Brewer quoted in BDN report on Lewiston’s mayoral race, Maine People’s Alliance
Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine, was quoted in the Bangor Daily News article, “Why Lewiston is an important test for the Maine People’s Alliance.” The progressive group is on the ground in Lewiston trying to replace mayor Robert Macdonald with one of its employees, Ben Chin, according to the article. The race will be decided in a Dec. 8 runoff election after Chin outpolled the conservative mayor on Election Day but without reaching the 50 percent threshold needed to win the office outright, the article states. Despite big money on Chin’s side, beating the two-term mayor would be “a massive upset,” Brewer said, but the race already has “shown the Democrats some positives” — including a high-energy campaign and a clear slate of progressive policies — that they could emulate to gain ground in areas where they have fallen behind in recent years. “There’s nothing that generates enthusiasm within a party like coming to believe that you have a shot at winning a race that initially you thought was, if not unwinnable, just very difficult to do,” he said.