Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, speaks Feb. 11 against the supplemental budget bill during a debate at the Maine State House in Augusta. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Rep. Laurel Libby can no longer speak on the House floor. She can’t cast votes on behalf of her constituents. By those traditional measures of political influence, the Republican star from Auburn hasn’t been this powerless since she first took office in 2021.

But her voice has never been louder.

Minutes after House Democrats censured Libby last week for sharing the name and photo of a transgender high school athlete on social media, the lawmaker posted the first of what has become a series of defiant messages that have garnered hundreds of thousands of likes, shares and comments. Appearances on right-wing television networks and podcasts followed. Over and over again, she has repeated her message: Maine liberals are silencing girls and women and anyone who tries to stand up for them.

“Women’s rights are under attack by an agenda that is putting forward biological males and displacing females from their rightful place,” Libby told the Press Herald in an interview last week.

Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

Democrats argue the censure was not about silencing anyone or even about the rights of transgender athletes. The party-line vote focused only on the appropriateness of thrusting a child into an online environment where they could be subjected to abuse, they said.

“This is about whether a young person should be ridiculed by a national audience, as a result of the blatant disregard and political expediency of an elected official,” House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, D-Biddeford, said in a statement. “The representative can bring her censure to an end by apologizing, which this student and their family absolutely deserve. I can’t imagine not understanding why that is the right thing to do, no matter how passionate I was about an issue.”

Libby has no intention of apologizing, even if it means she loses her voice and vote in the Legislature.

Given the Democratic majority in a polarized Augusta, she sees as much power in a platform as a vote. And she plans to use that platform — which the censure vote helped construct for her — to push for a ban on transgender participation in Maine sports and to punish her rivals across the aisle for challenging her on the issue when most Americans don’t support their position.

“I think it was a huge misstep,” Libby said. “And I will certainly be working very hard to ensure they feel the impact of that.”

FROM FACEBOOK TO THE PRESIDENT’S DESK

At 8 p.m. on Feb. 17, Libby posted unblurred photos of a transgender student-athlete on Facebook and referred to them by their first name. Within days, the story would make its way to the president of the United States.

Within an hour, right-wing Maine blogger Steve Robinson shared a screenshot of Libby’s post to the social media site X. At 2 a.m. on Feb. 18, a popular account run by far-right activist Chaya Raichik called Libs of TikTok reposted the screenshot. She received over 103,000 likes and 6.6 million views.

The conservative news site The Daily Wire picked up the story by the following morning, and by 6 p.m., Libby was being interviewed on Newsmax, a far-right national television network. A day later, Libby was speaking to Laura Ingraham during prime time on Fox News.

“Through the media over the last week, thousands and thousands of Mainers have become aware,” Libby told the Press Herald on Thursday. “If those media appearances have brought that awareness, then I’ve done my job.”

Three days after Libby’s initial post, Trump told a group of governors, “I heard men are still playing in Maine,” during a speech. He threatened to revoke Maine’s federal funding “until they clean that up,” setting the stage for his showdown with Gov. Janet Mills, who was in attendance.

“They are still saying, ‘We want men to play in women’s sports’ and I cannot believe that they are doing that,” Trump said.

Libby thanked those who “helped make this story impossible to ignore!” in a post hours later, including Ingraham, far-right activist Charlie Kirk and a series of right-wing podcasters, influencers and organizers.

She spoke on several national programs in the following days, doing TV interviews on conservative shows and podcasts, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Fox News several times.

Libby is not the first to follow that playbook. Both parties have media ecosystems with established structures that can offer rapid rises to prominence on the back of hot-button issues, University of Maine political science department chair Mark Brewer said.

“One of the things that we’ve seen people do is, if the opportunity presents itself, really take advantage of appearances on these highly specialized but also highly consumed ideological spaces,” he said. “Libby’s not doing this to change hearts and minds, right? She’s preaching to the choir.”

After being censured on Feb. 26, Libby’s presence in those spaces grew exponentially.

She began making several television appearances a day. News Nation, Newsmax and Fox News each interviewed her on national TV. Clips of the interviews posted online have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, likes and comments.

Libby’s X account gained more than 10,000 followers, her name was mentioned nearly 140,000 times on Facebook, and Google searches for her name rose more than 100% in the two days that followed the Legislature’s vote.

