The long-discussed effort to change Maine’s state flag is heading toward defeat, according to a surprising poll released Friday that carried other lessons ahead of the Nov. 5 elections.
The SurveyUSA poll was commissioned by the electoral reform group FairVote and the Bangor Daily News. Even though we had a strong hand in the survey, we think you should be skeptical that U.S. Rep. Jared Golden has a big lead as a vulnerable Democrat in Maine’s 2nd District.
You should also not tune this poll out. We dove into the data to bring you four key takeaways from the comprehensive survey of 1,079 likely and actual Maine voters.
Opposition to the flag shift comes from across the political spectrum.
Maine has a set of five referendum questions on this year’s ballot. Question 5, which would replace the state flag with one that has a pine tree at the center of a buff background alongside a blue star, is the highest-profile one. It has also long been the least likely to succeed.
A September poll found the yes and no sides tied at 40 percent, with the yes side of the other four ballot questions above 50 percent. Our poll showed the bottom falling out for the change, with 52 percent of voters opposed to just 33 percent in support and 15 percent undecided.
Mirroring the debate on the topic earlier this year in the Maine Legislature, Republicans were less likely to support the change, while Democrats were more likely to support it. But self-identified independents were nearly as opposed as Republicans, while Democrats were evenly split on the idea. That’s why it’s probably going to fail.
We don’t think Golden is actually up big.
The shocking figures in Maine’s 2nd District will define this poll. Golden led with 53 percent to just 41 percent for state Rep. Austin Theriault and another 6 percent undecided. That was despite former President Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 5 points.
This is one of the biggest congressional races in the country. Outside groups have spent more than $24 million here so far, which is the 12th-highest total among similar races, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The only other public poll here in September showed Theriault 2 points ahead of Golden. Both sides think this is a close race.
Golden’s numbers in our poll are huge. He is at a best-case scenario with support from 17 percent of Republicans. That’s unlikely to hold as Theriault has hitched himself to Trump in an effort to bring conservative voters home. A good number for Golden would be 10 percent, which is about the total that he won in the two previous elections.
The 2020 presidential election could be a good case study. Golden won the district alongside Trump but only won by 6 points despite rosy polls showing the congressman up as much as 29 points ahead of his Republican opponent. Something like this could be happening here.
Trump has been underestimated in the 2nd District and may be again.
The national political discourse is full of discussions about how the national polls undersold Trump in both 2016 and 2020. During the latter year, every single poll found U.S. Sen. Susan Collins losing to Democrat Sara Gideon, even though the incumbent won handily.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that this will happen again. But late polls have always missed Trump’s margins in the 2nd District. A late one in 2016 found Democrat Hillary Clinton up by 2 points, even though Trump won by 10 points.
President Joe Biden led the last three polls there in the last election, but Trump still won it by nearly 8 points. Harris is badly underperforming the 2020 version of Biden in national polls. She is behind him by 7 points nationally and is doing worse in each of the seven key swing states.
Our poll shows her only 5 points behind Trump in the 2nd District. A recently publicized Republican poll found Trump up 9 points. It’s hard to see Harris at a tighter margin than Biden here given the national context for her campaign, but it remains a possibility.
Ranked-choice voting may not matter, but key voters are ranking.
Maine will use ranked-choice voting in the presidential election as well as the four-way U.S. Senate race and the three-way race for the 1st Congressional District. The incumbents, independent Sen. Angus King and Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree, are favored in those latter races.
The poll found that all of the leading candidates, including Harris and Trump, are likely to exceed 50 percent of votes, eliminating the need for a ranked-choice tally. But our poll still measured how voters would move between candidates if those choices come into play.
It found that most of the third-party presidential voters also ranked a major party candidate, although supporters of Libertarian Chase Oliver were less likely to choose between Trump and Harris. The sample sizes of those voters were too small in our poll to learn much from, but that data could be valuable if one of the major candidates underperforms on Tuesday.
Full results and crosstabs from the poll can be viewed here. It has a statewide error margin of 3.6 percentage points. The survey 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.
