In his second bid for the Blaine House, Independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler appears more daunted by the spoiler perception than anything else. Although Cutler garnered 36 percent of the vote and Democrat Libby Mitchell only 19 percent in the 2010 election, many in Maine associate Paul LePage’s victory with Cutler’s campaign.

At every stop this campaign season, Cutler said he works to convince potential supporters that a vote for him will not ensure another four years for LePage or conversely, four for Democratic candidate Congressman Mike Michaud. It is a stumbling block he has yet to clear.

“I always get two questions: Will you split the vote and how will you govern,” Cutler said during an interview in Boothbay Harbor last month. “I don’t consider either of them unreasonable or difficult questions. The first reflects people’s anxieties and their desperate wish for a different governor.

“What I’ve found is once I address the anxiety and focus on what we will do differently, my conversion rate is very high.”

Although that may be Cutler’s experience, so far political polls continue to show him a distant third in the race. Last week in Wiscasset, Cutler focused not on his third place ranking, but instead on a recent poll that indicates almost two-thirds of Maine voters have yet to choose a candidate. That large sea of undecided and only-leaning voters are Cutler’s target audience. He said he is counting on a late-season surge, similar to the one in 2010 — only this time big enough to win office.

As an Independent, Cutler has all the benefits and the disadvantages that go with a third party candidacy. He is able to distance himself from the political partisanship and gridlock that have come to typify the American and Maine political scene and he has no voting record for his opponents to feast upon.

But independence means Cutler lacks the automatic legitimacy and benefits afforded a major party candidate. His campaign raises money with a $1,500 cap on individual donors instead of the $3,000 cap afforded Republicans and Democrats, who hold primary elections. Despite a long and consistent track record on equality and environmental issues, Cutler was passed over in favor of Michaud when Planned Parenthood, Equality Maine and the Sierra Club handed out their endorsements.

Cutler has also been unable to get either of the party candidates to engage with him in public forums. Without those debates, Cutler must wait to contrast his proposals, style and responsiveness with his opponents. He said he fears that by the time LePage and Michaud  are willing to debate in October, many enrolled voters will have already cast their ballots.

Cutler is not reticent about sharing his vision, plans and policies for Maine. If anything, there are perhaps more specific details on his website and in his book and policy papers than the average person is willing to digest. The staples of Cutler’s plan are to promote year round tourism, invest in infrastructure, stimulate a creative economy, reform the state’s tax structure, change its aging demographic, and foster non-destructive resource-based industries to revive Maine’s economy, such as tourism, fisheries and agriculture, that rely on Maine’s vast natural resources. For each of these areas, Cutler has a plan.

In campaign stops here in Midcoast Maine, Cutler focuses more attention on Michaud than LePage and points both to the Democrat’s voting record and his acceptance of millions from big business over the years. Cutler has pledged to accept no PAC money this year, but Campaign for Maine, a PAC that supports Cutler’s campaign has raised about $250,000.

“The (Cutler) campaign is accepting zero money from PACs — but we cannot control what other groups spend on their own whether it’s for or against us,” Communications Director Crystal Canney wrote in an email.

Cutler’s 2014 campaign has raised about $2 million so far, just under $1 million of which Cutler has contributed himself. The most recent Cutler campaign filing with Maine Ethics Commission shows they raised about $176,000 in June and  July; about 88 percent of the donors and 83 percent of those dollars came from Maine residents. Canney said donations under $50 are not included in the Ethics Commission report and the campaign actually took in about $190,000 from 894 individuals in the last two months.

Questions and answers

During his June visit to the Boothbay region, Cutler sat down for an interview between a campaign stop at the Southport Town Hall and a visit to Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay. An hour with Cutler allowed the Boothbay Register/Wiscasset Newspaper reporter only time to discuss a few subjects, but a detailed exploration of his plan is available on his website for interested voters.

Q: I’ve read your book and spent a half day on your website, which is so detailed I didn’t get through all of it. How do you get your message across to the general public when it is not easily distilled to newspaper bullets or 30-second advertisements?

Cutler: What I learned from Ed Muskie and Angus King is that it is important to give people a top line sense of who you are, what you do and what your principles are. But it’s just as important to give people either a detailed understanding or an assurance that you have thought about the issues they care about and that you have ideas that make sense to them. I really believe you need to treat voters like adults. We did that in 2010 and we are doing that with this campaign. I set out in 2010 to be more substantive, more fully transparent and to do no negative advertising. And that’s what we are doing now, because I believe it works and because it’s who I am.

