the primary to replace Mills, alongside Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who has a long political resume that includes serving in the top post at Maine’s chapter of the ACLU and The Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine, as well as a stint in the state Senate before becoming secretary of state in 2021.
The top Republican candidates include Bobby Charles, a longtime former federal government official who served stints in staff positions at the State Department and in the House of Representatives. It’s possible that more candidates could join the field, too, in a state that hasn’t elected back-to-back governors from the same party in more than a half-century.
King weighed in on Mills’ spat with the Trump administration over federal funding related to Maine’s policies toward transgender athletes, which the federal government said violated recent executive orders. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funding for a child nutrition program in the state, the administration lifted the freeze last week and the state agreed to drop its lawsuit.
King said that while he’s open to working with the Trump administration if it wants to help Mainers, “I’ll never rest when it comes to helping the people of Maine.”
“Any time a bully steals your lunch money and you’re able to get it back from him, that’s a good thing. I’m proud of the governor for doing that,” he said.
“I think that what the president has done to Maine, you don’t have to be a Democrat or an independent or a Republican or be from outer space, you know you shouldn’t play politics with kids’ school lunches and Social Security,” King said.
During his interview and launch video, King, 54, repeatedly pointed to a project he took on while working for a natural gas company in the state that turns cow manure into renewable fuel. The experience of bringing strange bedfellows together (a gas utility company and supporters of renewable energy) to accomplish a shared goal (sustainable energy that reduces emissions) is a theme King leans on heavily.
“I haven’t spent my career in Augusta, I’m not a politician,” he said, referring to the state capital. “But I’ve spent it building and making things that help people. I did it by bringing people together and importantly, focusing on the things we have in common, not the things that divide us.”
“Right now, there’s real value in having an outsider’s perspective, someone who’s built things, created jobs, worked on some of the toughest problems,” he added.
While King may have spent his career as an outsider, he sports a very public reminder of his ties to one of the most prominent politicians in the state: his father.
The elder King served two terms as Maine’s governor and returned to politics in the 2012 election, when he won the Senate seat he now holds, succeeding retiring GOP Sen. Olympia Snowe. He was re-elected to his third term in November.
But while the elder King has spent the last 30 years in politics as an independent, his son is running as a Democrat. (The elder King does caucus with Democrats in the Senate.) Asked why he’s choosing to run under the banner of one of the national political parties, he replied he has “a very easy answer.”
“I am a Democrat,” he said.
“I obviously have independent blood running through my body, and I think most people in Maine have independent blood running through their bodies,” he added.
Asked what he learned from the success of his father as well as the state’s other political constant over the last few decades, Republican Sen. Susan Collins, King replied that most of Maine’s successful politicians have been “moderate, pragmatic, ‘How do we get things done, how do we bring people together?’ kind of people.”
“That’s exactly how I’m going to serve as governor of Maine. That’s a terrific Maine tradition, and I fit pretty squarely into it,” he said.
He added, “You can be successful in Maine even if you are not a harsh partisan.”