Daily Kos Elections' project to calculate the 2016 presidential results for every state legislative seat in the nation comes to Maine, where the GOP holds a one-seat majority in the state Senate, and Democrats have a small edge in the state House. You can find our master list of states here, which we'll be updating as we add new data sets; you can also find all of our calculations from 2016 and past cycles here.
The Democrats controlled both the House and Senate from 2003 until the 2010 GOP wave, when Team Red flipped the governorship and the legislature. Democrats took back both chambers in 2012, but in 2014, LePage won a second term and Republicans once again took control of the Senate. Democrats maintained a small edge in the House in 2014, and they managed to keep it in 2016 even as Maine sharply lurched right, going from a decisive 56-41 statewide win for Obama to a tight 48-45 scrape for Clinton.
Republicans currently hold an 18-17 majority in the Senate, while Democrats have a 75-71 edge in the House, where five additional members do not identify with either party. (The Maine House also has three additional non-voting members who each represent a local Native American tribe.) The entire Senate and House are up every two years. Legislators in both chambers are termed-out of office after serving four consecutive terms, but the clock resets once they’ve been out of office for one full term. LePage is termed out next year as well, so 2018 could bring a sea change in Maine politics in one direction or the other.
Until recently, Maine drew its state legislative seats on an unusual timetable, waiting a full election cycle after the Census to put new lines in place. As a result, the state’s current districts were only first put to use in 2014, rather than in 2012 as they would have been elsewhere. However, a 2011 voter-approved law adjusted the calendar to bring the timing in line with most of rest of the country. Accordingly, Maine will draw its new seats for 2022 in 2021 and every ten years after that. In 2013, both chambers overwhelmingly approved the current maps, and LePage signed them into law.
Now, to the numbers. We'll start with a look at the Senate, where Clinton carried 18 of 35 seats. Five Republicans hold Clinton districts, while four Democrats represent Trump turf. Remarkably, Trump's second-best seat in the entire state, SD-02, is held by freshman Democrat Michael Carpenter; last year, Carpenter won this seat, which is dominated by Aroostook County in the northern part of the state, 52-48, even as SD-02 backed Trump 62-32. Democrat William Diamond, who has served off-and-on in the Senate for decades, also holds a very Trumpy seat. He won his second consecutive term 62-38 even as his Cumberland County district went for Trump 51-42.
State Senate Minority Leader Troy Jackson, who regained his seat 52-48 last year after an unsuccessful 2014 congressional bid, holds a rural seat that voted for Trump 51-43. In 2014, Democrat Shenna Bellows badly lost a bid for the U.S. Senate to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, but she ran for the state Senate last year. Bellows won her Kennebec County seat 45-37, with an independent taking 18 percent, even as the district voted for Trump 47-45.
Of the five Republicans in Clinton districts, three of them hold seats where her margin of victory was less than 1 percent. This includes state Senate President Michael Thibodeau, who won 52-48 as his Waldo County seat supported Clinton by a very narrow 46.3-45.7 margin; Thibodeau will be termed-out in 2018. This makes the Maine Senate one of the rare chambers where the Democratic leader holds a Trump seat while the GOP leader holds a Clinton district. Ronald Collins, who won his fourth term 55-45 in a 47-46 Clinton seat, is also termed-out next year.
As for the two Republicans who hold districts that are decidedly bluer, Amy Volk won her second term 59-41 in a seat that went 52-42 Clinton, while Brian Langley won 56-44 in a seat that backed her 53-41. Langley will be termed-out next year, so his Hancock County SD-07 could be a pivotal battleground. However, both sides have plenty of targets for next year and no room for error, though the tendency of many Mainers to split their tickets makes things messy to predict.
We'll now turn to the state House, which is … complicated. Maine's secretary of state provides presidential election results by town and by city but doesn't split the results further into individual wards or precincts. Unfortunately, while some communities like Portland do break their presidential results down by ward, most don't.
This is most pronounced in the city of Bangor, Maine’s third-largest. HD-124 includes a large chunk of Bangor and a small bit of nearby Orono, while House Districts 125, 126, and 127 are located entirely in Bangor. The city does not break their presidential results down by ward or precinct, so there was simply no way to tell which parts of the city voted for which presidential candidate. As a result, we had to treat the entire city as though it were one giant split precinct.
As a consequence, for the three districts contained completely within Bangor, we have no choice but to estimate that all of them backed Clinton by the same margin she carried the city as a whole, 53-39. (The vote totals in each district, however, are different.) By contrast, thankfully, the state Senate map splits only a few communities, and Bangor is entirely located in just one district, SD-09.
Bangor is the most extreme example of this problem, but it’s far from the only moderately sized community to group all its results into just one precinct. We're confident our results are as precise as they can get, but until Maine changes the bizarre way it provides results for its elections, we have to regard our calculations for the state House as having a greater margin of error than we do for any other chamber in the country.
With all that in mind, let's take a look at the actual numbers. Unlike in the Senate, where Clinton carried a bare majority of the chamber, Trump won 82 of 151 seats. Eighteen Democrats represent Trump seats, while eight Republicans hold Clinton turf. The reddest Democratic-held seat is HD-138, where Democrat Robert Alley won a second term 52-48 in a 59-34 Trump seat. The bluest GOP-held seat is HD-09, where Stedman Seavey won his second term 50.5-49.5 in a 57-37 Clinton seat.
Of the five representatives who don't identify with a party, four come from Clinton seats, but only two of them were elected without a party label in 2016, while the other three have since dropped their former affiliations. Freshman Kent Ackley, running as a "Common Sense Independent," beat a Republican 53-47 as Trump was taking his seat 58-34, while freshman Owen Casas beat his Democratic foe 50.1-49.9 in a 68-27 Clinton seat.
Since Election Day, two Democratic representatives and one Republican have become independents. Clinton's worst performance in any of these three seats was a 58-35 victory. This means that state Rep. Kevin Battle, a former Republican who often sided with Democrats on key issues, sits in a Clinton district. His HD-33 went for Clinton 63-31, which might help explain his party switch.