LEWISTON – Panelists including a veteran political activist and a member of the Bates College political science faculty will weigh the prospects of the Democratic Party, and suggest ways the party could regain the majority in U.S. politics.

The discussion will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 3, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Bates Democrats, a student organization, the event is open to the public free of charge.

Each commentator will offer a perspective on what lies ahead for the Democratic Party and ways the party might return to the majority in national politics. The panel will then invite the audience to participate in a general discussion.

The panelists will be John Baughman, Chris Beam, Donald E. Nicoll, Brendan Jarboe and Tim Walsh.

Baughman is an assistant professor of political science at Bates. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago, his research focus is U.S. Congress.

Adviser to the Bates Democrats, Beam is the Bates archivist and a lecturer in history.

Nicoll, of Portland, is a longtime Democratic Party activist. In the 1950s he became Maine’s first full-time paid party director. He later became administrative assistant in Muskie’s U.S. Senate office and supervised the Muskie Oral History Project at Bates.

Both active in the Bates Democrats, Jarboe is a first-year Bates student from Medfield, Mass., and Walsh is a sophomore from Overland Park, Kan.