ME Sen I can't really be Collins it yet

[MT Treasurer]

Betsy Sweet (D) is running

https://www.pressherald.com/2019/06/13/betsy-sweet-announces-election-challenge-to-collins-in-2020/

[MT Treasurer]

Still yearning for Troy Jackson. So far the only dem I would vote for over ff Collins.

So you loathe Democrats who voted for Hogan, Baker, or Scott, but you’d vote for Collins in 2020? Makes sense.

Anyway, Gideon would definitely be a substantial underdog in this race and would need a very large D wave to beat Collins. Somewhere between Lean and Likely R.

[MT Treasurer]

Jared Golden done messed up not running for Senate. He’d probably even be favored right now. Instead he’s in the fight of his life in an uphill seat

Right, Eric Brakey is gonna give him the fight of his life

Bruce Poliquin nearly won last year and he was one of the worst fits for that seat ever

Poliquin was an uncontroversial incumbent in a seat which usually doesn’t boot out its incumbents. He may not have been the best "fit" for the district, but he wasn’t some incredibly weak incumbent either.

[MT Treasurer]

Jared Golden done messed up not running for Senate. He’d probably even be favored right now. Instead he’s in the fight of his life in an uphill seat

Right, Eric Brakey is gonna give him the fight of his life

Bruce Poliquin nearly won last year and he was one of the worst fits for that seat ever

Poliquin was an uncontroversial incumbent in a seat which usually doesn’t boot out its incumbents. He may not have been the best "fit" for the district, but he wasn’t some incredibly weak incumbent either.

Either way, pretending like Golden’s re-election is gonna be easy even against Brakey is just dumb. Poliquin was a pretty bad incumbent whose only strength as a candidate was his fundraising and Golden was a pretty good one, and Golden only barely won.

Iowa “loved its incumbents” until last year it didn’t and sent two and almost three packing

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Golden has a better chance of winning reelection than beating Collins, especially with how weak the current GOP field in ME-02 appears to be. He’s tailor-made for his district, and I don’t think his 2018 strategy would be easily replicable in a statewide race against someone like Collins.

[MT Treasurer]

It's possible the Kavanaugh vote ends up benefiting her politically-she may not have been able to be renominated if she had voted against and been responsible for stopping both Obamacare repeal and the Kavanaugh nomination, and she may have enough of a positive image with moderates and Maine may be close enough to a swing state to make the damage she takes with the general electorate for the Kavanaugh vote survivable. I hope that she is proven wrong here, but Collins probably only needs to outrun Trump by a few points to win.

I wonder if she’ll move right now that she’s the top target by Democrats and much of her goodwill with them has faded, not to mention that this will almost certainly be her last term anyway and the state is probably only going to get more Republican. I could see her voting more like a Republican counterpart to Jon Tester rather than a Joe Manchin, but then again who knows.

[MT Treasurer]

https://twitter.com/SteveCollinsSJ/status/1162387200958484487

Cook Political Report does a lot of things.

[MT Treasurer]

It’s trending R so fast it replaced an R governor, congressman, and several legislators (double digits in the House) with Democrats in 2018.

So VA wasn’t trending D fast in 2009, 2010, and 2011? Obviously a party can recover some lost ground in states trending away from them in massive wave years.

[MT Treasurer]

Except ME wasn't consistently trending red before 2016 like VA was consistently trending blue,

Not consistently, but Republicans did really well in 2014.

and Trump's current approvals in the state are really rough.

Yeah, but Trump's current approvals are really rough in every remotely competitive state except maybe FL, where both parties have an absurdly high floor.

States can have massive trends and then reverse them the next cycle, such as MT/ND/IN 2008-2012. ME itself trended 8% R in 2000 and 8% D in 2004. My sig provides an example of trends reversing from one cycle to the next.

This is accurate, but I wouldn’t count on the trends we saw in 2016 coming to a halt in 2020, especially in a state like ME, which is still way more Democratic than its demographics would suggest. That’s not to say that it’s guaranteed to swing or trend Republican again, but I don’t think we’ll see a MT 2008/2012 "redux" there in 2020.

[MT Treasurer]

^He knows that Collins will win his district by a landslide, so this is a fairly predictable statement.

[MT Treasurer]

If you’re citing that Morning Consult poll, you should also mention that it has Trump's approval in ME at "only" -6, which isn’t particularly good but still on par with PA (also -6) and much better than his numbers in the following states:

NH: -19 (!)
CO: -18
MI: -15
NV: -12
WI: -10 (!)
MN: -10
IA: -9 (!)

