Angus King is a “mystery to those outside Maine,” the Hill reported recently. In the Pine Tree State, however, he’s the Ghost of Good Times Past: He served as governor from 1995 to 2003, a period in which the economy was booming and the state was flush with cash. During King’s tenure, in fact, the state budget swelled by $3 billion.

“We literally had surpluses and didn’t know what to do with the money,” King’s former communications director, Dennis Bailey, remembers.

Accordingly, King is the favorite to replace retiring senator Olympia Snowe this year. Public Policy Polling found that 62 percent of Mainers had a favorable opinion of him, while only 24 percent had a negative one. In a matchup with potential Democratic and Republican candidates, meanwhile, King came out on top.

Yet Maine Republicans aren’t despondent. Although they haven’t settled on a candidate, some see a chance for victory in November.

Born in Virginia, King moved to Maine after completing law school, and he made a name for himself hosting a public-affairs television show in the state for close to 20 years. In 1989, he founded Northeast Energy Management, a company that developed energy-conservation projects in southern and central Maine. In 1994, the ex-Democrat ran as an independent for the governorship.

He won largely thanks to his persuasive abilities and to the weakness of his opponents (the Democratic candidate was a former governor and the Republican was an untried Susan Collins making her first statewide bid).

“He is very articulate, very smooth,” says Vic Berardelli, who served as communications director for state-house Republicans during King’s gubernatorial tenure. “He basically governed from the bully pulpit; he left the staff to work with the legislature to iron out the details.” His approach worked: He won reelection in 1998 with 59 percent of the vote.

But he did get in trouble every now and then. His most controversial act was his attempt to mediate a dispute between environmentalists and the paper industry in 1996. That year, the Green party succeeded in putting on the ballot a proposal to ban clearcutting, a logging technique used by the paper industry, a mainstay of Maine’s economy. At first, the referendum would have been a straight yes-or-no vote: Either vote to ban clearcutting, or vote to keep it. Early polls indicated that voters were poised to reject the ban.

But King decided to seek a middle way. He proposed the “Compact for Maine’s Forests,” which didn’t ban clearcutting outright but put restrictions on it. The New York Times reported, “The compact would, among other things, reduce the maximum permitted size of a clear-cut in Maine from 250 to 75 acres and put an overall limit on the total any one landowner could cut in [a] year.” As a result, the referendum became a three-way vote: Vote to ban clearcutting, vote for the compact, or vote for the status quo.

Eventually, the paper industry backed King’s compact, and it won a plurality in the 1996 election. But because it failed to win a majority of votes, it had to undergo a runoff with the second-place finisher: the status quo. In 1997, then, voters rejected the compact in favor of doing nothing, 52 percent to 48 percent.

“In northern Maine [where the paper industry is based], practically any Republican speaks with disdain about Angus King,” Berardelli says.

King’s most notable accomplishment, however, was instituting a program to give all seventh- and eighth-graders in Maine’s public schools laptops to keep with them through high school. Bailey argues that the governor’s decision was prescient: “Now we’re giving iPads to kindergarteners for crying out loud.”

Asked to describe his old boss’s ideological leanings, Bailey replies, “He’s fiscally prudent and socially liberal.” But Bailey is hesitant to apply such labels, arguing that King’s dominant feature is his independent, research-driven mindset. During the 1994 gubernatorial campaign, for instance, King would read the Clean Air Act in the car while driving to campaign events.

Bailey says King takes a “more Republican” view toward business. “He doesn’t buy into the ‘love the worker, hate the company’ mentality” of the Democrats. He also predicts King “would fall on the liberal side of social issues,” but adds, “They’re not his [preferred] issues.” It’s likely, then, that King would caucus with the Democrats if elected.

Alert to this danger, Republicans hope to field a serious candidate against King and take aim at his gubernatorial record.

“All King’s record is just spending and taxing, and I think people will look at that and see it’s not what they want,” says Charlie Webster, chairman of the Maine GOP.

The problem for the GOP is it has no clear front-runner. Possible candidates include Republican national committeeman Rick Bennett, state attorney general William Schneider, secretary of state Charlie Summers, businessman Scott D’Amboise, and state senator Debra Plowman.

The two candidates who appeal to Ken Lindell, chairman of the Maine Republican Liberty Caucus, are Bennett and Plowman. “Rick Bennett appears to have a much better organization than Plowman does; it almost seems as if Plowman is trying to do it by herself,” Lindell observes.

“Bennett sets the right tone,” Lindell adds. “He’s a very strong fiscal conservative, and he’s not the sort of religious right-winger like Scott D’Amboise that pro-liberty activists tend to shy away from.”

Schneider, meanwhile, is rumored to have Snowe’s backing, as Maine Republican activists on Snowe’s e-mail list recently received Schneider literature in their inboxes. Snowe’s office, however, says Schneider rented the e-mail list.

So far, Bennett, D’Amboise, Plowman, and Summers have filed the necessary signatures to appear on the June primary ballot. And so far, only one Democrat, former secretary of state Matt Dunlap, has. The mysterious Angus King may have spooked the Democrats from the contest, but Maine Republicans aren’t ready to declare him the victor yet.

— Brian Bolduc is an editorial associate for National Review.