Bobby Charles sits behind the wheel of his SUV in a new campaign ad. He points out that the vehicle is a 2015 with 260,000 miles on it. It still runs better than the Democratic state government, he says.

Then he makes a promise.

"I'm going to cut your property taxes by raising the homestead exemption."

Earlier in the same ad, he tells Mainers: "I pay property taxes that keep going up, just like you."

There is a problem with the ad. The tax break Charles is promising to expand is one Maine has offered for nearly thirty years — and according to his own town office, he has never claimed it.

What the homestead exemption actually is

Maine's homestead exemption knocks up to $25,000 off the value of your home for property tax purposes. For most homeowners that works out to savings of a few hundred dollars a year. It isn't a loophole or a program you have to fight for. You fill out a form.

To qualify you have to be a permanent Maine resident who has owned the home for at least 12 months, and it has to be your primary residence. Second homes and camps don't count.

The program has existed since 1998. The amount was last raised in 2020, when the maximum went from $20,000 to $25,000.

In the 2025 tax year, more than 327,000 Maine taxpayers claimed it. The state pays municipalities back for 76% of the revenue they lose to the program — a reimbursement that came to $82 million in 2025.

So this is not an obscure break. It is one of the most widely used tax programs in the state. Roughly a third of a million of Charles's neighbors are already in it.

He isn't

Charles grew up in Maine. But he spent most of his career working for the federal government and running a consulting business in the Washington, D.C., area. Property records show he has owned his home in Leeds since 2006 — and that he didn't move back full time until 2022, the same year he sold a home in Maryland.

Staff at the Leeds town office say Charles has not claimed a homestead exemption since he moved back.

His campaign doesn't dispute that he's eligible. It says he doesn't rent or own homes anywhere else, and that he qualifies for the program. The explanation offered was that his accountant made an oversight, and that he plans to use it going forward.

Here is how his senior strategist, Vincent Harris, put it:

"He's going to get it and will save whatever money he's able to save going forward, which is not enough because he's suffering under these crazy, insane property taxes put on Mainers by the incumbent insider politicians."

Read that again. The defense of a candidate who never filed for an available tax break is that the tax break is too small to matter.

Both of his opponents in the November race already receive the exemption, according to property tax records in their hometowns — Democrat Hannah Pingree in North Haven and independent Rick Bennett in Oxford.

The part where the math doesn't show up

All three candidates for governor have pledged to expand the homestead exemption. What separates them is whether they've said how.

Pingree has proposed doubling it to $50,000, paired with a change to state law letting towns tax second homes owned by non-Maine residents at higher rates. Bennett has proposed raising it for Mainers 65 and older and increasing the state's reimbursement rate to towns by three percentage points a year until the program is fully state-funded.

Charles wants to raise it to $100,000 — four times the current level. Asked how he would pay for that, his campaign said details would be released soon.

That is a real question, not a gotcha. The state currently reimburses towns for 76% of what the exemption costs them, at $82 million a year. Quadrupling the exemption without a funding plan doesn't make the cost disappear. It moves it — either onto the state budget or onto the towns, which raise property taxes to cover their gaps.

And it lands on top of everything else Charles has promised to cut. His campaign platform pledges to abolish the state income tax outright and to slash regulation. That platform contains no dollar figures, no percentage targets, and no accounting for what replaces the revenue.

A spokesperson for Pingree, Mary-Erin Casale, put the objection this way:

"You can't promise a $4 billion budget cut and a tax break at the same time. The math doesn't work, and Maine families deserve a plan that does."

This is the pattern, not the exception

The homestead ad is a small thing on its own. What makes it worth writing down is that it is the same move Charles has made all year: a confident number, delivered with certainty, with nothing underneath it.

He has promised to end the income tax that funds schools and roads. He has promised to slash regulation and wasteful spending. He has now promised to quadruple a property tax break. Not one of those promises has arrived with an explanation of what gets cut to pay for it.

Maine's affordability problem is real. Property taxes here genuinely do keep climbing, and people genuinely are being squeezed. That's exactly why a plan needs to survive contact with a calculator.

There is also something worth noticing about who Charles is describing when he says "just like you." He is a lawyer and former Assistant Secretary of State who spent most of the last three decades working in and around Washington. He didn't live in Maine full time until four years ago. The 2015 SUV in the ad is doing a lot of work.

We've seen this shape before. Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan sells himself as a blue-collar everyman who "learned the value of hard work early" — and chartered a $23,000 private jet while quietly flying his own helicopter. The persona is the product. The record is the thing to check.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles is running an ad promising to cut your property taxes by expanding a program that 327,000 Mainers use and he doesn't. When a reporter asked why, his campaign blamed an accountant and said he'll sign up now.

He wants to raise that exemption to $100,000 and hasn't said how he'd pay for it. He wants to eliminate the state income tax and hasn't said what replaces it.

Mainers deserve a governor who does the arithmetic before he films the ad. We deserve better.

Source

Rachel Ohm, "Bobby Charles wants to expand Maine's homestead exemption. He doesn't use it." — Portland Press Herald, August 5, 2026. Image: screenshot via the Charles campaign.