4 things the scant polls of Maine tell us to expect on Election Day

The massive 2020 U.S. Senate race sent pollsters streaming into Maine looking for signals. But this presidential election has been a different story.

Only two independent surveys of Maine have been released since September. That is despite U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of the 2nd District facing state Rep. Austin Theriault in one of the biggest races that will decide narrow control of the House of Representatives. The battle between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris hangs over it.

Polls are fallible. They were infamously off here in 2020, with every one showing U.S. Sen. Susan Collins losing. The Republican won with high swing support, making her the only senator since 2012 to win her state alongside the opposing party’s presidential candidate.

But polls are still the best tools we have to see what’s going on in the electorate. Here are four lessons that we’ve taken away from the scant surveys and what’s going on behind the scenes.

There’s a big reason why Golden and Theriault are segmenting their audiences.

Targeting of political ads to specific constituencies is something that has long happened by mail, but social media has ramped it up and added transparency. Take a quick look through the Facebook ad archives, and you will see how Golden and Theriault are doing it.

Golden is closing his campaign with a soft-focus TV ad featuring his wife and kids. On social media, he has an ad aimed at Democrats featuring voters raising concerns about Theriault’s abortion record. Another ad aimed at conservative voters features him firing a gun and trying to fend off gun-rights concerns about his support for an assault-weapons ban.

Theriault has campaigned much heavier on his right over the last few weeks, aiming one of his last TV ads squarely at Trump supporters. He is reinforcing that on social media with more targeted hits on Golden and another post touting his support for Trump’s agenda.

Both of these candidates have unique problems in locking down voters. This week, the National Republican Campaign Committee publicized a poll showing Theriault slightly ahead of Golden but the Democrat still winning 12 percent of Republicans. If these numbers are true, both sides have improvements to make on their own sides of the electorate.

Despite the latest poll, bet on few undecided voters in the 2nd District.

A poll released this week by the Portland firm Digital Research had a strange result in the Golden-Theriault race, showing them tied at 38 percent with a whopping 21 percent undecided. That was a surprising result so late in the race, although the poll was taken over nearly a month and it stopped surveying voters on Oct. 7, a long time ago politically.

That doesn’t match other public and private surveys showing the candidates in a more conventionally close race in the mid-to-high 40s. The internal Republican poll showed roughly 8 percent of voters still undecided. That should be lower now, just over a week from Election Day.

Trump’s lead in the 2nd District seems healthy.

One of the more surprising findings from a Maine poll this cycle was an August poll from the University of New Hampshire finding Harris up by 5 percentage points in the 2nd District, which Trump won in 2016 and 2020 and is expected to win again.

That looks like a significant outlier now. The two public polls since then from Pan Atlantic Research and Digital Research pegged Trump at 7 points and 9 points up, respectively. One round of polling from House Republicans’ campaign arm had it as close as 2 points.

None of this has really altered what forecasters have seen as a heavy Trump lean in the rural part of Maine. Our national election results partners at Decision Desk HQ have bumped Trump’s chances in the district up slightly to 86 percent over the last three months. That’s pretty healthy.

Voters got more optimistic on a couple of fronts.

Golden is in danger and Trump is looking like a narrow favorite in the national election, making for a nervous election for Democrats here and everywhere else. But Maine Democrats could be heartened by a couple of less-time-sensitive findings in the latest Digital Research poll.

It found that 37 percent of voters thought Maine was headed in the right direction. That’s not an inspiring share without the context that it was the highest level in three years amid the pessimism of the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

That economic pessimism seems to be lifting a bit as well. It was at 54 percent in this survey a year ago, but it is now 24 percent, a level not seen since the beginning of President Joe Biden’s term. It might not portend an amazing election for Maine’s majority party, but it could be enough to boost some candidates at the margins.