BY PAUL CARRIER

MaineToday Media, Inc.

Democrats Chellie and Hannah Pingree will give the mother-daughter relationship a new, highly political, twist if both win their respective bids for office later this year.

Victories in their respective races would create a potentially unprecedented link between the state's congressional delegation and legislative leaders at the State House.

Chellie Pingree hopes to defeat Republican Charles Summers in their race for the 1st Congressional District seat being vacated by Democrat Tom Allen. And if she wins re-election, Hannah Pingree, the majority leader in the Maine House of Representatives, is likely to be the next speaker of the Maine House.

Neither prospect is a foregone conclusion. Summers could win the congressional seat. The Republicans could wrest control of the Maine House from the Democrats. Or the GOP could emerge victorious on both counts.

But experts give Chellie Pingree at least a slight edge over Summers because the 1st District votes Democratic more often than not and the pundits say this looms as a bad year for Republicans.

And Hannah Pingree has a very good shot at the speakership of the 151-member Maine House, where Democrats currently hold 90 seats to 59 for the Republicans, with two independents. The Republicans must pull off an upset in November to take control of the House, which they have not run for more than three decades.

Perhaps because of the unusual situation that the election of two Pingrees would create, political experts, and the Pingrees themselves, seem hard-pressed to assess the significance of having a mother-daughter duo in two capitols.

It would, some say, guarantee a tight working relationship between Maine's congressional delegation and the state's political leaders back home, especially because the liberal Pingrees are close personally and share similar views.

But others say there may be less here than meets the eye. They say the pairing might be little more than a novelty.

Far from claiming the role of senior partner in such a relationship, Chellie Pingree suggested that her daughter, as the oldest of three children and someone who is "very opinionated but extremely competent," would be an equal player in whatever dealings they may have with each other.

"Hannah is my oldest child, so she has kind of mentored and raised me," Chellie Pingree joked. "People bring up Hannah in glowing terms, and I try to ride her coattails."

"I think it's exciting," Hannah Pingree said of a possible Pingree duo, adding that she and her mother are "very supportive of each other" and they are in "constant communication."

Hannah Pingree worked on her mother's successful primary campaign for the 1st District Democratic nomination, for example, and she helped raise money for her mother's failed 2002 U.S. Senate race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

It might be "useful to have those kinds of connections," particularly on issues involving federal funding, said Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine.

Maine's political leaders here at home and in the nation's capital already work well together, Brewer said, but "any time you can have a better connection with the big dog (in Washington) is a good thing."

But House Minority Leader Joshua Tardy, R-Newport, the likely GOP candidate for speaker of the Maine House if the Republicans take control in November, cautions against overstating the value of the Pingrees' familial bond.

"I have the ability to reach out to my (Republican U.S.) senators," Tardy said. "I think anybody (from Maine) sitting in Congress would take a call from a legislative leader" in Augusta, he said.

Summers, Chellie Pingree's opponent in the congressional race, could not be reached for comment.

Brewer and Marvin Druker, a political scientist at Lewiston-Auburn College, said it is not unusual for politics to become, as Brewer put it, "the family business to some extent," and this may be an example.

There always have been plenty of American families "where public service is at a high value," Druker said.

In the case of the Pingree children, however, that devotion to politics stops with Hannah, at least as far as seeking high office is concerned.

Sister Cecily Pingree is a documentary filmmaker and brother Asa Pingree is, according to his mother, a carpenter and "theoretically an actor."

Still, the political duo of Chellie and Hannah Pingree conjures up interesting comparisons to other well-connected political families, both in Maine and elsewhere. The best recent example is that of the husband-and-wife team of former Gov. John McKernan and then U.S. Rep. Olympia Snowe, now the state's senior U.S. senator.

The Legislature has long had its share of siblings, as well as parents and children who hold office at the same time.

Republican Sen. Peter Mills is the brother of Democratic Rep. Janet Mills, and of Dr. Dora Mills, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Similarly, Democratic Sen. Bruce Bryant and Democratic Rep. Mark Bryant are siblings whose aunt, Republican Paula Benoit, serves in the state Senate. Republican Sen. Richard Nass and his wife, GOP Rep. Joan Nass, both serve in the Legislature.

Historically, the most obvious Maine case of such family ties is that of the famous Washburn brothers of Livermore, four of whom served in Congress in the 19th century, three of them simultaneously, but all representing different states.

Elsewhere, U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and his son, U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, are a case in point. So are U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware and his son, Delaware Attorney General Joseph "Beau" Biden.

Even if both Pingrees succeed in their respective quests, political scientist Ronald Schmidt of the University of Southern Maine warns against reading too much into that fact.

For one thing, Schmidt said, whoever wins the 1st District seat "will be a freshman member of the House, so it's not really a strong link to a center of power."

Ultimately, he said, the value of a dual Pingree win would be measured not by their election victories but by "the ability of the Pingrees to translate their positions on issues and policy into actual outcomes."