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Maine People's Resource Center (pdf). 3/31-4/2. "Registered Maine voters in likely voter households." MoE: ±3.1% (no trendlines):
Matt Dunlap (D): 12
Charlie Summers (R): 22
Angus King (I): 56
Undecided: 10
Cynthia Dill (D): 20
Matt Dunlap (D): 17
John Hinck (D): 6
Benjamin Pollard (D): 2
Undecided: 55
Charlie Summers (R): 28
Bruce Poliquin (R): 12
Rick Bennett (R): 7
Debra Plowman (R): 6
Scott D'Amboise (R): 4
William Schneider (R): 4
Undecided: 40
We've gotten our first poll of the Maine Senate race since the filing deadline passed and the candidates have sorted themselves out. It's also only the second poll since Olympia Snowe's unexpected retirement announcement;
PPP got into the field quickly, but that was before broadly-popular independent ex-Gov. Angus King bigfooted his way into the race. Most of their permutations tested out Democratic heavyweights like Rep. Chellie Pingree and ex-Gov. John Baldacci; their most useful finding was their one permutation involving a King three-way, which found King at 36, Pingree at 31, and Republican SoS Charlie Summers at 28. Today's poll, though, is the first to try out a three-way race with one of the second-tier Democrats who actually got in. Unsurprisingly, given his generally left-of-center positioning, King vacuums up most of those Democratic votes that went to Pingree in PPP's sample, pushing him well north of 50 percent here.
The poll is from a pollster we haven't seen before, the Maine People's Resource Center, described by the Bangor Daily News as "affiliated with the Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive statewide advocacy group," and, in their own words (from their polling memo) "a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to giving people, especially those groups that are under-represented in civic life, skills and information to participate in the decision-making processes that affect them." If that description strikes you as one of a partisan pollster, then you might take the poll with a grain of salt, but as you can see from King's mighty toplines, if they're shilling for the Democrats, they're doing a pretty poor job of it!
One other consideration is that their sample breaks 39 Democratic, 29 GOP, 31 unenrolled. Actual state registration figures (pdf), as of February, are 32 Democratic, 28 GOP, 37 unenrolled, so the sample may overweight Democrats at the expense of indies ... but again, that doesn't seem to matter one bit as far as King's dominant performance goes. In fact, King performs nearly as strongly among Democrats as among indies; he gets 61 percent of Democrats (with 24 percent of Democrats going for Dunlap) compared with 67 percent of indies (who also break 11 percent for Dunlap and 16 percent for Summers). King loses among GOPers, but even there he gets 38 percent to Summers' 52 percent.
Their general election poll only ran one permutation, apparently assuming that Matt Dunlap, the state's former secretary of state (which isn't a statewide elected position in Maine), would be the Democratic nominee. However, Dunlap's in second place in the Democratic primary, behind state Sen. Cynthia Dill, who seemed to stake out a more aggressive position early and has been one of the few people interested in publicly calling out King on the actual impracticalities of his post-partisan rhetoric. (Undecideds are so high on the Democratic side, though, that there's no point in drawing conclusions yet.) Current SoS Charlie Summers is in a somewhat more dominant position on the GOP side, but is only a slightly larger speed bump for King in the general than Dunlap is.
Chellie Pingree (D): 61
Jon Courtney (R): 28
Undecided: 11
Mike Michaud (D): 53
Kevin Raye (R): 37
Undecided: 10
As an added bonus, we get our first polling looks at Maine's two Congressional races, where Pingree and Michaud decided they were better off staying rather than fighting for Democratic votes with King. Courtney and Raye are no slouches—far from being of the "Some Dude" variety, they're Maine's state Senate majority leader and state Senate president respectively—but they don't seem to be getting much of any traction here, suggesting that Maine's pro-Republican shift in 2010 (they elected a GOP governor, Paul LePage, and turned control of the legislature over to Republicans) was a one-time event rather than the start of a trend. (More evidence for that: LePage's approvals are only 39/56.) Michaud's race is somewhat closer, given that ME-02 is a swingy/light-blue district while ME-01 is solidly blue, but even he looks out of danger.
Speaking of the Congressional districts, Maine is one of the few states that allocates electoral votes based on CD, and it looks like Barack Obama can still count on all of Maine's EVs. In the poll's presidential portion, he's up 48-41 over Mitt Romney in ME-02, as well as 61-33 in ME-01 and 55-37 statewide.
Finally, while the poll doesn't specifically address how people plan to vote on the upcoming same-sex marriage referendum re-do, people's general feelings about the matter make it look likely that same-sex marriage will make its legal return to Maine. Fifty-eight percent favor allowing same-sex couples to marry in Maine, while 40 percent oppose. (H/t to ndrwmls10 for finding the poll before anyone else did.)
