U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine’s 2nd District has not yet clinched victory over former U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, but the ranked-choice outcome of their race is a mere formality.
The second-term Democrat fell just shy of a majority in Tuesday’s election with 48.8 percent of votes to 44.3 percent for his Republican challenger, according to results reported to the Bangor Daily News as of Wednesday afternoon. Independent Tiffany Bond pulled 6.8 percent of first-choice votes.
That lack of a majority triggers a process under Maine’s ranked-choice voting law sending state police out to collect ballot information from cities and towns in the district and take it to Augusta for a count set for Tuesday and run by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ office.
Bond will be eliminated and the votes of those who ranked her first will be reallocated to Golden or Poliquin if they are named as second choice. Golden only needs a sliver of these votes to be pushed over the top, but he is expected to win a solid majority of those continuing ballots.
In a SurveyUSA poll of the 2nd District released last week by FairVote and the Bangor Daily News, 65 percent of Bond’s first-choice voters also ranked a second choice. Of that group, 80 percent went for Golden. If both the first-place margins and the polling results on Bond’s voters held, the incumbent would win 53.7 percent of votes to Poliquin’s 46.3 percent.
Golden is so close to winning the election that Poliquin could win every one of those 65 percent of Bond voters and the Democrat would still win. That is because the 35 percent of Bond voters who did not rank a second choice would drop out of the voter pool in the final round, nudging Golden up over the 50 percent line with his current vote total.
To win, Poliquin would need a functionally impossible outcome: Some 80 percent of Bond voters would need to rank a second choice, and he would need to win 90 percent of them.
The congressman’s edge in the ranked-choice count should be no surprise. Bond was a liberal-leaning candidate who also ran as one of two independents in the 2018 race between Golden and Poliquin. Their second choices went largely to Golden and erased a small first-round lead for Poliquin, who unsuccessfully challenged the Democrat’s victory in court.
