In his U.S. House race, former Maine Governor Paul LePage throws a little French into a campaign ad. It might be the first time we’ve seen French spoken in an American ad for a candidate running for Congress.
Former Gov. Paul LePage is the first candidate I can recall running a bilingual French-English ad — and using it to take a hard line on illegal immigration pic.twitter.com/gO4TSchafD
— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) September 22, 2026
LePage’s personal story is fascinating. He grew up in a family with roots in Quebec that settled in Lewiston, Maine. The immigration of French-speaking Catholics to Maine was the occasion of massive resistance. A hundred years ago, the Ku Klux Klan had significant success growing in Maine because of popular opposition to Catholicism, particularly Francophone Catholicism.
LePage’s road into politics probably began when legislator Peter Snowe (husband of Olympia Snowe), convinced a Maine college to allow LePage to take his aptitude exams in French rather than English. Maine had an English-only law that was essentially anti-French.
A lot of progressives will look at LePage’s personal story and this ad, which calls for immigration control, as LePage being a traitor to his class — poor immigrants. But I just see the recurring pattern. America takes in a wave of immigration. The numbers rise, and then eventually popular reaction says, “Too much”; some of that public reaction is nasty, some of it less so. The velocity of immigration slows or stops. This tends to let the market pressures of a commercial republic do their work of assimilating the children of immigrants.