In the late summer of 2016, Drew Gattine received a surprising voicemail. The sender was Paul LePage, then the governor of Maine, and he called Gattine “a little son-of-a-bitch socialist cocksucker”.

Amid the inevitable media frenzy that followed, LePage lamented not having the opportunity to engage Gattine, a Democrat in the Maine house of representatives, in a duel. Rather than follow in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton, who pointed his gun in the air when he dueled Aaron Burr in 1804, LePage told reporters, “I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt.”.

The incident made national headlines and shocked many Americans, not least Gattine’s aunt, who called him from Arizona after learning of the threat on National Public Radio. “It was an interesting five or six days of my life,” Gattine says now.

But for Gattine and other Mainers, LePage’s behavior was somewhat typical by that point. Over his eight years in office, LePage cultivated a reputation for offensive comments and for adversarial relationships with reporters, Democrats and even fellow Republicans.

Now, after briefly leaving Maine for Florida, LePage has come home with a mission: to return to the governor’s mansion. Contradicting his previous claims that he was “done with politics” after his two terms in office – “I’m going to retire and go to Florida,” LePage proclaimed in late 2018, “I’ve done my eight years. It’s time for somebody else” – LePage is back, making a pitch for another term as he attacks Democratic governor Janet Mills’ economic record.

“I’m running again, because Maine is in serious, serious trouble,” LePage said at a forum in Waterville on Tuesday. “Maine’s economy is going backwards, and it’s not growing. We need to get somebody there that can grow it. I did it once. I will do it again.”

Mainers may have some understandable misgivings about revisiting the LePage era. When the NAACP criticized LePage forskipping Martin Luther King Day events in 2011, the then-governor responded by noting that his adopted son is Black. “Tell them to kiss my butt,” LePage said. “If they want to play the race card, come to dinner; my son will talk to them.”

The comment sparked accusations of racism, which dogged LePage during his tenure. In 2016, LePage complained that Maine was struggling with the opioid epidemic because drug dealers “with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” were coming into Maine from other states and would often “impregnate a young white girl before they leave”. Months later, LePage told reporters that it was important to identify the “enemy” in the opioid epidemic, saying: “The enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”

It was Gattine’s criticism of LePage’s race-related comments about the opioid epidemic that culminated in the governor’s threat of a duel.

“The irony is, the comments that I had made that got him so angry, I was trying to be very measured,” said Gattine, who now serves as chair of the Maine Democratic party. “I think he has such a reputation for saying these off-the-wall things that people just used to sit around waiting for him to say them.”

That reputation invited many comparisons between LePage and another Republican known for causing controversy: Donald Trump. Both men built political personas off their sensational rhetoric, and some of LePage’s stunts as governor even seemed to foreshadow Trump’s later acts as president. In 2018 for example, LePage registered his discontent with Democrat Jared Golden’s victory in a Maine congressional race by writing on the certification form “stolen election,” previewing Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 race.

The two politicians now find themselves in similar situations again – with LePage seeking to return to office just as Trump contemplates another presidential bid in 2024. But despite LePage’s past praise of the former president – he once described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular” – he has struck a notably different tone in recent months.

LePage now rarely invokes Trump’s name while campaigning, and he has abandoned his past support for the former president’s lies about the 2020 election. “I believe that President Biden won the election,” LePage said at a debate earlier this month. When asked last month whether Trump should run again, he dodged the question: “I’m running for governor of the state of Maine, all right? And that’s it.”

LePage’s efforts to distance himself from Trump fit into his campaign’s broader goal of presenting a toned-down version of the pugnacious leader that Mainers came to know over his eight years in office. “What I’m saying is, life is a journey,” LePage told the Atlantic. “And along the way you learn and you get better, and hope that every day, the rest of my life, I’m a better man.”

Democrats scoff at the idea of a reformed LePage, and they say his behavior on the campaign trail has provided ample evidence that the former governor is the same as he ever was. They specifically point to an incident in August when LePage threatened to “deck” a Maine Democratic party staffer paid to track his events.