“Libby, from a national perspective, has definitely benefited from this,” Brewer said. “The raising of her profile nationally is probably the one biggest thing that comes out of this, at least so far.”

A LANDMINE FOR LIBERALS

Before the censure vote on Tuesday evening, several Democratic lawmakers took care in distinguishing their criticism of Libby’s decision to focus attention on an individual student from the broader debate on the rights of trans athletes — a perilous political issue for the progressive left, according to national polling.

One survey conducted by The New York Times this January found that only 18% of Americans polled, including just 31% of Democrats, believe that transgender girls and women should be allowed to compete in female sports.

Libby — who said that she shared the athlete’s first name and photo to underscore the “stark reality” that trans athletes are competing and winning in Maine — has worked hard alongside her fellow Republicans in Augusta to blur the distinction between the ethics of her post and the debate around fairness in women’s sports. They’ve kept their followers focused on the Maine Principals’ Association’s policy of allowing high school athletes to compete on teams of the gender they identify with.

“Let’s keep our eyes on the most important issue here,” Maine Republican Party Chairman Jim Deyermond wrote Wednesday in a statement defending Libby. “Democrats are putting safety and opportunity for thousands of Maine girls at risk to appease the failed culture warriors of their radical left.”

While she immediately faced criticism for the post from the liberal lawmakers, members of the media and a coalition of 30 state and national organizations, Libby says she’s received far more support for her policy stance, including from Democrats.

“Libby knows she’s got a political winner here,” Brewer said. “We just saw Trump knew that, right? Probably the most devastating ad of the presidential campaign was Trump’s ad going after Harris on transgender (issues).”

Though some Republican lawmakers have expressed discomfort with Libby’s initial post, both Brewer and several former legislators told the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram that she has navigated the media deftly in the days since.

“Are the political appearances working? Yeah, I think it is for her,” said Phil Harriman, a Republican political commentator who served four terms in the Maine Senate in the ’90s. “The reaction by the public has been favorable toward her position, and that requires the other side to say, ‘We may have misread this.’”

PLAYING HARDBALL

Rep. Laurel Libby talks to a small group about what testifying against a bill at the State House will look like during an event in Bath in 2023. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald

It’s not clear whether Libby’s crusade will result in the Legislature amending the Maine Human Rights Act, the statute upon which the Maine Principals’ Association based its policy on transgender athletes. Despite Democratic voters’ wariness of the issue, Libby said she did not expect any legislators to defect and join the Republican push to change the law.

“The Democratic majority has demonstrated in the last few years that they have no interest in reaching across the aisle,” she said. “I have never seen that happen in my six years, and I don’t see that happening this year.”

A bill introduced by Rep. Elizabeth Caruso, R-Caratunk, last Wednesday would ban biologically male athletes from competing in girls sports. But it would also require schools to bar transgender students from the bathrooms and changing rooms that align with their gender identity, which could be a deal-breaker for Democratic lawmakers who would consider limiting athletic participation on fairness grounds but otherwise support transgender rights.

Sawin Millett, a longtime Republican legislator from Waterford who retired in December, said the hardball politics from both sides — Libby’s post and media blitz and the Democrats’ decision to censure her with no Republican support — is just another example of the extreme polarization, fueled in part by social media, that has been on display in Augusta during recent sessions.

“It doesn’t set a good tone for the Legislature going forward,” he said.

Several former lawmakers said Democrats have for years had the numbers to force through budgets and legislation without compromising with the right. Now that they wield only slim majorities in both chambers, that will be more difficult — and Republicans don’t appear eager to make their lives any easier.

Libby thinks that the fight over the rights of Maine transgender athletes will be settled not on the floor of the Legislature but in the promised legal showdown between Mills and Trump following federal action.

But even if she cannot leverage Fox News appearances into policy changes in 2025, several commentators said Libby is poised to emerge from the controversy more powerful than ever.

Brewer speculated that Libby, already one of the top political fundraisers in the state, could be positioning herself to challenge for the governor’s chair or even to take on Sen. Susan Collins in a Republican primary in 2026.

Libby, who said she does not believe the House speaker has the legal authority to strip her vote, said she is considering challenging the censure, though she declined to specify how she might do so.

She said she’s considering all options for the next steps in her political career. As for what that might mean, she remains, for now, silent.