So if you’re taking MC at face value, ME is looking much more like a swing state than a blue state.

[MT Treasurer]

yeah its kind of the reverse of AL.

No, it’s not. I’m one of the most cautious posters here when it comes to predicting R pick-ups in red states, but this comparison is ridiculous. Gideon is nowhere near as likely to win as Tuberville/Sessions.

[MT Treasurer]

Hot take here, but I don’t think Northern Virginia and Maine are really comparable.

[MT Treasurer]

Friendly reminder that the last three public polls of this race have shown Collins leading Gideon 51%-29%, 52%-36%, and 52%-35%, respectively. Yes, that was in March, June, and July 2019, i.e. before impeachment, but it was also after her Kavanaugh vote.

It’s one thing to argue that Collins is vulnerable and that she could actually lose this time but quite another to say that she’s DOA, as doomed as Barbara Comstock, could actually underperform Trump, etc. Reading this forum you’d think Collins was running in Hawaiʻi and trailing badly in every single poll.

[MT Treasurer]

Collins' path in the Trump era has always been solidifying the Republican base + benefiting from the state's rapid Republican trend + winning over the ~6-8% of Biden voters who are at least considering her due to her long history in the state, remaining goodwill, etc. + making sure Gideon is seen as an even less appealing alternative. Is it easy? No. Is it impossible? I don’t think so (even if it’s a narrow path), and it’s certainly much easier in a state like ME than in any other "blue" state.

Running as an ardent anti-Trumper would be suicidal for obvious reasons.

[MT Treasurer]

LMAO. Sure, jan

https://twitter.com/Robillard/status/1279075663119626240

Not sure if you realize this, but the votes of an energized Democratic base which will foam at the mouth no matter what Collins does won’t be enough to beat her. It would be enough in pretty much any other "blue" state, but not in ME.

It’s not like Gideon hasn’t received negative press or only Collins has been subjected to attack ads (especially recently), so not sure why this is so incredibly hard to believe.

[MT Treasurer]

This is a senate race in a small state; politics is much more local.

This statement is rather meaningless. The same logic could apply to Heitkamp in 2018, or Bacaus in 2014, or Heller in 2018, etc. In fact, this same train of logic also serves to benefit Sarah Gideon.

Yes, Heitkamp lost, but do people forget that she actually outperformed Clinton by 25 points? 

Baucus was vulnerable in 2014 but not even close to DOA.

Heller only beat a corrupt trash-tier candidate by 1 point and received fewer votes than Romney, not exactly comparable to Collins' electoral record.

[MT Treasurer]

That ad is a mess. This attack ad that I keep seeing is much better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwMMIN30VTk



This still remains one of my favorites from Gideon. Simple and effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAWTqc333Ow

What’s your current prediction for this race? (Even if it’s just a "gut feeling", I’m genuinely curious.)

[MT Treasurer]

Do you mean Collins down 54%!? Or do you mean Collins wins with 54% of the vote? Or was that a typo and supposed to be Collins -5.4%?

Sorry, I clicked send before I finished. It's all updated. I predict a 54-46 Collins race right now. Just a gut feeling. I grew up with blue collar independent friends and family and they are all likely voting for Collins again. They are not persuaded by the Kavanaugh argument. They care about jobs and Collins has done a solid job making herself visible with these blue collar employers throughout the years. I see Gideon doing well along the coast and in the Portland area. I see her struggling in the second district and inland areas of the first.

Mills won in 2018 by under 8% and she was from the second district. She also wasn't facing a 20+ year incumbent. There was also a third-party candidate so Mills only got about 51% in a great year for Dems as a solid candidate. Gideon isn't a better statewide candidate than Mills.

Thanks a lot. it sounds dumb and I really don’t have much to back this up (it’s mostly gut feeling, and I realize that I could be totally wrong), but I still feel like Collins is being underestimated here and that ME isn’t part of the Democrats' path of least resistance to 50 seats in the Senate. Either way, I feel like this race is going to surprise a lot of people regardless of what happens.

