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Douglas Fogg of Orrington is a middle school social studies teacher at All Saints Catholic School in Bangor and a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate.
If there was ever an election where you would want to consider independent and third-party candidates, it would be this one. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have ceased to work for the American people and have focused only on their own agendas, pushing for power rather than solutions and improvements. Yet they control the entire democratic process in this country, particularly in Maine, where they even control who can vote in the primaries.
Many people are afraid to stray from the mainstream candidates, afraid that they will “waste their vote,” and this is only reinforced by propaganda from the two major political parties. Yet in Maine, we have ranked-choice voting, where we can take a chance on an independent or third-party candidate and still list as our second choice a mainstream candidate who may stand a better chance and our vote is not wasted or lost.
So why go this route? If we consider only the mainstream candidates, we will continue to have gridlock in Washington, two parties who only care about their own power, telling our elected officials to totally ignore ideas from the other party, even if they are good ones. The two parties have little intention of working together to develop good solutions to the issues currently faced by our nation.
In the current Maine U.S. Senate race, my Republican and Democratic opponents have approved one negative advertisement after another, slamming the integrity and record of the other, slinging mud so deep it would be hard to realize that each of these women have worked hard for Maine and have done good work in the past. But these negative ad campaigns have damaged the integrity of both women.
Expenditures in this race, including funds from the candidates and outside interests, are already well over $40 million, and you know this money did not all come from inside the state! Why is so much money being poured into our state in an attempt to sway our votes? Why are we subjected to incredibly negative and misleading ad campaigns?
It is because we have allowed it to happen. We have allowed the negative campaigns to sway our votes. We have allowed outside interests to hijack the political process. We have not demanded honesty, integrity and decency, accepting, while not necessarily liking, that this is just the way politics is done these days. We need to demand more, demand better, demand a different way!
If we continue to vote for the Republican and Democratic candidates, we are only going to get more of the same. I urge you to check out the independent candidates in all races, but particularly in the senatorial race. Whether it be Max Linn or Lisa Savage who will be on the ballot, or the registered write-in candidates, including Tiffany Bond, Ian Kenton Engleman or myself, I assure you you will find a candidate that is in a better position to work for the people of Maine, because they are the only people to whom these candidates owe their loyalty.