October 3, 2016 | No Comments
BANGOR, Maine — The small cities and struggling mill towns of Maine’s rural north have become the backdrop for Donald Trump’s best opportunity to start ripping up President Barack Obama’s electoral coalition this fall.
Hillary Clinton is leading in most polls of the entire state of Maine, but the state also allocates two of its electoral votes by congressional district — and Trump is trouncing her in recent polls of Maine’s northern congressional district, which Democratic presidential candidates have carried for a quarter-century. Trump led by 10 points in a Boston Globe/Colby College poll conducted last month, and by 14 points in a Portland Press Herald poll. Even in Democratic House candidate Emily Cain’s internal polling, Trump is up by 4 percentage points in the district, one of many places where blue-collar voters have turned sharply against Clinton and her party this fall.
“There’s just not a lot of love for Hillary,” said Troy Jackson, a Democratic National Committeeman who hails from Allagash, in far northern Maine.
There are some scenarios, though remote, in which the single electoral vote from Maine’s 2nd District tips the whole election to Trump or even throws it to the House of Representatives. But Maine’s importance to Trump lies especially in how the working-class voters he has motivated there epitomize the coalition he is chasing around the country, from Ohio to Iowa to Nevada. Trump needs more than Maine to win the White House, but it’s his best chance to win territory that Obama carried four years ago.
GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who grew up in the remote northern part of the district, said she wasn’t surprised that Trump is doing well there.
“As I’ve said all along, Donald Trump’s message on the economy and jobs really resonates with people who feel they’ve been left behind and who have lost their jobs because of poorly negotiated trade agreements,” Collins said.
Jackson is supporting Clinton after working for Bernie Sanders during the Maine caucuses, which Sanders won in a landslide. But he’s spent months knocking on doors as he campaigns for the state Senate, and he said Trump’s message on trade has connected with voters in the struggling region.
“I think it’s going to be close,” Jackson said.
The state is split between the more liberal 1st District, which includes Portland and its suburbs, and the more rural, conservative 2nd District — along what Rick Bennett, the state GOP chairman, calls the “Volvo line.” “North of that you don’t see any Volvos,” Bennett said, adding: “They’ve always talked about the two Maines, but I think it’s really becoming politically palpable now.”
Demographics are not on Democrats’ side north of the Volvo line. White voters without college degrees make up the bedrock of Trump’s support nationwide, and the 2nd District has more of them than almost any district in the country.
Nearly 75 percent of adults over 25 in the district are white and don’t have a four-year degree, according to Census data. If the 2nd District were a state, it would trail only West Virginia in that category.
In East Millinocket, an old mill town an hour north of Bangor, Clint Linscott has a Trump sign taped up in the window of the auto-body shop he owns on the town’s main drag. He’s convinced that Trump will carry a district that went twice for President Barack Obama.
“I’m sure he’s going to win this district, and I’m very confident he’s going to win the election,” Linscott said.
Some Democrats remain skeptical that Trump’s lead will hold. Polls also showed competitive races in the 2nd District in 2008 and 2012, said David Farmer, a Democratic consultant in Portland who worked on the 2014 gubernatorial campaign of former Rep. Mike Michaud, who represented the district. But Obama ended up winning easily both times.
“For every white middle-aged man that he might appeal to, there are Republican women who have elected [moderate GOP senators like] Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe” but are unlikely to vote for Trump, Farmer said.
Mike Mellott, 34, a union ironworker who lives in Brewer, has voted Democratic for years and said he and his fellow union workers agreed with what some of Trump has said.
“I like listening to him talk, because he says what everybody’s thinking,” Mellott said, wearing a New England Patriots cap while standing in the parking lot of the Brewer farmers market last weekend.
But Mellott is sticking with Democrats this year, even though he’s not especially enthused about Clinton. “I usually always voted Democratic, because they’re for unions and Republicans aren’t,” he said. “Republicans just want the rich to get richer.”
Republicans are bullish on Trump’s chances.
Bennett said the numbers he’s seen show Trump with a similar lead to the one has has in the public polls. “I don’t see it moving,” Bennett said. “I think if anything it’s calcifying.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But Bennett said Trump’s strategy in Maine relies on winning the 2nd District by a big margin, then making enough inroads in the 1st District — to carry the whole state.
“I think he could win the at-large electors,” Bennett said, referring to the two electoral votes that go to the candidate who wins the statewide vote. “I think it’s going to be tough to win the 1st” District.
Still, some Republicans in the 2nd District aren’t exactly solid in their support for Trump.
Earl Black works in real estate and lives in Holden, a small town right outside Bangor that went for Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. Black, a registered Republican, voted for both candidates, but he’s not sold on Trump yet.
“Some of his policies are right on,” Black said. But he’s wary of someone who seems so much like Maine Gov. Paul LePage, who has drawn criticism from many fellow Republicans for his caustic comments.
“We’re seen somebody who shoots from the hip,” Black said. “That’s my concern. Trump has been able to alienate so many different people. He reminds me of LePage.”
To protect Democrats’ hold on all of the state’s four electoral votes, the Clinton campaign is relying on its ability to outwork Trump on the ground. “She’s got a terrific ground game,” former Democratic Gov. John Baldacci said. “Her organization has more offices, more people working and volunteering, than any previous campaign I can remember.”
Trump’s campaign hired Christie-Lee McNally, a former state party executive director, in July, but Republican and Democratic operatives alike say Trump has been slow to staff up. “It seems like an under-manned operation right now,” said Lance Dutson, a GOP operative in the state.
Clinton has 22 paid staffers in Maine, with some paid through the state party and other directly by the Clinton campaign. Republicans have nearly 70 paid staffers on the ground overall, according to Jason Savage, the state GOP’s executive director. But he declined to say how many of those staffers are working on the presidential campaign. There are only four staffers in Maine working directly for the Trump campaign, Bennett said.
Both campaigns have set up offices in low-lying strip malls on the outskirts of Bangor, a pivotal and solidly Democratic city of 30,000 that’s surrounded by more conservative suburbs and small towns. The Trump campaign office was locked on a recent Saturday afternoon, with a sign taped to the door reading “BE BACK SHORTLY.” Later, the office was unlocked but empty except for two young volunteers, who said McNally was out knocking on doors.
The Clinton office, a quarter-mile away, was filled with a dozen volunteers busily phone-banking.
Thomas Cavaness, the state Democratic Party’s regional organizing director for the eastern portion of the 2nd District, oversees six field organizers who work out of offices from coastal Machias to Fort Kent, nearly 200 miles away on the Canadian border. They work for the party’s coordinated campaign, but spend most of their time campaigning for Clinton.
Cavaness, who moved up to Maine from Texas last month to work for the campaign, acknowledges that Clinton is facing a tight race for Maine’s northern electoral vote.
“I think all the polls are pretty clear that it’s a close race and we’re going to have to fight for every vote,” he said.
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