Many months ago, Donald Trump was making outlandish promises about putting states into play that have gone Democratic for decades, thanks to his unconventional mix of positions. Most notably, he was going to put his home state of New York back on the map! He even hired a New York-specific pollster to help him figure out how to do that.
Fast-forward to now, and, no New York isn’t even close to being in play. If you look at Huffington Post Pollster’s New York trendlines, he’s trailing in New York by an average 21 points. I suppose, if you were being charitable, you could say he’s overperforming Barack Obama’s 2012 performance (who won by 28). But he hasn’t taken any actual steps toward winning in New York (such as running ads there or campaigning there), and in fact hasn’t said anything about winning in New York in many months.
There is one state from the so-called blue wall, though, that wasn’t on anybody’s bingo card, but seems to be hanging around the remote edge of being competitive. As you can guess from the title, it’s Maine! This was an unlikely pick, because Obama won here by 15 points in 2012 (a wider margin than Washington, Oregon, or New Mexico), and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won in Maine since George H.W. Bush in 1988. But if you look at the Pollster aggregate for Maine, Hillary Clinton’s leading by an average of 5 here. That includes two polls (from Univ. of New Hampshire, on behalf of the Portland Press-Herald, and the Maine People’s Resource Center) both released in the last week giving Clinton a 5-point lead. (Though UNH has a reputation for small sample sizes and bouncing around, while MPRC doesn’t have much of a track record yet.)
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That doesn’t mean that Clinton is suddenly at grave risk of losing the Pine Tree State; our model puts her odds of winning there at 86 percent, better than any of the Colorado/New Hampshire/Pennsylvania/Virginia quartet that’s her surest path to victory in the Electoral College. And the small decline in Maine’s odds hasn’t really changed the overall presidential odds in the model: Clinton’s overall chances are at 64 percent, with the model basically going sideways in the mid-60s for an entire week now. The main consequence, as you can see above, is just to turn Maine from dark-blue to light-blue on our map.
So what gives? Maine has, if nothing else, a media-generated reputation as a quirky but tolerant and mostly progressive place, so this seems out of character. Well, think back to the piece I wrote last week on the demographics of the other states that are seeming to underperform for the Democrats this year: Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio. The strongest demographic for Trump is non-college-educated whites, and those three states had a noticeably lower percentage of non-college whites than the other swing states.
Let’s run Maine through that same process. Maine is actually the whitest state in the entire nation. The 2015 American Community Survey finds that Maine is 93.6 percent non-Hispanic white, edging out Vermont at 93.4. West Virginia and New Hampshire are the only other states where the number is above 90 any more.
However, Maine isn’t a particularly poorly educated state. Its total percentage of persons over 25 with a bachelor’s degree or more is 30.1 percent, which is slightly above the national average and closer to its New England brethren (New Hampshire at 35.7, Vermont at 36.9) than West Virginia (near the national bottom, at 19.6). Even when you switch to whites only with college degrees, Maine is at 28.8 percent, which would put it lower than Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but higher than, as we talked about last week, Iowa, Nevada, or Ohio.
Where you’re likeliest to see an Electoral College impact, though, is Maine’s 2nd congressional district. Maine is one of only two states to allocate presidential electors at the CD level, along with Nebraska (which you might remember was a big deal in 2008, when NE-02 gave its EV to Obama … not that it mattered at the time, since he was winning the Electoral College by a wide margin). When pollsters provide a breakdown of the two CDs, they’ve usually found Clinton winning ME-01 by a wide margin, but Trump winning ME-02 by a smaller margin, which balances out to a single-digit Clinton win statewide. ME-01 has, for decades, been the bluer of the two districts, but usually the disparity between the two hasn’t been anywhere near as large. (For instance, Obama won ME-01 with 60 percent while winning ME-02 with 53 percent in 2012.)
So what you really need to do is look at the demographic information for the two congressional districts, which shows you that, as John Edwards might put it, there are really two Maines. There isn’t a big race difference (ME-01 is 93 percent white while ME-02 is 94 percent), but if you look at education, wow! Thirty-seven percent of ME-01’s residents 25 or older have a bachelor’s degree or better (on a similar level as Colorado or Virginia statewide), while only 23 percent of ME-02’s residents do, which, while better than West Virginia, is at the same level as, say, Alabama and Kentucky. It stays at 37 and 23 when you switch to whites only (unsurprising when almost the entire state’s population is white).
And you can see that disparity when you switch to economic indicators. ME-01’s median household income is $59k, while it’s $45k in ME-02, compared to a national average of $55k. If you’ve been to Maine, think about what’s in the two parts of it. Portland, on the one hand, is a pretty cosmopolitan city given its size, and notoriously left-leaning in its local politics. On the other hand, in ME-02, you have the college town of Orono, the sort-of-upscale resort of Bar Harbor … and beyond that, mostly a lot of isolated mill towns that have gotten left behind by the last few decades’ of economic expansion.
There are a few other districts around the country that are similar, in that they’re historically Democratic thanks to unions, but that are rural, mostly white, and timber and mining oriented. Minnesota’s rural 8th district is apparently having the same problem; Democratic Rep. Rick Nolan, who’s sweating his re-election, has leaked that Trump is leading in his internal polls of the district. But MN-08 isn’t likely to make the news in the same way, because Minnesota doesn't split congressional districts, and Clinton’s not at much risk of losing Minnesota thanks to the Twin Cities and their suburbs.
With that in mind, we’re going to be adding a feature to the model in the coming days that accounts for the congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska. It’s also still somewhat possible that Clinton swings the 2nd district in Omaha, Nebraska, a la Obama in 2008 … but we don’t really know, since there’s no polling data there. (Nebraska statewide is not looking competitive, so nobody’s bothering to poll that state as a whole.)
As far as the model is concerned, though, Maine as a whole becoming a bit more competitive hasn’t really changed the overall odds, given how few EVs it has. And once we break out ME-02 separately, that extra one electoral vote that’s likelier than not to go to Trump isn’t likely to change the overall odds much either, by virtue of, y’know, it only being one vote. (The one scenario where it could be very important would be if Clinton wins only Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, but not New Hampshire, which is good for 269 votes; losing ME-02 would push it down to 268. But a 269-269 tie is a good outcome for Clinton only if you think she’d somehow be awarded the win by the House of Representatives.)
This is the last time we run the model before the debates, but keep in mind that whatever happens in the first debate, it’ll take a number of days for that to filter into the polls. Because of the lag time of polls having to spend multiple days in the field, it’s likely we won’t see an effect until this point next week.
Also, it’s distinctly possible that the debate won’t really have much effect in the first place. While we’re probably all hoping that Trump has an onstage meltdown, while also worrying that, a la Ronald Reagan in the 1980 debate, he might find a way to humanize himself and allay swing voters’ fears about him … the real outcome might be that they just talk past each other, each candidate’s partisans think their candidate won, and the needle doesn’t move much in what’s already a pretty stable race. (Or, if the needle does move, it might well just move back in another week or two anyway. As you’ll remember from the first debate in 2012, whatever gains Mitt Romney made in its immediate aftermath gradually vanished, as Democratic “differential response” stopped being an issue as the debate faded from view.)
