U.S. Sen. Angus King’s office is getting about 10 times as many emails and phone calls from Mainers as usual.
The state’s independent junior senator said Friday that his office is logging about 20,000 a week these days instead of the 2,000 or so it has normally received during his four years in office.
“It’s a genuine outpouring,” King said. “They are very thoroughly engaged and they don’t like what’s going on.”
Maine’s other members of Congress are also getting more calls than usual, but didn’t want to talk specifics Friday.
King said the junior staffers who answer his phones don’t get any break at all between calls that come in one after another at a record pace.
At one point this past week, the senator handled some calls for about 40 minutes, giving him a taste of what his aides are experiencing.
He said callers told him to please let the senator know what they had to say. Then he’d tell them he didn’t have to, because they’d just done that.
Some of the Mainers talking to him thought it was funny that he answered. Others told him it was cool or that they didn’t believe him.
One, though, took the opportunity to give him an earful on quite a few issues, King said.
“It was actually a lot of fun,” King said.
The calls he’s getting, he said, are almost entirely in opposition to President Donald Trump.
For instance, King said, his office had about 300 calls in opposition to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos for education secretary for each one it got in support of her.
But, he said, he knows that the calls don’t reflect the views of many Mainers who aren’t phoning his office.
Maine U.S. Sen. Angus King takes phone calls from constituents last week in his Washing D.C. office. He said he’s been getting 10 times the normal number of calls.
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
