Adjust your map accordingly, readers.
Also see: Boston Globe Exit Poll Calls Virginia For McCain
Obama's Lone Pennsylvania Supporter
Obama Surges in Swing-State Polls
Also see "McCain Concedes Michigan" post I put up today!
"McCain camp turns to Maine's Second District; Hopes Palin can attract rural voters" by Sasha Issenberg, Globe Staff | October 3, 2008
BANGOR - Democratic strategists may have to work especially hard to keep the Second Congressional District blue. Yesterday, Republican John McCain's campaign announced that it had begun withdrawing from Michigan, but would start committing resources to Maine, where strategists say he has been buoyed by the addition of Sarah Palin to his ticket.
This is one of only two states that award electoral votes in a manner other than winner-take-all: A losing candidate statewide can still claim one of the state's four electoral college votes by winning one of the two congressional districts. While both campaigns have long expected that Obama would carry the state, both public and private polls show the race closing. In one poll released two weeks ago by Rasmussen Reports, a steady double-digit advantage that had carried Obama through the spring and summer had shrunk to four percentage points.
Much of McCain's gain appears to derive from a renewed appeal in Maine's Second, the largest district east of the Mississippi River, sprawling through the state's rural north and east. Maine consultants describe the differences between the electorates in their two districts in lifestyle terms: the southern, liberal First is hiking and kayaking, the Second is hunting and fishing.
The Second's socially conservative attitudes have lured Republicans in recent years to toy with the possibility of winning its elector. In 2000, Bush came closest, finishing within 5,000 votes of Al Gore in the district while losing the state handily.
"Maine has been a place over the last couple of cycles where Republicans have competed only to find in the closing weeks of the campaign that the investment has not paid off, but we're finding the opposite," said Jim Barnett, McCain's regional campaign manager for New England.
So far, McCain appears to have invested little. When he visited Maine on a fund-raising trip in July, he stuck to Portland and Kennebunkport, both in the First. He has yet to broadcast ads in the Second's Bangor and Presque Isle media markets, which local strategists say can be saturated for $100,000 per week.
"If the Republicans bring Sarah Palin up here to do a whistlestop tour through the Second Congressional District, I think they'll not only win that district but they'll win the state," said Christian Potholm, a political consultant and Bowdoin College government professor.
Palin status signifiers are familiar, even prosaic here: The moose-hunting, church-going hockey mom married to a snowmobiler is a well-established demographic.
"I'm fairly convinced there are a lot of people in Maine who would look at the Palins and say, 'I do that,' " said Bob Meyers, executive director of the Maine Snowmobile Association, which has more than 30,000 members. "Some people follow snowmobile racing closely and some people know her husband from that."
The group's board, which does not endorse in every election and is backing both Democrats and Republicans in other races this year, voted after the Republican convention to back McCain-Palin. "I think it reflects how we've been able to build out our coalition in places like Maine to reach out to nontraditional Republican voters," Barnett said.
While Democrats say the race in the economically depressed Second will revolve around the loss of jobs in mills to global competition and the high cost of home heating oil, they still often begin conversations trying to eliminate the cultural distance that has complicated past efforts by national candidates here.
One Obama ad that has aired on sports-talk radio here is narrated by a former football player and hunting advocate who promises that Obama is not interested in regulating guns but focused instead on "keeping our jobs," according to Obama state director Toby McGrath.
Despite treating Maine as safe territory, Obama has established an unprecedented field operation in a state where voters are physically hard to reach. In partnership with the state Democratic party, the campaign has 32 field offices - including Fort Kent, the northern-most Obama field office outside of Alaska, and Machias, a town of barely 2,000 near the Canadian border.
"That's the first one there since Ed Muskie was in the US Senate," said Peter Chandler, director of the Democrats' coordinated campaign in Maine. "The thinking was: That's normally a Republican area, and we're going to compete for votes."
Apparently, all that WORK and $$$ mean NOTHING because McCain doesn't have to spend a minute or cent and HE'LL WIN!!!! At least, that is the IMPRESSION I AM LEFT WITH in my BIASED, AGENDA-PUSHING, WAR DAILY!
McCain's Victory 2008 Campaign has only four offices around the state, and on the same evening that Democrats had fielded a lively group of volunteers in Bangor, the Republican office across town had only four people in it. Republican strategists are counting on Senator Susan M. Collins's large, constant advantage over her Democratic challenger, First District Congressman Tom Allen, to lift McCain.
Actually, SHE is IN TROUBLE, so YOU KNOW THIS SOB is gonna be RIGGED, RIGGED, RIGGED!!!!!!!!!
The Second is one of the nation's whitest districts - only 0.4 percent of the population is African-American - but it may have the longest tradition of electing Republican women to office.
So THAT is how they are gonna rig it: the RACISM EXCUSE!!!!!
It was represented in the US House of Respresentatives by Margaret Chase Smith, Olympia J. Snowe, and Collins, all of whom went on to serve as US senators. In 1992, Ross Perot carried three counties in the district on his way to placing second statewide, his best finish in the country.
"A lot of eastern, western, and northern Marine is like Alaska in terms of the psychographics," said Potholm. "In Palin's case, she will appeal to them with that attitude she brings. They're always angry about something, and she's angry." --more--"Translation: McCain wins Maine!! And Sarah is ANGRY?! When?
I haven't seen that side of her yet (while the MSM covers up her bosses temper)!!
And what of the rest of us? Can't vote Democrat (well, I'm not, but...) if you are ANGRY?!!!
The Repugs have exclusivity to the ANGRY VOTE?
They will WIN 99% of the country then!!!!
