ME-2

There’s an idea out there, propounded Michael Crowley (and again) that Maine’s second congressional district is a plausible enough target for the McCain campaign that it’s worth going after. And it seems that the campaign itself buys it, dispatching Sarah Palin to Bangor as the “campaign believes the moose-hunting Palin will connect with voters in a region where hunting, fishing and snowmobiling are popular.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in this district over the years and you can color me skeptical about this theory. The district is D+4 on the Cook PVI scale. It’s represented in congress by a Democrat and his predecessor was a Democrat. His predecessor was Susan Collins and her predecessor was Bill Cohen. That’s a classic New England political history of moderate Republicans giving way to Democrats. They may hunt moose, but there’s no tradition of Palin-style Christian conservatism playing here. And while the district is giant and includes vast backwoodsy expanses, it’s in the nature of these things that most of the district’s voters don’t live in the parts of the district where nobody lives. Bush carried Piscataquis County handily in 2004, which really is backwoodsy, but the whole county was responsible for fewer than 10,000 votes. In coastal Hancock County, people live in nice little towns, Kerry got 54.5 percent, and over 33,000 people voted. Most of all, I don’t see any particular reason to think that if McCain is going to do worse than Bush did in places like Ohio that it would make sense to think he’ll substantially improve on Bush’s showing in a place like northern Maine.