Politics
Our political journalists are based in the Maine State House and have deep source networks across the partisan spectrum in communities all over the state. Their coverage aims to cut through major debates and probe how officials make decisions. Read more Politics coverage here.
A new poll released the Friday before the Nov. 5 election found that Maine’s 2nd District is on track to split its votes between U.S. Rep. Jared Golden and former President Donald Trump for the second straight presidential election.
The most surprising aspect of SurveyUSA’s exclusive poll for the electoral reform group FairVote and the Bangor Daily News was that Golden, a Democrat from the rural district, had 53 percent of votes to just 41 percent for state Rep. Austin Theriault, R-Fort Kent.
The finding is a clear outlier compared with recent polls of the race. National Republicans recently publicized one from last month that had Theriault slightly ahead of Golden, just as the Republican was ahead in another public survey of the race released in September.
The poll of 1,290 adults in Maine took place from Oct. 24 through Tuesday, with 1,079 respondents in the survey determined to be likely voters or to have already voted. The error margin of the statewide poll was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
In the rural 2nd District that Trump carried in 2016 and 2020, the Republican was up by 49 percent to 44 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris, with that result changing slightly to put Trump over 50 percent following a recalculation if the 4 percent of undecided voters are removed.
Harris is otherwise projected to win three of Maine’s four electoral votes by easily beating Trump in the reliably liberal 1st District and having 51 percent of voters statewide rank her first to 43 percent for Trump, 1 percent for each third-party candidate and 4 percent undecided.
That kind of a Harris performance would be roughly in line with President Joe Biden’s 9-point victory over Trump statewide in 2020. Late polls in both that race and the 2016 presidential election underestimated Trump severely. The final poll of Maine’s 2nd District in Trump’s first race showed him losing to Democrat Hillary Clinton, whom he beat there by 10 points.
The new survey also projects little drama with Maine’s ranked-choice voting system, with both U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who has represented the liberal 1st District since 2009, and U.S. Sen. Angus King, a two-term independent who caucuses with Democrats, getting more than 50 percent of first-place votes in their multi-candidate races.
A gender gap was noticeable among the presidential candidates. Trump leads by 4 points statewide among men in first-place votes, while Harris leads by 21 points among women.
Elsewhere on the ballot, Democrats have controlled the State House since 2018. The new survey gave them the edge in those races, with 41 percent of likely voters saying they will support Democrats, 35 percent backing Republicans, 16 percent supporting a mix of both and 9 percent still undecided.
Full results and crosstabs from the poll can be viewed here. The poll was paid for by FairVote, a group that supports ranked-choice voting. Questions were reviewed and added by the Bangor Daily News. SurveyUSA is the nation’s 15th-best pollster, according to FiveThirtyEight grades.
