All the officially smart people will tell you that “nobody starts to pay attention to an election until after Labor Day.”

So, for those of you who are waiting until Tuesday, let me be the first to let you know that Maine will elect a new governor on Nov. 6.

Between now and then, prepare to see TV ads, debates, analysis stories and biographical profiles. Someone will make a mistake. Some unforseeable event will occur that exposes a candidate’s weakness. Voters will take it all in, digest it and … forget the rest of the metaphor. In the end we get a governor.

But what if the officially smart people are wrong this time? What if the race for Maine governor stays the sleepy back-burner affair that it has been all summer? What if a lot of people never get around to paying attention because their account at the attention bank is overdrawn?

It’s true that past gubernatorial races have heated up in September, but this year’s is taking place in an environment unlike any we have ever seen. For one thing, we’ve never had this president before.

Depending on your point of view, “The Donald Trump Show” is drama, tragedy or farce that’s served up hot all day long on the media platform of your choice. Everyone around him is either facing charges or cooperating with the prosecution, and he says things in public that other politicians wouldn’t dare to whisper.

Oh, and he’s got nuclear weapons, so it’s compelling on multiple levels. It’s like a Shakespeare play set on the Jersey Shore, where we all might die in the end. Try to top that, candidate for Maine governor!

The other big distraction is the current governor, Paul LePage. When he was running an insurgent campaign in 2010, he didn’t have to compete for attention with an incumbent who asked to address a legislative committee so that he could publicly berate one of its members, as LePage did last month. Eight years ago, there was no governor announcing that he would rather go to jail than implement a law he didn’t like, as LePage did with Medicaid expansion.

Back then, it was candidate LePage who was constantly in the news for, among other things, telling an audience, “As your governor, you’re going to be seeing a lot of me on the front page, saying ‘Gov. LePage tells Obama to go to hell,’ ” which was considered rough talk in that simpler time.

Both Trump and LePage seem to instinctively understand that our need to be entertained is vast and that it’s only limited by our ability to pay attention. To register with the voters, this year’s candidates are going to have to be bigger and louder than the kind of spectacle that comes as second nature to people like LePage and Trump.

This should help one contender, businessman Shawn Moody. He crushed the field in a four-way Republican primary in June and we haven’t heard much from him since.

Moody comes across as a nice guy who really cares about people, which helped Republican voters overlook what appear to be some glaring holes in his understanding of what government does. He ran as an independent against LePage in 2010, but this time he has adopted a few hard-line Republican positions and has the support of the LePage family, including the governor’s daughter Lauren, who is managing his campaign. With regular Republicans solidly behind him and a personality that appeals to independents, he has the most to gain from a sleepy race.

Attorney General Janet Mills has a much tougher road ahead. In what is supposed to be a good year for Democrats and women, she still has to unify her party. She has critics on the left who say she’s not progressive enough, and on the right who say she’s too liberal. Both of the independents in the race are former Democrats, which may cost her votes. Unless she finds a way to get more attention than the lame-duck incumbent, she’s in trouble.

The candidate with the most to lose could be Alan Caron, an independent who has put out the most detailed policy agenda, including major reforms to economic development and education. But Caron doesn’t get to say why he thinks he’s got the best ideas if all the TV crews have been dispatched to the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, where the governor is threatening to chain himself to the gates.

The other independent, State Treasurer Terry Hayes, says she’s running to stop partisan bickering in Augusta. But she will have to speak a little louder if she wants that message to be heard over the partisan bickering that people can’t seem to look away from.

Here are some other things that the officially smart people say: Two months is a long time in politics. Expect the unexpected.

So, maybe we will have a robust race for governor. But this could be one of those times when all the officially smart people are wrong.

 

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