Bangor Daily News political editor Michael Shepherd sat down for an Ask Me Anything session on the Maine Reddit forum on Tuesday night. It proved to be a wide-ranging and informative evening, with questions covering an array of topics around this year’s elections.
We’ve collected some of the questions and his answers here. Some questions have been edited for clarity. You can read the entire AMA on reddit.com/r/Maine.
Mainers historically approve 75% of ballot questions. Which of the five ballot questions will be this year’s defeated initiative?
I think the easy answer here is the one getting the most attention: Question 5, the state flag change. The only public poll we’ve seen on it back in September showed the yes and no sides tied at 40%, while every other question was above 50%.
Support was just soft across the board, with 44% of Democrats, 40% of Republicans and 37% of independents backing it. Maybe people hadn’t tuned into the question yet then. I don’t know if it will lose, but I’m pretty sure this will get the lowest number of the questions on Election Day.
How would you describe the opposition to the flag referendum?
It’s complicated. I referenced some polling earlier that showed not a ton of polarization on this, but a lot of the Republicans in my social feeds are talking about the farmer and seaman representing Maine’s heritage or citing a desire to “keep the old flag.” (Even though the new flag is a riff on the old flag.)
Some of this is reflexive. Conservatives are often inclined to preserve the status quo, right? Yet this whole exercise also shows that people need hard reasons to make big changes. There’s no big-money campaign being waged here, so people are coming to their own conclusions.
What is it about Austin Theriault that makes people think he’d do a better job than Golden?
I’m not here to say who’s better, but keep in mind that this is a Republican-leaning district. To date, Golden has gotten enough swing support, something that I chalk up to his profile as a veteran and a centrist. But it’s also because he ran against some subpar candidates.
Bruce Poliquin, a former Wall Street guy, never fit the district’s history that well. Dale Crafts wasn’t able to keep things close enough in 2020. While Theriault talks about Trump and immigration, he also campaigns to the middle by saying he’ll preserve Social Security. In those ways, he stalemates Golden a little bit. He’s also younger, creating a little bit of contrast.
All of this says nothing about how he’d perform in office, and whether he’ll live up to all of these promises. But I think his campaign has been much smarter than the last ones against Golden. He only has to be a little better than past Republicans to get over the hump in the 2nd District.
What is a typical attendance record for voting? I know the commercials say that [Theriault] missed 45 votes. I don’t know if that is a lot or not.
Yes, Theriault missed 45 votes during his first term. But his attendance record was still pretty solid at 92%. Even though Democratic ads hit him on that, Golden missed 46 votes during the term in which he was in the Legislature and campaigning for Congress. That was a 94% record.
These are both honestly fine. The Press Herald tallied these figures up and found most people at 90% or better in 2023. Keep in mind that we’re talking about votes and not legislative days here. If you happen to miss one big day of votes, your record gets dinged hard.
Where do you recommend getting information about town council members?
While I’m probably one of the more informed voters in the state, I often go to vote in my home city of Augusta and find myself frantically searching for any information to figure out which school board or city council candidate to vote for.
I almost always pull up Kennebec Journal candidate profiles. We run a voter guide that highlights some local races but focuses on the top of the ticket and a survey of all legislative candidates. Past that, there may be a candidate forum in your community. If not, you’re probably down to searching out a few lines on social media.
At this point in time how much of the second district being far redder than the first is still the result of the 2010 gerrymander intentionally making it a redder district, and how much is just that part of the state swinging to the right?
Gerrymandering isn’t really possible in Maine. We only have two congressional districts. Also, we have a consensus process that effectively forces the parties to agree or the whole thing gets kicked to the courts. (We played with some partisan gerrymanders in 2021 that give you a flavor of the possibilities on this front.)
Also, the state isn’t swinging to the right. The 1st District has swung sharply toward Democrats while the 2nd District has gotten more conservative but less so. The districts used to vote pretty similarly in presidential elections, but they’re incredibly far apart now.
Over time, the 2nd District is going to creep further down the state due to population loss. It actually got a little more Democratic because of that in the 2021 redistricting.
[I’d like] more in depth info on Question 1. I feel like there will be ways around this limit if it passes.
