As I’ve compiled election maps recently, looking at past results to suss out future possibilities, a few trends have become clear. One is that the ancestrally Democratic Aroostook County has shifted to the right, voting for Republicans — whether Paul LePage, Donald Trump or Susan Collins — by increasingly high margins since 2010.

Aroostook County was sometimes seen as a swing area in the past, one that Democrats or Republicans could win equally well, but that’s no longer really the case. In many ways, it’s the Maine equivalent of Ohio in presidential elections: a working-class, closely fought area that has become a solidly Republican one.

Once gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson was termed out of the Legislature, for instance, his Maine Senate seat went to Republican Sue Bernard — whom he barely beat in 2022 — by a 30-point margin.

It may be tempting to think of Aroostook County as a geographic home base for Jackson, but it’s hard to see it having much of an impact politically for him when it’s trending away from Democrats as a whole. While Aroostook County may maintain its distinct cultural identity, it seems to be gradually losing its distinct political identity and simply shifting more toward the GOP, much like the 2nd District as a whole. The overused and oversimplified “Two Maines” divide is subsuming it into that narrative.

Western Maine, however, is a different story. When LePage attempted to return to the Blaine House in 2022, it was one of the few areas of the 2nd District where he did worse than in 2010 or 2014. That was clearly because he was running against Janet Mills, without the advantage of a progressive independent in the race to muddy the waters.

In Rumford and Farmington, for instance, Mills got more votes on her own than Libby Mitchell and Eliot Cutler combined or Mike Michaud and Cutler combined. This wasn’t true at the presidential level, though: Trump increased his share of the vote in Farmington and Rumford every time.

While this effect was not uniform across the region, it’s repeated more than enough to show a pattern: even as Trump was increasing his share of the votes in the area, Paul LePage was not the same way he was in Aroostook County. That was probably because Skowhegan native Janet Mills was on the ballot, although, intriguingly, Skowhegan itself was one of the towns that bucked the case, perhaps an example of familiarity breeding contempt.

All of this does show that western Maine will buck national and statewide trends to vote for one of its own; we don’t yet know if that’s still true of Aroostook County.

The Republicans do have a candidate from western Maine in the primary, Robert Wessels of Norway, but even if he makes the ballot he’s certainly an underdog. There are two better-known candidates who are from western Maine and could draw the support of the region.

Sen. Jim Libby of Standish represents parts of Cumberland, York and Oxford counties. He straddles the line between the more Republican interior and the more Democratic coast, a nice place to be from politically.

Libby first ran for governor in 2002, against Peter Cianchette in the Republican primary, so he knows how to run a statewide campaign. Back then, Libby ran as the more conservative candidate in the primary; it will be interesting to see exactly where he lands on the ideological spectrum today.

Another western Maine candidate is current state senator and former Republican Party chair Rick Bennett, from Oxford, who represents a large portion of Oxford County. Bennett has never been a didactic conservative, nor has he ever been a big Trump supporter, so it’s unsurprising that he’s running as an independent.

Like Libby, Bennett has experience running for higher office: he’s run for Congress, losing to John Baldacci in 1994, and for the U.S. Senate, losing in the primary to Charlie Summers in 2012.

A candidate from western Maine, though, could certainly throw a wrench into the race, testing to see whether that region’s loyalty is truly an advantage regardless of party. It wasn’t much of an advantage for Terry Hayes in 2018 running as an independent, but she’d never run for higher office before, so she didn’t have the experience of Libby or Bennett.

With none of the Democratic candidates forming much of their political identities around a geographic base, Bennett and the Republicans will likely be the candidates for whom being from a particular region matters the most — both in the primary and the general election.