Nirav Shah had a request at a recent virtual town hall.

“No softballs whatsoever,” Shah told the 100 attendees on the call. “Nothing is off limits tonight.”

The crowd obliged. They grilled Shah about a complaint regarding vaccine access when he was head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, challenged him on how his candidacy for governor is different from that of other Democrats and questioned whether he is tough enough to take on the Trump administration.

Shah, who is one of five Democrats in a field of 22 total candidates seeking to replace Gov. Janet Mills next year, seemed to relish the opportunity to speak directly with voters.

The town hall — one of several he has held on the campaign trail — was reminiscent of the Zoom briefings that made Shah a household name in Maine during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a little over an hour, Shah faced the camera and fielded an array of questions, sprinkling in his trademark humor and real-life examples.

In the race for governor, he’s seeking to build on the brand he established as a good communicator who ushered the state through one of its most challenging times.

Right now, the polls say that strategy is working. Despite having raised less money than his primary competitors, a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released last month had Shah leading his fellow Democrats with 25% of likely primary voters selecting him as their first choice. Shenna Bellows was second with 19%.

And a Pan Atlantic Research poll released earlier this month had Shah and Angus King III tied at the top, each receiving 24% support among likely voters.

Shah’s status as the early frontrunner is noteworthy in a state that’s typically been skeptical of outsiders. All of his opponents, unlike Shah, have either held elected office in Maine, belong to a political dynasty, or both: Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state; King, a renewable energy entrepreneur (and son of U.S. Sen. Angus King); Hannah Pingree, former Maine speaker of the House (and daughter of U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree); and Troy Jackson, former Senate president.

Shah has also spent considerably less time in Maine. As a native Wisconsinite who recently lived in Georgia in a race full of born-and-raised Mainers, Shah will have to convince voters he’s not an interloper. He said he’s done that.

“When I talk to Maine voters … they don’t care that I’m a brown guy with a weird name from Wisconsin,” he said. “They care about the fact that I showed up for them and that they can trust me.”

A CALL TO PUBLIC SERVICE

Shah, 48, grew up in Medford, Wisconsin, a rural town of about 4,500 people that he has described as being similar to many places in Maine. His parents were Indian immigrants who were active in the community.

“A large part of growing up in that small northern town was coming to events like this in spaces like this,” Shah said, addressing a crowd recently at a health care rally at a Portland community center. “That’s what I did most nights when I was a kid.”

But by Maine standards, Shah is a newcomer, having first moved here in 2019. The Maine constitution says the governor has to have been a resident for at least five years before taking office. In recent years, Shah divided his time between Maine and Atlanta, where he worked at the U.S. CDC. He’s confident he meets the bar to run for governor, though he’s likely to face eligibility questions.

His social media presence is that of a person who loves his adopted state. On Instagram, he hikes through the woods with his dog, Fritz, cheers for the Hearts of Pine soccer team and takes in live music at Flight Deck Brewing, the producer of Shah’s favorite beer, V-Formation.

“I have the zeal for Maine that only a convert could have,” said Shah, who lives in Brunswick with his wife, Kara.

Shah’s status as a relative newcomer could be an issue if he makes it to the general election, said Jim Melcher, a professor of political science at the University of Maine at Farmington.

But it may also help that Shah hasn’t held office and is not part of a big-name political family, he said.

“Shah may be benefiting from this desire among some voters to bring in ‘new blood’ in a Democratic field full of well-known politicians, people from famous political families, and in some cases, both,” Melcher said.  

Although he celebrates Maine, Shah’s worldview is undeniably shaped by his experiences outside the Pine Tree State. He has an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of Louisville, and studied economics at Oxford University in England. In the early 2000s, he applied to a program that sent him to Cambodia, where he worked as an economist on health issues for the Ministry of Health. He said it was that experience that hooked him on public service.

Back in the U.S., Shah finished medical school at the University of Chicago, where he also earned a law degree. After several years working at the law firm Sidley Austin LLP, a job opened as the director of the Illinois Department of Public Health under the administration of then-Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican. Shah went for it, got the job and loved it.

In Illinois, Shah worked on initiatives to address the state’s opioid crisis, reduce maternal and infant mortality and mitigate childhood lead poisoning.

But his time there was not without controversy.

Shah came under fire for his agency’s failure to enforce a state law requiring newborn screenings for Krabbe disease, a rare condition that causes neurological issues. He told lawmakers in 2017 he had inherited an initiative that wasn’t fully implemented, and pledged to resolve the issue. The program was in place by the end of the year, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Shah’s department was also at the center of a controversy over a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a veterans’ home that resulted in a dozen deaths. Both of Illinois’ Democratic U.S. senators called for his ousting. 

