All posts by Matthew Gagnon

Matthew Gagnon

About Matthew Gagnon

Matthew Gagnon, of Yarmouth, is the Chief Executive Officer of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. Prior to Maine Heritage, he served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C. Originally from Hampden, he has been involved with Maine politics for more than a decade.

Reopening Maine bars: If not now, when?

On Monday, Gov. Janet Mills announced that the bars in Maine would not be allowed to resume indoor service on July 1, as originally planned. The announcement wasn’t surprising — at least to me — given that last week Dr. Nirav Shah, the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, announced that the state […]

Remembering John Richardson

Tuesday afternoon I learned the unfortunate news that former Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and former commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development John Richardson had passed away as the result of a heart attack. I had the great fortune to know John, though interestingly enough we first encountered one another […]

What political language do you speak?

Last year I read a book entitled “The Three Languages of Politics,” by Arnold Kling, which was originally published in 2013 and has since been re-issued with an updated edition. In the book, Kling argues that the problem causing our increasingly caustic political discourse is that our ideological groups behave “like tribes speaking different languages.” Each […]

The inherent worthlessness of presidential election polls

If polls are to be believed, Joe Biden is currently enjoying a small but statistically significant lead over President Donald Trump in head-to-head matchups for the White House. That has been true for a while, of course, going back to late 2019, but that hasn’t stopped the media from reporting every new poll, regardless of […]

So much for going to the gym

On Tuesday, the Mills administration announced that gyms, fitness centers and (for some reason) nail salons would not be able to open up on June 1, as had been the plan, but would instead need to wait longer before they could reopen their indoor facilities to customers. The reason? Science, of course. Science is every […]

The fantasy of unlimited money

It never ends. Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled her vision for the next round of congressional action to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is a vision of mountains of cash. Pelosi’s plan would spent $3 trillion, which would make it far and away the largest coronavirus relief spending package to date from […]

We can’t be held hostage by coronavirus

It has all the makings of a good scandal. A powerful governor on a private conference call that was not open to the public. A surreptitious recording of the call by a participant, leaked to the media. An admission that actions being taken by that governor will make something worse. And, of course, the subject […]

The Mills plan for reopening the economy is no plan at all

When a crisis happens, I think most of us try our best to band together and be on the same team. In the year 2000, this country lived through one of the most bitter and miserable elections in American history. In the end, after a month of legal battles and uncertainty, George W. Bush became […]

It is time to (carefully) reopen

This past weekend, something broke in my house that needed fixing. Sunday, I decided to venture out into the vast unknown hellscape now known as “reality” to venture to one of our illustrious essential businesses — a home improvement store — in order to acquire the necessary handful of items that I needed to repair […]