Maine’s two congressional races have been playing second fiddle to the hotly contest gubernatorial race for months now. This may explain in part the high number of undecided voters that various pollsters testing these races have found. Though both freshman Chellie Pingree and four-term incumbent Mike Michaud have been regularly ahead of their Republican challengers – often by large margins – only once has either candidate broken the fifty percent mark.
Pingree’s race had been narrowing in the last race. The Maine polling firm Critical Insights had given her a 15-point lead over Republican challenger Dean Scontras in mid-October. Then, just days after a different firm – Pan Atlantic – gave her a comfortable lead, Critical Insights had the race at a narrow five point margin. Today, though, the shocker: their tracking poll put Scontras ahead, by four points:
Unfortunately, none of the sample sizes in any of these polls (other than PPP’s polls back in September) have been large, so one must take them with a grain of salt. Still, the trend has been clear: Since the middle of October Dean has been narrowing the gap and has now pulled ahead.
In Maine’s other congressional district, fellow Republican Jason Levesque has faced an even tougher challenge. He is facing off against Mike Michaud, a popular Blue Dog Democrat. The second district – the largest east of the Mississippi – is generally considered the more conservative of the two, but Michaud hasn’t faced many quality challengers. This campaign marks the first time in recent years that he’s even run any television ads. At first, the task looked hopeless: though Michaud was consistently polling below 50%, pollsters gave him an even larger advantage than Pingree.
Today, though, Critical Insights showed Levesque within striking distance of Michaud, who was ahead just 44%-40%. Levesque seems to have been successfully winning over most of the undecided voters in the district, while Michaud’s support first plateaued and has now begun to drop. Levesque and Scontras both seem to be riding the same wave of momentum as Republican gubernatorial nominee Paul LePage. For either of them, pulling off a win in districts that hadn’t been on either party’s radar nationally would certainly be an enormous upset. It is always extraordinarily difficult to defeat incumbents, especially Maine, which almost always reelects its members of Congress. In this anti-incumbent year, though, with an energized Republican base, it just may be possible.
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