Maine has apparently missed its chance to play an outsize role in an white-knuckle, divisive presidential contest in which Americans awarded Republican Donald Trump the White House.
Unofficial returns suggest the brash TV personality and real estate mogul won’t likely need any of Maine’s four electoral votes, although he did make history by splitting them for the first time in modern history.
The rural, white voters whom Trump mobilized in his shocking victory have already proven to be a political force here.
For a brief moment, as the vote totals rolled in from around the country, it looked like Maine would be thrust into the national spotlight. Trump’s path to the presidency had widened, Hillary Clinton’s narrowed, and that’s when NBC News correspondent Chuck Todd floated a possible scenario.
“Believe it or not we may have recounts in Maine-2, recounts in Nebraska-2. This is a very plausible scenario as this night is wearing on,” he said.
Todd’s reference to Maine-2 is the state’s 2nd Congressional District. Trump had targeted this rural, more conservative part of the state, holding four of his five Maine rallies there. He was mocked by some pundits for doing so — after all, it has just one electoral vote, one of four in Maine.
But Trump’s campaign saw something in Maine-2 that the candidate would eventually tap into nationwide: A rural, white swath of voters wary of demographic changes, anxious about the economy, slow to experience the benefits of the economic recovery and eager for a big shakeup in what’s considered the most powerful elected office in the world.
Maine Republican Party Chairman Rick Bennett says he saw evidence of Trump’s effect on these Mainers throughout the campaign.
“People who have never had a political sign at all have decided that this is the year to get involved and to support Donald Trump,” he says.
Bennett spoke while visiting the GOP’s victory party at the Ramada Inn in Lewiston. At the time, it was too early to see Trump was headed to victory, but the TV screen in the room showed the tide was turning.
State Sen. Eric Brakey, who won his re-election Tuesday, says he disagrees with Trump’s plans to address voters’ concerns — but he says those concerns are real.
“I think Donald Trump is speaking to the very real frustrations that people have, people who feel disenfranchised,” he says. “I think Bernie Sanders was doing a lot of the same thing, to a different group of people that were feeling a lot of the same problems.”
As it turns out, Sanders crushed Clinton during the Maine Democratic caucuses. The U.S. senator from Vermont was later deployed to Maine to campaign for his former rival. Sanders made two visits to Maine, including one just last week — Clinton never came.
Even as the threat of a Trump presidency grew, the disconnect between the Democratic nominee and progressives like Juliette Gordon of Gorham persisted.
“If this has been any other election, I probably wouldn’t vote for her,” she says.
Gordon was a reluctant Clinton voter. But millions of other voters, voters whom exit polls showed voted for President Barack Obama just four years ago, went for Trump this time. Some of those same surveys put Trump’s advantage with rural white voters at 2-1.
That may not surprise too many Mainers, who have seen Gov. Paul LePage court, and win, many of the same voters despite a penchant for controversy and impolitic behavior. Earlier in the campaign, local political observers like Michael Cuzzi, a former vice president at VOX Global and a Democrat, warned that Trump’s message was resonating with working-class voters, much like LePage’s had before.
“The Democratic Party has really forgotten how to talk to white, working-class voters,” he says.
Cuzzi argues that the Demcoratic National Committee was focusing on the new voters, Latinos and other new citizens who are changing the country’s demographic makeup. But those voters are a distinct minority in Maine and the other parts of the country that helped deliver the Trump victory.
“If you are going after a population that is more diverse, that is more highly educated, you are by definition leaving out the vast majority of the voters here in Maine,” he says.
As Brakey noted, politicians do so at their peril.
“I do think it’s a mistake for anyone to underestimate the sense of disenfranchisement a lot people here in Maine, and across the country, feel. They feel like it’s a system run by political elites that’s disinterested in them and just using them,” he says.
Trump has made big promises to these voters — the return of manufacturing jobs, better trade deals, a wall to halt immigration. Those promises helped deliver him a historic victory in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and shocking upset over Clinton.
In the end, the Republican didn’t need the voters in Maine-2 on Tuesday. But they certainly believed they needed him.
