Trump Is Dropped From Maine Primary for “Insurrection” But Remains on California Ballot

Maine became the second state to bar Donald Trump from its primary election ballot on Thursday after the state’s secretary ruled that the former president’s attempt on January 6, 2021 to overturn the legitimate 2020 election made him ineligible to hold office.

Just hours later,  California — which has 54 electoral votes, and where election officials have limited power to remove candidates — signaled that the GOP frontrunner would remain on the ballot, bucking pressure from several top Democrats in the state (though the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had opposed removing him.)

In her ruling, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is a Democrat, acknowledged that a president had never been barred from an election based on the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, which prohibits anyone from holding the office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government. But, she wrote, “no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

Bellows wrote that the January 6 attack was “violent enough, potent enough, and long enough to constitute an insurrection.” Trump, she added, “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters and direct them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power.” 

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said Thursday night that both rulings were “partisan election interference efforts” and amounted to “a hostile assault on American democracy.” Cheung attacked Bellows in particular as a “former ACLU attorney, a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat,” and said that the Trump campaign would appeal the ruling.

The two decisions contribute to what has become a growing checkerboard of divergent opinions regarding whether the insurrection clause permits Trump to remain on both primary and general election ballots in 2024. Colorado’s supreme court ruled last week that Trump had engaged in insurrection and would be removed from the primary ballot, while secretaries of state in Michigan and Minnesota have, like their counterparts in California, decided to keep Trump on the ballot.

In total, lawsuits seeking to keep Trump from running have been filed in 30 states, though only 14 are currently active, according to the legal website Lawfare. The next state likely to rule on the question is Oregon. The swing states of Nevada and Wisconsin are two of the states with pending suits. Ultimately, the question is likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court, as the decisions have created pressure for the highest court, which is dominated by conservatives, to create a general standard and avoid a situation in which Trump only appears on some states’ ballots.

In his comments last week opposing removing Trump from the ballot, Newsom admitted that “there is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy,” adding, “But in California, we defeat candidates we don’t like at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”