Maine is one of only two states — Nebraska is the other — that does not award all its electoral votes to the statewide winner. Two go to the statewide leader and one to the winner of each congressional district, and in 2024 the line ran straight through the state. Kamala Harris carried Maine by 6.9 points, down from Joe Biden’s 8.6 in 2020, and took the southern First District around Portland; Donald Trump won the elector of the northern Second District, the rural interior from the Kennebec Valley to the Canadian border. Maine has used ranked-choice voting for federal races since 2018, the first state to adopt it statewide.
The divide is sharpest at the county line. Cumberland County, which holds Portland, voted Democratic by 35.3 points in 2024 — the bluest county in the state — and the southern coast around it votes the same way: Knox by 18.6, Sagadahoc by 16.6, York by 10.5. The northern and eastern counties run the other direction: Piscataquis by 29.2, Somerset by 27.0, Aroostook by 26.2, Washington by 23.5. Aroostook, the potato country along the New Brunswick border, voted Democratic by 7.6 points as recently as 2012; it has moved thirty-four points since, the clearest case of the shift that gave the Second District to Trump.
Underneath the split is the oldest population in the country, a median age of 44.8 years, and one of the whitest, at 89.9 percent White — with English, Irish, and French the largest ancestries and a French-Canadian thread, 6.1 percent, tracing the mill towns and the Aroostook border. It is a secular state, second of fifty in the share claiming no religion, at 69.3 percent, and Catholic where it is religious, at 16.1 percent. In 2026 Maine holds two top races: Governor Janet Mills is term-limited, with Hannah Pingree (D) and Bobby Charles (R) out of June ranked-choice primaries, and Senator Susan Collins seeks a sixth term against Graham Platner (D).
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