Barbara Merrill

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Barbara Merrill is an American politician from the U.S. state of Maine. Elected as a Democrat to the state legislature, she left the party in 2006 to become an Independent candidate for Governor of Maine. If elected, she would have been the third Independent Governor of that state (after James B. Longley and Angus King) and its first female Governor. Although she did not win on Election Day, with Democratic incumbent John Baldacci elected to a second term, she made a very strong third-place showing. With 98% of precincts reporting, she had 115,203 votes, or about 21%.

Merrill was born Barbara Butler in a U.S. Army hospital in Frankfurt, Germany. Her father, Charles Butler, was a West Point graduate who served in the Korean War, rose to the rank of Colonel, and was killed in Vietnam when Merrill was in high school.

She attended Waterville High School and the University of Maine, where she earned a law degree. After working for the law firm of Verrill Dana, she opened her own practice with her husband, Phil Merrill (with whom she has two children, Nick and Jackie). In her practice, she became a lobbyist, working mainly for non-profit organizations, before the state legislature. In 2004, she ran as a Democrat for the Maine House of Representatives in heavily-Republican Appleton. She won the general election with over 60% of the vote.

After a year and a half as a Democratic member of the legislature, she authored the book Setting the Maine Course: We Can Get There from Here, in which she advocated a variety of new policies, including eliminating both the corporate income tax and economic development tax breaks, dedicating the sales tax to funding public education, having the state pay for teacher pay, increasing environmental regulation, decreasing all other regulation, establishing a "rainy day fund" to cover budget deficits, and fighting urban sprawl. She says that she wants Maine to be known as "the Free Enterprise State."

On January 3, 2006, she announced that she was changing her voter registration to "unenrolled," the Maine equivalent of Independent, and leaving the Democratic caucus. This temporarily threw the House into turmoil, as the two major parties became tied in number of members, until Rep. Joanne Twomey, who had left the Democrats the previous November, returned to them, ensuring they would retain a majority. A few days later, in a speech delivered in front of the Charles Butler Army Reserve Center in Saco, Maine, Merrill announced that she would be an Independent candidate for Governor.

On May 31, she submitted more than 4,000 valid signatures to the Maine Secretary of State, ensuring that she will receive a place on the ballot. The next day, she submitted proof that she had received 2800 $5 contributions to the Maine Clean Elections Fund, thus qualifying her campaign for partial public funding.

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