Asked about the Legionnaires’ outbreak at a recent a town hall, Shah disagreed with critics who said he didn’t take the right scientific approach.

But he said he could have communicated more about the outbreak.

“I realized I could have done better, and I pledge to do better,” he said, adding that his experience informed his efforts to be proactive communicating with the public about COVID-19.

LEADING MAINE THROUGH COVID-19

When Rauner lost his reelection bid in 2018, Shah was out. He wanted to keep doing the same kind of work, so he connected with Mills, a Democrat who had just been elected in Maine. Mills said she was impressed with Shah’s national and international work, and his record in Illinois.

The Mills administration said at the time that it was aware of Shah’s background, including the Legionnaires’ outbreak, and was confident in his ability to lead the Maine CDC.

In March 2020, less than a year into the job, the pandemic broke out. Where he had failed to communicate with Illinoisans about Legionnaires’, Shah succeeded with Mainers and COVID-19.

During his briefings, Shah often broke up dry discussions with humor and pop culture references, making the topic more digestible for the public. His updates on the virus became a staple source of critical information for Maine households, and his style earned him a strange sort of local celebrity.

A Facebook group called “Fans of Dr. Nirav Shah” amassed thousands of followers and is still active today. A Freeport candy company created a chocolate “Shah Bar” as homage. In Topsham, a highway sign was erected that read, “In Shah we trust.”

Shah has pledged to hold twice monthly online briefings for the public if elected, complete with public Q&A sessions, similar to the briefings he held during the pandemic.

While his communication style was popular, Shah was part of an administration whose mask mandates and limits on gathering sizes drew pushback, particularly among conservatives.

“Shah failed our state and shut down churches and businesses,” Republican Bobby Charles said when he challenged Shah to a debate last month. (Shah has not accepted the challenge.) “He is responsible for housing prices and hard working Mainers losing their jobs.”

In a recent op-ed in the Press Herald, Shah also faced criticism from a University of Maine researcher who argued that the state, under Shah’s leadership, failed to prioritize timely vaccine access for people with disabilities — despite data showing them to be at elevated risk of death.

Shah says he is proud of his response to the pandemic. No one was immune to pandemic-related economic shocks, he said, and Maine’s low overall death rate came even though the state has one of the oldest populations in the country.

Only Hawaii and Vermont had lower age-adjusted COVID-19 death rates, according to data from 2020 to 2023 compiled in a report in the public health journal BMC Public Health.

He also defended the state’s approach to vaccine eligibility. Asked about the op-ed in a recent town hall meeting, he said that at the time, he had reviewed data from other states and it was clear to him that speed mattered more than anything in vaccine rollouts. Convoluted rules about who was eligible were slowing some states down.

When Shah announced in January 2023 that he had accepted the job with the U.S. CDC, officials in Maine, including Mills and Republican Sen. Susan Collins, praised his work.

“Dr. Shah has been a trusted adviser to me and an extraordinary leader of the Maine CDC,” Mills, who has not made an endorsement in the Democratic primary, said at the time. “But even more than that, he was a trusted adviser and a leader to the people of Maine.”

Still, some of Shah’s former colleagues have declined to back his run.

Lisa Letourneau, a top advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services, is one of at least five current or former staff members in the Mills administration whom the Pingree campaign has advertised as endorsing her. Also on the list: Shah’s former boss at DHHS, Jeanne Lambrew.

Letourneau, who has worked in the department since 2019, complimented Shah’s communication skills. But she said she’s backing Pingree, who led the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future from 2019 to 2025, because Pingree has a wider breadth of experience outside of public health.

HEALTH CARE A KEY ISSUE

If Shah can convince voters he’s the health care candidate in the Democratic field, he could go far. Health is a top issue for many Mainers amid rising prices and Medicaid and public health cuts from the Trump administration.

Shah has rolled out a series of proposals to make health care more accessible. They include capping insurance copays and deductibles, expanding access to MaineCare — Maine’s version of Medicaid — and increasing taxes on large insurance companies with revenues directed to struggling rural hospitals.

His broader policy proposals for making Maine more affordable include offering closing cost assistance for middle-income homebuyers who are priced out of the market, investing in child care and making permanent Maine’s free community college program.

But in a race with so many candidates, many of whom agree on the issues that matter to Democratic primary voters, Shah has to find a way to stand out.

Jessica Bonilla, a graduate student at the University of Maine who attended a recent forum where Shah and other candidates spoke, said she likes Shah’s emphasis on health care and said his answers at the forum were “clearly thought through and spoke to things I care about.”

But Bonilla, a Democrat, is still undecided on whom she will vote for. She said Pingree and Jackson are also high on her list.