If Ford makes a car that doesn’t work and hardly anyone buys, it doesn’t keep making it forever.

Instead, it stops selling it, shifting the resources used to produce it into better, more popular vehicles. This is generally the approach private companies take to failed products. That’s because they face competition from other companies — if they don’t do this, they won’t be sticking around for very long.

This is one of the ways in which government could be run more like a private company. All too often, when a government program is unpopular or unworkable, the first instinct of bureaucrats and elected officials alike is to do everything possible to save it, sinking more and more taxpayer money into it. They even often think the solution is to promote the program more, spending money to make sure its target audience knows it exists.

There’s a simpler answer to addressing government programs that are unpopular or ineffective: eliminate them. We now find ourselves in that position with the state’s public campaign financing, system, aka Clean Elections, for gubernatorial candidates.

Nobody has ever been elected governor using Clean Elections financing, and the only two major party nominees to have opted in to the system, Republican Chandler Woodcock and Democrat Libby Mitchell, were disastrous failures. Both of them got the lowest total percentage of the vote of any candidate from their respective parties in the past 25 years. No wonder most of the serious gubernatorial candidates are ignoring it for the 2026 election cycle.

We can see why when we take a look at how much qualifying as a Clean Elections candidate gets gubernatorial candidates in funds: $530,125 in a contested primary and $795,175 in a contested general election. If they raise additional matching donations, they can get up to $795,200 for the primary and $1,885,400 for the general.

That’s simply not enough to compete in either, which is why gubernatorial candidates consistently ignore it. Hannah Pingree has already raised over $525,000 for her campaign, and Shenna Bellows has raised more than $529,000, so they’ve both already raised more than they would get as Clean Elections candidates — and that’s 10 months before the primary. In 2022, Paul LePage raised $2.6 million while Janet Mills raised $5.8 million.

The entire budget for financing gubernatorial candidates for Clean Elections is $4.5 million.

So, in essence, hardly anybody is using the program and it’s consistently been a total failure. This stands in stark contrast to the Clean Elections program for state legislative candidates, which is used frequently by candidates from both parties and frequently by winning candidates.

Even if you’re a fan of Clean Elections as a concept, or you completely hate it as a concept, it’s impossible to deny that it’s been a success at the legislative level and a failure at the gubernatorial level. Now, some have said that the program should be ‘fixed’ somehow, but they didn’t have an actual solution.

That’s probably because there isn’t one.

If we were to simply raise the level of funding for publicly financed candidates to the levels reached by privately financed ones, we’d have to exponentially grow the overall budget of the program. If we did that, it might work to a certain degree — but success might bring its own cost, too.

If more candidates ran for the Blaine House under the Clean Elections program, the program could easily run out of money no matter how much we give it. There’s no way to predict how many candidates will qualify for funding, after all — especially in the primary.

Moreover, there’s no way to ensure that publicly financed candidates end up with just as much as privately financed ones. Instead, it would just encourage other candidates to raise even more money, making the overall race more costly.

No matter how much money we give publicly financed candidates, privately financed candidates will always be able to raise more — at least, legally. That will always discourage top candidates from using the system, and if they don’t use it, then hardly anyone else will, either.

Regardless of how one feels about Clean Elections financing for legislative candidates, for gubernatorial candidates it’s become a useless anachronism. It’s similar to the opt-in public financing for presidential candidates: Once Barack Obama raised more money privately and opted out, pretty much everyone stopped using it.

Rather than trying to fix public financing for Maine’s gubernatorial candidates, we should accept that it’s outlived its usefulness, eliminate the program and focus on other forms of campaign finance regulation.