OLD TOWN — One of the key moments that led Matt Dunlap to public service happened in a University of Maine dining hall.

Stick with him for a minute. Dunlap, the state auditor, loves to tell stories. This is the third he’s shared before his haddock chowder has even arrived on a recent weekday afternoon at Pepper’s Landing, a seafood restaurant along the Penobscot River.

It was late November 1988, and Dunlap was working in the kitchen at UMaine’s Wells Commons, where he had earned his undergraduate degree in history and would soon start a master’s in English.

One day, Dunlap found a student employee — he cannot recall her name but remembered how good a worker she was — in tears by the kitchen’s time clock. She was the first in her family to go to college, and had fallen behind in paying for school, Dunlap said.

The school was not going to let her take final exams that semester if she couldn’t pay. Dunlap worked with others to find a few hundred dollars to help her.

That moment inspired him to ask school administrators to set up financial support options for student workers. An administrator also suggested trying the area’s State House delegation. That’s how Dunlap met John O’Dea, a lawmaker from Orono who would become a good friend and nudge Dunlap into thinking about running for public office.

Dunlap eventually listened.

In 1996, he ran for the Maine House for the first time and would go on to serve four terms before becoming secretary of state, then leader of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, then secretary of state again — and finally state auditor.

Got all that? Good, because that brings us to Dunlap’s current effort to represent Maine in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The 61-year-old Old Town resident wants to take over the 2nd District seat that U.S. Rep. Jared Golden has held for Democrats since 2018, despite the rural district voting for President Donald Trump in each of his presidential elections.

Golden said last November he would not seek a fifth term, citing increasing political incivility, unproductivity in Congress and threats against his family.

But Dunlap got into the race before he knew that, ignoring objections from national Democrats who tried to talk him out of a primary challenge.

Although he’s running to succeed Golden, Dunlap’s approach is different. Where Golden won repeatedly in a red district by showing voters he’s willing to vote with Republicans, Dunlap does not shy away from backing progressive policies, and feels he has found common ground with conservative friends over how to help struggling Mainers.

Dunlap says he wants to have “tremendous constituent services” and simply help people out, just like the student who worked in the dining hall.

“He understands the challenges that every person who gets up and goes to work in the morning is dealing with,” said former state Sen. Marge Kilkelly, a Democrat who lives in Dresden and served with Dunlap in the Legislature. “Matt can really be a shining star and give people hope, and hope right now for a lot of people is a very fragile component.”

Dunlap is facing three other Democratic challengers in the June primary. The winner will face Republican Paul LePage, the former governor who is making another political comeback.

At a time when voters are sometimes skeptical of the political establishment, Dunlap feels his lengthy amount of experience in Augusta is an asset, not a liability.

But more importantly, he and his friends point to something they think matters in the 2nd District: They say he is a genuine person who gets along with Democrats, Republicans, independents, sportsmen, older Mainers and younger students alike.

On paper, Dunlap, a gun owner, is a decent pick to try to replicate Golden’s electoral success. But whether the good-natured Dunlap’s progressive views pick up enough support in the district is the crucial question.

“He’s a thinker, and despite his folksy manner, he’s an intellectual,” Bob O’Connell, a retired South China resident who was the lead attorney for the state’s motor vehicles bureau that was overseen by Dunlap as secretary of state. “He’s one of the good guys in politics.”

SEWING, RUNNING, COOKING, SERVING

Matthew Gordon Dunlap was born on Thanksgiving Day in 1964 at what was then Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth, the youngest of Robert and Susan Dunlap’s five kids. The family lived in the Bar Harbor village of Town Hill and ran The Dunlap Weavers, a textile company that it continues to operate today.

Dunlap worked in the family business when not at school, sweeping floors and eventually graduating to sewing machine duties as he progressed through Mount Desert Island High School and UMaine. Running on the UMaine cross country team kept him busy too, though an Achilles tear interrupted his junior and senior seasons.

Though wanting as a young boy to work at a lobster pound, Dunlap stuck with the family business until he got the fateful dining hall kitchen job. That led to more cooking gigs on campus and back in Bar Harbor, and the call to elected service.

He met his wife of 30 years, Michelle Dunphy, a former state representative and the current assistant clerk of the Maine House, when she was working at Pat’s Pizza in Orono. She would wait on Dunlap before he eventually started bartending there.

“I can’t say that it went well at first — we clashed a lot,” Dunlap said of working with his eventual wife at Pat’s. “Once we had a thaw, though, we were married inside of eight months.”

Their daughter, Emily, is in her mid-20s and is a middle school band director in Newport.

