A generic Democrat is no guarantee in Maine

Sen. Susan Collins has a solid track record with political independents.

The question on a lot of political minds these days is: What is the net impact of Graham Platner’s dropping out of the Maine Senate race on the outcome there and on control of the Senate? Arguably the best answer is: How did you think it was going before the last and final bombshell allegation against Platner?

While there have been over a dozen public polls released since the earliest days of this Maine contest, only two are of high quality, both conducted in June: one from The New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena, the other by Fox News. The NYT/PPH/Siena poll of 608 likely voters showed Platner leading Republican Sen. Susan Collins by 2 points, 49 to 47 percent; the Fox News poll of 1,003 registered voters had Collins up by 3 points, 50 to 47 percent. The bottom line is that the race was fundamentally even.

But an even race in Maine, a light-blue, Democratic-tilting state, should be a hint that everything is not quite copacetic there for that party. Their presidential nominees have carried the state in nine consecutive elections. The last GOP candidate to win was George H.W. Bush, a part-time resident of the state, in 1988. In gubernatorial elections, Democrats have won four of the last eight. In two of the four they did not win, now-Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, prevailed. The only two GOP victories were Paul LePage’s wins in 2010 and 2014. Aside from Collins, who is seeking a sixth term, the last Republican to win a Senate seat in the state was Olympia Snowe in 2006.

The crosstabs for the two surveys show that while the race was tied, Platner was already facing resistance within his own party. While Collins was holding 93 percent of the vote among Republicans in the Fox poll and 98 percent in the Times poll, Platner was attracting just 86 percent of Democrats in Fox and 89 percent in the Times poll. Collins also fared much better among men than Platner did among women, which may be related to some of the baggage that Platner had accumulated prior to the rape allegation of a week ago.

For some reason, many seem to think that Collins won reelection six years ago because Democrats weren’t energetic enough. Indeed, these days, partisans on each side seem to think that any political problem comes back to turnout, bringing to mind the old joke that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The idea that a candidate was simply not sufficiently attractive to the narrow slice of swing voters in the middle is a concept many have difficulty conceiving. But six years ago, when Collins beat the Democratic nominee, then-state House Speaker Sara Gideon, by 8.6 percentage points, 50 to 42.4 percent, the same electorate voted for Joe Biden by a very similar 9.1-point margin, 53.1 to 44.0 percent. Obviously, the 2020 Senate outcome was not about turnout; if it was, both races would have gone in the same direction and by similar margins.

In that 2020 election, Biden carried the independent vote in the state by 24 points in the Edison Research exit poll and 29 points in the VoteCast survey. That same day, Collins won independents by 3 points in Edison and 11 points in the VoteCast survey.

Maine Democrats will hold a pop-up state convention next weekend to select a new nominee. The odds are pretty good that they will tap one of the three runners-up in the party’s gubernatorial primary, in which Hannah Pingree, a former state House speaker and policy adviser to Gov. Janet Mills, emerged as the victor of the ranked-choice vote.

In the initial primary balloting, former state Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Nirav Shah ran first with 26.9 percent, followed by Pingree with 23.2 percent, then former state Senate President Troy Jackson and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Keep in mind that in Maine, the secretary of state is selected by the legislature, not a statewide elective post. Jackson and Bellows come from the party’s more progressive wing: Jackson very closely aligned with labor, while Bellows ran a bit more on cultural issues. Both would do fine among Democratic voters but may have more limited appeal among independents. Shah was a daily presence on television and radio in the state during the COVID crisis. He was non-polarizing, with a good bedside manner that would help with independents in the middle but might not exactly titillate progressives in the party base.

There are a couple of dangers here for Democrats. First, there is little time for the kind of full vetting that is needed to make sure that none of the Democrats have personal or professional gremlins in their background that could be exploited in a tough general election, where spending from all sides may top $400 million.

Many in the state suggest that Shah, Jackson, and Bellows are tested, having gone through a competitive open-seat gubernatorial primary. That is laughable given the difference in scrutiny between a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber and a gubernatorial race in a small state with no major media markets.

But another factor is that for all of Platner’s personal baggage, he was unquestionably the most charismatic statewide candidate in the country this year. While this was his first race, his raw candidate skills were very impressive and on a completely different level from any of the Democrats now mentioned for the seat. Collins, and the apparatus behind her, are on a heavyweight level, far beyond anything we’ve seen from the gubernatorial candidates this year.

Winning a Senate majority this year was always going to be an uphill battle for Democrats this cycle. The map is as tough as either party has faced in a long time. Only two races are in purple swing states—Michigan and North Carolina. Maine and the open Democratic seats in Minnesota and New Hampshire are light blue; everything else is in varying shades of red. Is it possible that Democrats can win a majority in November? Yes, but I give them maybe 1-in-3 odds, as opposed to the strong likelihood that the House will flip from Republican to Democratic. Democratic voters are extremely motivated, and Republicans are considerably less than energized. In purple states, that says, “Advantage Democrats.” But while Democrats may well get to 47, 48, or even 49 percent in red states, hitting 50 percent is a real challenge.