“Initially [in] this campaign, he was fairly even in his temperament … But really, I think since sometime in August, that’s been less effective,” said Amy Fried, chair of the University of Maine’s political science department. She said of LePage’s threat against the tracker, “It really gave Democrats an opening to say, this is not a new LePage. This is the old LePage.”

Mills has hammered that theme in her messaging as well, using her campaign ads and speeches to resurrect LePage’s past comments and conduct while in office. Speaking at a fundraising event in Portland on Thursday, Mills reminded supporters that LePage once expressed openness to overturning Roe v Wade, the landmark supreme court case that established federal protections for abortion access. The supreme court did indeed reverse Roe in June, and LePage has since sent mixed messages about his stance on abortion policy.

Asked at the debate how he would respond if the state legislature attempted to limit abortion access to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, LePage pleaded ignorance. “I don’t know what you mean by 15 weeks or 28 weeks,” LePage said. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure I understand the question.”

Mills accused LePage of attempting to hide his true views from Maine voters, repeatedly telling the Portland crowd: “We won’t go back.”

In an interview after her speech, Mills expressed doubt that LePage’s efforts to present a new side of himself would prove successful.

“People know better. People knew him for eight years. They knew how rudely he treated legislators of his own party. They know how he treated the Maine people,” Mills said. “They know Paul LePage, and hopefully they don’t forget the true Paul LePage.”

Like many other Republican candidates nationwide, LePage seems to be hoping that record-high inflation and Joe Biden’s lackluster approval rating will be enough to sweep him back into office. He has focused his campaign events on kitchen-table issues such as rising oil prices and the struggles of Maine’s lobster industry, while keeping a relatively low profile when it comes to press access. (Multiple calls and emails to LePage’s campaign office and one of his senior advisers went unanswered.) Directly linking Mills to Biden, LePage’s allies insist his experience as governor will translate into an improved economy for the state.

“Janet Mills and Maine Democrats only have soaring prices and a track record of failures to offer voters,” said Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. “Paul LePage is the only candidate who will move Maine forward, protect our iconic lobstering industry from far-left activists, put an end to the Biden-Mills heating oil crisis that is crushing Mainers, and get our economy working again.”

Mills rejected LePage’s characterization of her economic policies, noting that one study ranked Maine’s pandemic-era economy to be the 11th strongest in the nation. The sitting governor acknowledged the pain caused by rising prices, but rejected the idea that LePage would better address the global issue of inflation. Mills cited her approval of $850 relief checks to Maine families to help mitigate the effects of inflation, and said she has received letters from constituents thanking her for the checks, which allowed them to fill their gas tanks or pay for prescription drugs.

“I’m not saying everything’s rosy. I’m not foolish,” Mills said. “At the same time, we, in a bipartisan budget, enacted one of the most generous, one of the most effective inflation relief programs in the country.”

Mills’ efforts to work across the aisle could pay dividends at the ballot box, Fried said. As more states have embraced one-party rule, Maine has become an outlier in electing both Republican and Democratic candidates at the statewide level. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by nine points, even as Republican senator Susan Collins won re-election with a similar margin.

“Maine has tended to like the idea of people working together, and that was part of Susan Collins’s pitch all these years,” Fried said. “She definitely has more credibility on that, on being bipartisan, than LePage does.”

LePage’s adversarial history could be contributing to his poor performance in recent polls, some of which show Mills with a double-digit lead in the race. Fried expressed skepticism of those results, but she acknowledged that LePage may be struggling with an issue that also plagued the man he once endorsed for president. Like Trump, LePage has a unique ability to motivate his biggest critics to turn out at the polls.

“It’s hard for me to totally believe these polls that have a really large Mills lead. It’s likely it’s going to be closer,” Fried said. “Ultimately, in some ways, LePage is like a Trump figure in that people will come out on the left to prevent the least-liked candidate from winning.”