Dunlap served in the Maine House until 2004, where he chaired the Legislature’s Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Committee. Lawmakers then tapped Dunlap to serve as secretary of state from 2005 until 2011, when Republican Charlie Summers took over after the GOP won control of the State House. Dunlap pivoted to leading the influential Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine until 2012, when he reclaimed the secretary of state role as Democrats took back the Legislature.

Dunphy has always been supportive of Dunlap’s political career — within reason. When Dunlap first floated to her the idea of challenging Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe for the Senate in 2012 (before Snowe opted against seeking reelection), his wife got up and walked out of the room, he said.

Dunlap lost the Democratic primary in 2012, and the seat ultimately went to a former governor and independent named Angus King, so Dunlap went back to his secretary of state gig.

When Trump got elected the first time, Dunlap agreed to serve on a “voter fraud” commission the president set up after the 2016 election. But he later criticized the panel’s work and sued the commission for more information, saying it was trying to validate Trump’s baseless claim that millions of people voted illegally in the race that Trump won over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

In 2020, Dunlap became state auditor, though he had to wait until 2022 to start after initially failing his certified public accountant exams. He said his predecessor, Pola Buckley, encouraged him to run for the auditor position, with its demands and pay drawing little interest from private sector accountants.

Dunlap anticipates criticism from opponents over his past failing of the exams, but he chooses to view it as an example of overcoming adversity.

“I’m never letting my [CPA] certification go,” he said. “I just worked way too hard for it.”

A Golden response leads to a primary challenge

Last spring, Dunlap said numerous people reached out to him to share frustration about Golden’s penchant for voting with Republicans. Some also felt the congressman was aloof, rarely going to events to hear from constituents.

But what really got Dunlap’s attention was Golden’s letter to a constituent explaining the congressman’s support for the SAVE Act, the Republican-backed voting proposal that passed the House and has not yet come up in the Senate.

The bill’s provisions included requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Golden told the constituent that is already required in Maine. As a former secretary of state who managed elections, Dunlap knew that wasn’t quite right. Citizenship is required to vote, but voters can show documents that don’t prove citizenship when registering.

Dunlap sent Golden an email and said the congressman responded by “rapid fire texting me and lecturing me about why I was wrong.”

“And I finally said to him at one point, ‘You know something, you’re right. I only managed that process for 14 years,'” Dunlap recalled.

By October, about a month before Golden opted out of seeking reelection, Dunlap was officially in the race. Dunlap called Golden “a good guy,” though he doesn’t expect the congressman’s endorsement: “He’s probably already worn out two or three cases worth of Matt Dunlap voodoo dolls,” he joked.

Dunlap said this is his 17th campaign, counting internal ones for legislative leadership positions, but noted it is the first time he’s ever had people thank him for being a candidate.

While he said some have called him a moderate like Golden “because I have guns and go deer hunting,” Dunlap is unabashed about his support for progressive policies including Medicare for All and a student loan forgiveness program similar to former President Joe Biden’s plan that the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority blocked.

His staff reflects the campaign’s progressive philosophy. His campaign manager, Harry Burke, worked at top Democratic consulting firms, including the since-closed Devine Mulvey Longabaugh that helped U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, run his 2016 presidential campaign. (Dunlap co-chaired the Bernie 2016 Maine operation that saw Sanders win the state’s Democratic caucuses and got an endorsement Tuesday from Sanders’ Our Revolution group.)

Dunlap has raised more than $600,000 so far, running neck and neck with LePage in the limited polling of the race. The other Democratic candidates are Sen. Joe Baldacci, D-Bangor, ex-Capitol Hill operative Jordan Wood and UMaine graduate student Paige Loud.

Political opponents say Dunlap is too far left for the district he’s running in. But Dunlap has some street cred with Republicans. He butted heads with Democratic Gov. Janet Mills’ administration last year when he put out an audit that looked critically at state spending, and the dynamic repeated itself this year when he flagged potential problems with the state’s Medicaid program.

Dunlap feels the national mood is shifting amid the war with Iran and resulting economic shocks, along with the health care cuts brought by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Win or lose, Dunlap plans to remain friendly and respectful with people across the political spectrum: He has chats with everyone from King to conservative Maine Wire editor Steve Robinson to former Gov. John Baldacci.

When people ask him what he will do if elected to the Congress that currently has a narrow GOP majority, Dunlap tries to temper expectations, but he says he’ll abide by two rules.

“Never cast a thoughtless vote,” he said, “And the day I think $1,000 is not a lot of money, I should really get out of this business.”