Just 50-years ago this month, Maine witnessed the finale of its last major primary election recount: the Democratic nomination for governor between Maynard Dolloff and Richard Dubord. It’s a campaign certainly worth re-visiting.

But first a bit of background: The major state-wide elections from 1954 through l958 had seen a revitalization of the Democratic party in Maine. Three times in a row Democrats had elected the governor and by 1958 had seated a majority of the state’s Congressional delegation. Though the GOP had maintained control of the legislature, the Democrats seemed on their way to becoming the state’s majority party.

Nineteen sixty reversed this trend. Maine afforded Republican Richard Nixon his sixth highest vote total in the country despite losing nation-wide to John F. Kennedy. The GOP also won an election for governor for the first time since 1952 and seized the upper hand in the Congressional delegation. The Republicans at the same time preserved their solid footing in the state legislature.

By 1962, even though many Maine Democrats remained demoralized by the ’60 election, some saw a renewed opportunity to restore their party to the Blaine House. Incumbent Republican Gov. John Reed, elected in 1960 with just 53%, was perceived as vulnerable. The state’s poultry-, shoe-, and textile-based manufacturing base had emerged from the late 1950s recession a bit more slowly than the rest of the nation.

Two prominent figures, Dolloff and Dubord, thus stepped forward seeking the right to oppose Reed. The primary campaign saw few overt philosophical differences between them. They instead focused their aim at Reed on economic development and labor, though as a moderate Republican, Reed did not make an easy ideological target. Both Dolloff and Dubord were able to take issue with Reed’s veto of a 1961 bill that would have allowed the Sunday sales of liquor, however.

The personal profile of the two candidates revealed more cleavage in their backgrounds: Dolloff, 48, had been a farmer from Gray who along with his wife, Phyllis, rose to head up the state’s Grange. Dubord, 40, was an attorney from a prominent Waterville legal and political family who since 1956 had been the state’s Democratic national committeeman.

Both entered the campaign with a base of recognition within the party. Four years before, Dolloff had been the “new guard” candidate who ran with the backing of younger party elements including Lewiston’s Frank Coffin in opposition to 63-year-old Clinton Clauson, whose roots within Democratic party leadership stretched back to the early 1930s. The narrowness of Dolloff’s loss in that primary had encouraged him to seek the office again. (Clauson went on to win the fall 1958 election but his death at the end of 1959 led to Reed ascending to the office from the senate presidency.)

Dubord’s renown had arrived with his 1951 election as Waterville’s youngest mayor, his 1954 keynote address to the state convention and his designation in 1956 as Ed Muskie’s successor on the Democratic National Committee, a position he would hold until George Mitchell succeeded him in l968. As the younger of the two primary candidates and as a closer protégé of such new breed activists as Coffin and Muskie, Dubord in 1962 took over much of the same party turf that had four years earlier been Dolloff’s. The play bill of the 1962 primary thus cast Dubord in a role similar to that which Dolloff himself had played in 1958. At the same time, Dolloff was in effect the Clauson of 1962, the older candidate who appealed to more traditional party elements.

The candidates avoided face to face television debates – which even by then had become a staple of earlier state-wide campaigns – and both defied ideological branding. As Don Nicoll, one time WLAM radio newsman and later a key aide to both Coffin and Muskie, described in an email to this columnist last week:

“’Liberal vs. conservative’ was not a factor in that campaign. Dick Dubord was, like Ed Muskie, a pragmatist out of the Roosevelt-Truman traditions. Dolloff never expressed much in the way of political philosophy, but could probably be classified as a low-key, rural populist.”

Nevertheless, if one were forced to bestow labels, Dolloff would be deemed the candidate more likely to appeal to conservatives and Dubord to liberals.

Even after the polls closed June 18, it took over a month for the results to be ascertained and then only after a recount of some precincts in York and Androscoggin County. An unexpected blow to Dubord occurred in Biddeford, a Franco-American stronghold in which he had expected to do well. There, however, the city’s well known conservatism trumped ethnicity. Dubord lost the city by nearly a thousand votes. His 39 percent there came in a city that was second only to Lewiston in the Democratic primary turnout.

(It would not be until both Franco-American ethnicity and conservatism converged in a single candidate that Biddeford would cast its lot with a winning Franco-American gubernatorial candidate: Paul LePage in 2010.)

Lewiston itself did go for Dubord by a margin of 4,566-to-3535. Even though the 8,101 votes cast made up 22 percent of the primary statewide total — five times the number cast by Portland — the Dubord margin was not enough there to offsent gains by Dolloff in Biddeford and elsewhere.

By the third week in July 1962, a month after the primary, a Dubord requested retabulation of several precincts including Biddeford and Lewiston confirmed Dolloff’s initial 227 vote statewide margin of victory out of the36,000 cast and the young Waterville attorney conceded.

Overall, then, the Democrats weighed in about as they had four years earlier: the older and somewhat more traditional candidate narrowly edging out the younger and newer.

The outcome of an also recounted and razor thin fall election and the eventful future for each of these 1962 campaign protagonists in a future column. Stay tuned.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected]