A tale of two states

Sarah Gideon: Westport carpetbagger lands in Maine to free fellow coastal elites from the shortbus northerners

The NYT: Susan Collins hasn’t changed, but Maine has.

Being the New York Times, there’s the requisite Trump bashing in the article, but they got this right:

Maine has always been split between its more affluent coastline and its blue-collar interior. But the political and social gap has widened even further in recent years.

“A lot of the people down here are more connected to Napa Valley than they are Penobscot Valley,” said John Baldacci, a former Democratic governor of the state, who grew up in Bangor and now works in Portland.

The influx of transplants along the Maine coast and the migration of working-class whites into the Republican Party under Trump and LePage, who called himself “Trump before Trump,” have upended the state’s politics.

Perhaps most significant, and for Collins most threatening, LePage’s consecutive plurality victories prompted Maine [Democrats] to enact ranked-choice voting. In this system, voters rank their preference on the ballot so that those who receive few first-place votes are eliminated and the eventual winner garners a majority.

This means that the votes of those supporting a liberal independent candidate, Lisa Savage, can ultimately go to Gideon if Savage’s backers list Gideon as their second choice.

[snip]

Republicans used to run up some of their best margins in wealthy enclaves along the Atlantic, while Democrats consistently fared best in immigrant-heavy and union-organized mill towns farther inland.

Maps from the last two major elections, the 2016 presidential contest and the 2018 governor’s race, reveal a near-unbroken stretch of Democratic blue up the Atlantic Coast from Kittery to Bar Harbor.

There are effectively two states — one working class and more pro-Trump, and the other more upscale and deeply contemptuous of the president — that Collins must bridge.

They can be seen in the Trump lawn signs sprouting up across inland Maine and the ubiquity of Biden signs nearly anywhere saltwater is in the air.

Sarah Gideon (no relation) has been running non-stop radio ads and I assume television ads as well, attacking Collins for spending $26 million on her campaign. This is true; unsaid, however, is that the Democrat=ts have poured $74 million into Gideon’s coffers. Even this uneducated Trump voter can do that math: $100 million spent in total, in a state where total campaign expenditures, both sides, in 2014 was $8 million. The Democrats smell blood, and or purposes of controling the government, a senator from a state with just 1.3 million residents counts just as much as a senator from, say, California.

Although massive advertising may be less responsible for Collins impending defeat than the past two decades’ massive invasion by the Woke, the combination of being outspent and outnumbered will result in the removal of Collins who, as the Times notes, “is the one remaining Republican member of Congress from New England”.

Sad.