Q: What are the three biggest ways you believe you differ from Gov. LePage in vision and policy?

Cutler: I believe deeply in fairness of opportunity and that state government has a responsibility to create, or see that opportunities are created, for people to make the most of their human potential. I think Paul is more inclined to let opportunity be a lottery. Second, I believe that there is an important difference between spending and investing, and that government is the only vehicle to make public investments whose returns accrue to all. We have a governor who only thinks to the end of this term. We are never ever going to recover from this tailspin unless we invest. Third, Paul doesn’t appear to believe in the importance of planning. I believe we have to plan; we have to invest in our competitive advantages, we have to identify what those are, and that we ought to have a capital budget. It’s a huge difference.

Q: What are the three biggest ways you believe you differ from Congressmen Michaud in vision and policy?

Cutler: It’s hard to know what he believes, it changes so often on some core issues. First, the biggest difference, Mike’s policies serve particular special interest groups instead of the people of Maine. He’s taken so much money over the course of his career from special interest groups, it’s hard to see where his policies stop and their interests start. Second, Mike never says how we will pay for things. His answer is always some variation of “we will work it out.” The last thing Maine needs now is a failure of leadership, and that’s a failure of leadership. Third, there is a set of social issues that are core issues for a lot of people where Mike and I have a lot of differences. I’m a strong defender of the second amendment, but I am also a strong supporter of universal background checks. I don’t think there’s a good argument against them. Mike out of one side of his mouth says he’s working on it, but he won’t sign on to the legislation. Mikes says he’s evolved on so many things, one of them women’s access to reproductive rights, which he now favors. But not for poor people. I think that’s a huge difference. This is a Democratic party that distinguishes between whether you have money or you don’t, and I hate that.

Q: How do you propose to raise the $180 million needed to offset the 20-40 percent property tax reduction you propose?

Cutler: I’ve proposed two options, both based on sales tax changes. The first proposal is we take the sales tax down to 5 percent, except it goes up to 7 percent from May to October (excluding auto sales and building materials), broaden the sales tax, and keep the lodging tax at 8 percent year round. The second option would adopt a straightforward one percent increase in the sales tax rate from 5 to 6 percent. I put two options out there because I think there’s a reasonable discussion to be had. I like the first option because it exports more of our tax burden to the 15 million people who come to visit Maine every year. I think they should pay a larger share of keeping up the state.

Q: There is a huge difference between very rich and very poor in Maine, and it’s one that is felt strongly along the coast. How do you begin to address that problem?

Cutler: Since 2010, I have been talking about the relationship between the growing inequality in our lives and the failure of the political system to deal with it. And it all comes down to money in politics. That’s why I am so committed to getting money out of politics and will not take money from special interest PACs. That constellation of issues is the greatest vulnerability we have as a democratic society.

Q: Gov. LePage has placed a large emphasis on reducing Maine’s share of public assistance. Where do you stand on this issue?

Cutler: We do have a huge problem in Maine with dependency on public assistance. The solution is not just to awaken Maine’s economy. Dependency (on public assistance) has taken a toll on Maine’s society. LePage and I agreed in 2010 that one of the biggest problems we have is the cliff effect, that perverse set of disincentives to work for those on assistance. We’ve got to replace that cliff, essentially what Clinton did, and build a a bridge from welfare to work. Paul hasn’t done that, instead he has demonized people on welfare.

Q: With the merger of healthcare providers across the state into large systems, Maine’s rural communities have seen local healthcare services decline without lower costs. What should the role of government be?

Cutler: We have very good care in this state but at an extremely high price. And we have a state government that has set policies that have been a series of mistake, after mistake, after mistake. Beginning when we increased substantially the amount of money hospitals can spend without a certificate of need, and we “reformed” the insurance marketplace in a way that doesn’t not serve so many people, and then we compounded those mistakes by not taking the federal money to build our own exchanges and implement the ACA. All of those can be fixed. We are going to end up with two big hospital systems in Maine in a few years. One of the compromises we need to make is we need to be very purposeful and careful about how we order those resources. I do not believe in regulating hospitals like we do other public utilities but I do believe in a more vigorous state role in planning the healthcare system. If we look at other states and provinces, they have had great success and we need to look to those other examples.