Angus King
Angus Stanley King Jr. is an American lawyer and politician who has served since 2013 as the junior United States senator from Maine. A political independent, he served from 1995 to 2003 as the 72nd governor of Maine.
Born and raised in Virginia, King moved to Maine after graduating from law school. In 1989, he founded Northeast Energy Management, Inc., a company that developed and operated electrical energy conservation projects. He won the 1994 Maine gubernatorial election as the independent candidate in a four-way race and was reelected in a landslide in 1998. As the country's only independent governor, King enjoyed high approval ratings during his tenure. After leaving office in 2003, King returned to his business career.
King won Maine's 2012 Senate election to replace the retiring Republican Olympia Snowe. He was reelected to a second term in 2018, following the state's inaugural instant-runoff voting elections, and won a third term in 2024. For committee assignment purposes, he caucuses with the Democratic Party. He is one of two independents in the Senate; the other is Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who also caucuses with the Democrats.
Early life and education
King was born in Alexandria, Virginia, the son of Ellen Archer and Angus Stanley King, a lawyer. His father was a U.S. magistrate for the Eastern District of Virginia.King graduated from Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria. He then enrolled at Dartmouth College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1966. At Dartmouth, King joined the Delta Upsilon social fraternity. He then attended the University of Virginia School of Law, graduating with a Juris Doctor in 1969.
Soon after graduating from law school, King entered private law practice in Brunswick, Maine. He was a staff attorney for Pine Tree Legal Assistance in Skowhegan.
Early career
In 1972, he served as the chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Narcotics. King served as a legislative assistant to Democratic U.S. Senator William Hathaway in the 1970s. He was also well-known statewide as a host on public television.In 1973, when he was 29, King was diagnosed with an aggressive form of melanoma. King has said he believes he survived cancer only because he had health insurance, and has highlighted this experience when explaining his support for the Affordable Care Act.
In 1975, King returned to Maine to practice with Smith, Loyd and King in Brunswick. In 1983, he was appointed vice president of Swift River/Hafslund Company, which developed alternative energy projects in New England.
In 1989, King founded Northeast Energy Management, Inc., a company that developed and operated electrical energy conservation projects. In 1994, he sold the company. As of 2012, King's investments were valued at between $4.8 million and $22.5 million.
Governor of Maine (1995–2003)
In May 1993, King announced he would run for governor of Maine as an independent in the 1994 election. Incumbent Governor John McKernan Jr., a Republican, was term-limited and could not seek another term. King abandoned his lifelong affiliation with the Maine Democratic Party. "The Democratic Party as an institution has become too much the party that is looking for something from government", King told the Bangor Daily News a few weeks after he announced his candidacy. The Republican nominee was Susan Collins, Commissioner of Professional and Financial Regulation under Governor John McKernan and a protégée of U.S. Senator William Cohen, and at the time relatively unknown to the electorate. The Democratic nominee was former Governor and U.S. Representative Joseph E. Brennan. It was Brennan's fifth campaign for governor.The general election was a highly competitive four-way race between King, Collins, Brennan, and Green Party nominee Jonathan Carter. King invested early in television advertising during Maine's unusually early June primary, allowing him to emerge from the primary season on an equal footing with his rivals. He positioned himself as a businessman and a pragmatic environmentalist focused on job creation and education. The Washington Times described King as an idealist who "wants to slash regulations but preserve the environment; hold the line on taxes; impose work and education requirements on welfare recipients; experiment with public school choice and cut at least $60 million from the state budget." His opponents criticized him for flip-flopping. Collins argued King "presents different images, depending on who he is talking to. Angus has been a Democrat his whole life. In my opinion, he became an independent because he didn't think he could beat Joe Brennan in a primary. He's extremely smooth, articulate and bright, but he says different things to different groups."
King narrowly won the November 8 election with 35% of the vote to Brennan's 34%, a margin of 7,878 votes. Collins received 23% of the vote and Carter 6%. King won eight counties, Collins five and Brennan three. King's election as an independent was preceded by fellow independent James B. Longley, elected to the same office 20 years earlier.
During his tenure, King was the only U.S. governor unaffiliated with a political party. He was also one of only two governors nationwide not affiliated with either of the two major parties, the other being Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, who was elected in 1998 as a member of the Reform Party. The terms of Connecticut's independent governor Lowell Weicker and Alaska's independent governor Walter J. Hickel both ended when King's began. In his 2004 book Independent Nation, political analyst John Avlon describes all four governors as radical centrist thinkers. As governor, King signed legislation requiring that all school employees be fingerprinted and undergo background checks.
King had an approval rating of 75% going into his reelection bid in 1998, which he easily won, garnering 59% of the vote and defeating Republican Jim Longley Jr., who took 19%, and Democrat Thomas Connolly, who received 12%. King's 59% was the highest share of the vote a gubernatorial candidate had received since Brennan's 1982 reelection with 62%. Brennan's 1982 victory was also the last time until 1998 that a gubernatorial candidate had won a majority of the vote, and King's 1998 reelection was the last time a Maine gubernatorial candidate received the majority of the vote until 2018.
In 2002, King launched the Maine Learning Technology Initiative to provide laptops for every public middle-school student in the state, the first initiative of its kind in the nation. It met with considerable resistance due to its cost but was enacted by the Maine Legislature. On September 5, 2002, the state began the program with a four-year $37.2-million contract with Apple Inc. to equip all 7th- and 8th-grade students and teachers in the state with laptops.
Hiatus from politics (2003–2012)
The day after he left office in 2003, King, his wife, Mary Herman, and their two children, who were 12 and 9 at the time, embarked on a road trip in a 40-foot motor home to see America. Over the next six months, the family traveled and visited 33 states before returning home in June 2003.During his post-gubernatorial residency in Maine, he lectured at Bowdoin College in Brunswick and Bates College in Lewiston. He was appointed a visiting lecturer at Bowdoin in 2004 and an endowed lecturer at Bates in 2009, teaching courses in American politics and political leadership at both institutions.
In 2007, King and Rob Gardiner, formerly of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, formed Independence Wind, a wind energy company. In August 2009, Independence Wind along with joint venture partner Wagner Forest Management won Maine DEP approval for construction of a proposed $120-million, 22-turbine, utility-scale wind power project along a prominent mountain ridge in Roxbury, Maine. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, King sold his share of the company after entering the 2012 U.S. Senate election. Of the project, King has said, "People who say wind is only an intermittent resource are looking for a one-shot solution. And my experience is that there are rarely silver bullets, but there is often silver buckshot. Wind is an adjunct source of energy. Ten percent, 20% can be very significant".
U.S. Senate (2013–present)
Elections
2012
On March 5, 2012, King announced that he was running for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Olympia Snowe. King said "hogwash" to allegations by some Republicans that he had cut a deal with Democrats to keep U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree out of the race.King's Senate campaign came under scrutiny for posting a heavily edited newspaper profile of him on its website.
On November 6, 2012, King won the Senate race with 53% of the vote, beating Democrat Cynthia Dill and Republican Charlie Summers. The following week, King announced that he would caucus with Senate Democrats, explaining not only that it made more sense to affiliate with the party that had a clear majority, but that he would have been largely excluded from the committee process had he not caucused with a party. King said he had not ruled out caucusing with the Republicans if they took control of the Senate in 2014 United States Senate elections, but when Republicans did win the majority that year, he remained in the Democratic caucus. King remained in the Democratic caucus after the 2016, 2018, and the 2020 elections, the first two of which also resulted in Republican Senate majorities and the last of which produced a 50–50 tie.