A version of this article was originally published in The Daily Brief, our Maine politics newsletter. Sign up here for daily news and insight from politics editor Michael Shepherd.
It is getting rarer for political candidates in Maine to tie themselves to bigger-name figures.
In a sign of the times this summer, we could only find one member of the congressional delegation who endorsed either former President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden in a possible 2024 race, reflecting the angst about a rematch between the two unpopular figures.
That makes former U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin’s tactics striking. Both his campaign and at least one outside group backing him have run ads and sent out flyers tying the Republican to former Gov. Paul LePage ahead of Poliquin’s November matchup with U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine’s 2nd District.
One Poliquin ad that ran on TV this weekend focused on hammering Biden but showed a picture of LePage and the former congressman toward the end. A picture of the two takes up more than a quarter of a recent Congressional Leadership Fund mailer. Poliquin invoked both LePage and Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, in a September radio ad. It is worth noting that LePage and Poliquin share a chief strategist in Brent Littlefield.
The electoral math here seems pretty simple. Poliquin struggled in 2018 to motivate the Republican base during his narrow loss to Golden. A poll taken the year before that showed LePage at 79 percent approval with Republicans. Golden saw significant swing support in a 2020 election that he won comfortably while winning more votes than Trump in the 2nd District.
Poliquin may see polarization as his best path to victory. There are mixed signals on that theory in the scant polling to date on the race. A University of New Hampshire survey released last week found Golden 11 percentage points ahead of Poliquin. Matching 78 percent shares of Democrats and Republicans were backing Golden and Poliquin, respectively.
Crucially for Golden, 45 percent of unenrolled voters backed him to just 22 percent for Poliquin. It also found that nearly 47 percent of voters have a negative view of the Republican, compared with 32 percent for Golden. Those kinds of figures mean Poliquin needs to lock down a disproportionate share of Republican voters, especially since independent Tiffany Bond will be on a ranked-choice ballot alongside the party hopefuls.
Despite the good polling results for Golden, both parties are hitting the race hard with the expectation that margins should tighten down the stretch. The Congressional Leadership Fund is throwing another $2 million into the 2nd District, Axios reported this weekend. It should be a fight to the end.
