U.S. Senate candidate Kouzounas has record of spreading false information about COVID, elections

A newly-announced Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Angus King — former Maine GOP chair Demi Kouzounas — has a record of making conspiratorial statements about the pandemic, elections and the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to a review of her public comments. 

Kouzounas headed the state party from 2017 until she was ousted in early 2023 after Maine Republicans failed to win either of the state’s congressional districts, the race for the Blaine House or majorities in the Maine House and Senate in the 2022 election cycle. 

On Friday, she announced she would challenge King — an independent who caucuses with the Democrats — for his U.S. Senate seat. Kouzounas, the first Republican candidate to announce a 2024 run against King, said she reached her decision to enter the race after being encouraged by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a fellow Republican. 

Kouzounas enters the race with a record of making extreme political statements. For example, soon after then-President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, Kouzounas told WLOB that she believed the COVID-19 pandemic was designed to hurt Trump’s chances. 

“If they allowed us back in China … they won’t find a bat that has COVID,” Kouzounas said, adding, “This was unleashed on us because they knew if the economy stayed strong the way it was going, that our President Trump would be re-elected with huge numbers. I believe that for sure. I also feel that they had a hand in our elections. They are a super power and want more ground, they want more land.”

In addition, on Nov. 12, 2020, days after Joe Biden had officially won the 2020 election, Kouzounas said in a statement that the Maine GOP was “deeply concerned with the anomalies” in voting in several states and the “possibility of election fraud.” 

“As far as we are concerned, President Trump is still our President until proven otherwise,” she said, adding that, “We will not rest until the truth about the 2020 election is revealed and we return trust to American elections.”  

Further, under Kouzounas’ leadership, the Maine Republican Party ran 27 legislative candidates who denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election. 

There is no evidence to support Trump’s widely-repeated lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. 

Kouzounas did not respond to a request for comment about whether she stands by the statements she made in the past or about whether she believes the 2020 election was stolen. 

A spokesperson for Collins did not respond to a question about whether the Maine Republican is concerned about Kouzounas’ past statements. A spokesperson for King declined to comment on Kouzounas’ record. 

Kouzounas has also made conspiratorial statements about the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. 

“They knew the Capitol riots were happening, they were going to happen,” she said. “They had enough of an understanding. I mean it’s not being talked about but I think it is.”

“The Capitol riots happened. Of course the five people that were killed were our people, right, were on our side, not the other way around, and only one was really murdered, which was by a Capitol policeman,” she added, referring to Ashli Babbitt. Authorities say Babbitt was shot to death when she tried to climb through a door near the House chamber.

Along with those statements, Kouzounas’ tenure as chair saw the state Republican party release a platform in 2022 that — among other proposals — called for defining any teaching in public schools about genders other than male and female as child sexual abuse. 

The platform also proposed a ban on presenting “sexually-based material” to students prior to grade 12 — which would effectively end sex education for most students — and explicitly stated that the Maine GOP believes the definition of marriage is “the union of one man and one woman.”