Question 1 would set a $5,000 limit for giving to political committees that spend money for and against candidates. Right now, those contributions are unlimited.
This is going to pass, but it isn’t likely to become law because it’s probably unconstitutional after Citizens United. In Massachusetts, the AG declined to put a similar question on the ballot because of that. I agree that people would just set up webs of political committees or just use nonprofits to take money completely dark if this passes.
What are you expecting for who will have power in Augusta?
The safe bet is for Democrats to hold both chambers. That’s what Chaz Nuttycombe at CNalysis thinks will happen, and he generally nails these races and their fundamentals.
But Maine Democrats are a little nervous about the House of Representatives, and Republicans have gotten pretty well organized on that front. That’s the spot for an upset if we’re going to have one.
If I am voting against a presidential candidate (rather than for), with a ranked system voting, how is the best way to do that? Should I rank them 5th, or not rank them at all?
There really isn’t a way to use the system against candidates. In ranked-choice voting, your second choice is only taken into account if your first-choice candidate is eliminated. Otherwise, your vote never moves.
We have five presidential candidates on the ballot this year. In practical terms, we know that either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is going to win. So if you’re a Harris supporter, ranking Trump second or not ranking him at all is likely to have the same effect.
To be safe, I say always rank every candidate in order of preference. In case a candidate unexpectedly does well, your vote will always hang in there.
What do you think it will take to get ranked choice voting on all Maine elections? I know there have been a bunch of lawsuits about it – where does it stand now?
Except for maybe at the local level, this is pretty much it for now. That’s because it’s unconstitutional for it to be used in general elections for state offices. Changing that requires two-thirds votes in the Legislature, which Republicans will pretty much always be able to block.
Perhaps specifically to CD2, have you spoken to any campaign who had proof that there was a swing in voter demographics since early 2020, with a large number of remote employees newly located in rural municipalities due to the pandemic?
I don’t think it’s too much of a factor. The district definitely saw a high level of in-migration that beat historic standards, but there’s a natural population decline countervailing that. It’s also unclear to me that the COVID boom areas ( like Rangeley) saw a large bump in people staying for the long term.
I’ve read recently that for the state of Maine, young voter registration is down by over 10% compared to the 2020 election. Is this true, and if so, do we have any explanation why?
I’m not familiar with the figure, but we did a story this week on registration among 18-year-old voters here. It was below a lot of states at 35.6% this September, even though Maine votes better than just about every other state.
Part of that is because our online voter registration system is new this year. It will probably boost the numbers significantly. But there is also a stark urban-rural divide, with Aroostook, Somerset and Piscataquis performing worst. It may be a little harder to register in those places, and those smaller towns may not have as many engaging local issues to settle.
Why do the last few precincts never get reported? The maps always seem to stop at 99% reporting with one or two gray spots left even a week after the election.
Maine is kind of unique because it doesn’t keep a tally of votes on election night. That is left to media outlets. We produce our own count of Maine votes that we share with national partners at Decision Desk HQ, while the Associated Press does another count. (These often differ because different towns report to us at different times.)
The reason why you see some towns never reporting is just because they don’t send us those initial tallies. Some places are so small that only a couple of people vote. I’ve seen zero votes reported. However, the secretary of state’s office eventually gets those figures, and they’re almost never enough to swing a high-visibility race.
Do you think there has been sufficient polling of Maine’s 2nd district this cycle? For one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country that could make or break certain paths to 270 in the electoral college, why is there seemingly no interest in watching ME-2? Is Maine that unpredictable?
This year has been weird. By this point in 2020, we had several public polls. This year, we have only one. More are coming, though! (Stay tuned.)
Of course, the interest in U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ race was one big reason we had so many polls last time. I think the remote chance that Maine could swing the presidential election has just not been as big of a motivator for firms to come in. The parties are doing their internal polls of the congressional race, and they’re coming in pretty close in favor of Golden or Theriault depending on which side you ask.
While the polling misses that year are well documented, the midterm polls here in 2022 were great. There are theories out there that Trump voters are hard to find and that swing support can be underplayed in polls. I’ll be interested to see how it works out this time with less data.