[MT Treasurer]

McLaughlin said last week that their NRSC internal polling shows Collins ahead outside the margin of error. The guy was obviously wildly overconfident about his party's chances of holding the Senate and often doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but I do think that there’s more uncertainty in this race than in AZ/CO/NC and that Democrats were right to expand the map into KS/MT/etc., especially in case Collins ekes out another win and they don’t get all 4 pick-ups in AZ/CO/NC/ME. I’m not necessarily predicting that it will happen, but it’s interesting how confident Republicans seem to be about this particular race given what all the polling which has actually been released so far has shown.

[MT Treasurer]

I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind the notion that this isn’t a lose-lose situation for Collins. "Moderate posturing" hasn’t exactly worked for Collins so far in an environment in which there’s little appetite for bipartisanship and the partisan fronts couldn’t be more unambiguously defined and rabidly opposed to each other. She’s going to lose most of her remaining support from the few Democratic-leaning independents still willing to consider her when the race becomes hyper-nationalized and closely tracks with the presidential race after an AYE vote (this would be a good bet if Trump was on track for reelection and/or competitive in ME, but he’s not), and she’s going to lose base support if she votes to reject his nominee while winning over a very limited numbers of Biden voters (certainly not enough to offset losses among the Republican/Trump base). RCV might help a little, but I feel like people underestimate the number of Trump supporters who wouldn’t rank her at all as well as the number of Biden voters who have already made up their mind about Collins and won’t rank her at all.

I was always skeptical that this would be the third Democratic pickup and that ME would flip before NC, but it’s really hard to see how she finds a way out of this, especially with Biden vastly improving over Clinton's result in ME (he’s not going to win it by 17-21 points, but even high single digits/low double digits will be difficult to overcome). Her entire shtick probably just doesn’t work in this era.

[MT Treasurer]

Manchin completely conned WV voters in 2018 and they totally fell for it, but given that it’s WV we’re talking about, it’s only par for the course. It would have been fun to see some of the entertaining reactions of Trump/Manchin voters to Manchin voting for impeachment. The fact that Republicans couldn’t beat him in 2018 after all the fodder for attack ads they had was easily the most humiliating Senate result of the last two decades for either party, even more so than AL-SEN 2017 (which you can chalk up to turnout patterns in a special election and Moore being an atrocious candidate/campaigner). It was the equivalent of Democrats losing a Senate race in HI and the Republican Senator from HI proceeding to vote for Obama's impachment the year after the election. Can’t wait for WV's reactions when the Senate under Biden is 50-50 and Manchin is the deciding vote until 2023, lol.

[MT Treasurer]

Not on topic to this megathread, but Manchin will probably stop a number of Biden-backed bills in a 50-50 senate, especially when it comes to climate and gun control. He'll vote for a public option on Obamacare, which should be popular in his state, but nothing that goes against the coal industry. He'll certainly speak at some of President Biden's executive actions to promote green energy and environmental regulations. That's why I hope Democrats can get 51 or 52 seats not to depend in Manchin. He'll probably retire in 2024 from the senate anyway, and Republicans finally control all statewide elected offices in West Virginia.

There’s zero incentive for Manchin to stop any Biden-backed bill given that he just won reelection and might not even run for another term in 2024. His votes on impeachment and Kavanaugh have made it pretty clear what his voting record will look like for the remainder of his term, so you’re definitely safe with a 50-50 majority (also don’t underestimate Murkowski's willingness to break with her own party).

[MT Treasurer]

If Collins wants even a shot at winning at this point then she needs to directly condemn Trump. At the presidential level Maine (at large) is practically a Safe D state at this point and she has no hope if she can't bring herself to realize that and behave accordingly.

And lose Trump's base in the process?

[MT Treasurer]

Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, and now candidates Bullock and Bollier know how to behave in ways that maintain enough crossover appeal to be competitive without alienating voters of their own party. Collins clearly doesn't know how to do that.

Tester and Manchin would have lost if they had been up in a Republican wave year/Clinton midterm or even if Republicans hadn’t proven themselves as laughably incompetent in (not) contesting those races as they did in real life (e.g. by aggressively pushing for Jenkins/Fox, going scorched earth on the incumbents and the Libertarians in MT, not prioritizing NV/AZ/TN/etc. over MT/WV, not allowing Tester/Manchin to define their opponents early, etc.). Bollier would be DOA under a Clinton presidency, and Bullock would be facing an uphill battle after twelve years of Democratic party control in Washington.

The real explanation for the success of Tester/Manchin/Bollier/Bullock and the apparent underperformance of Collins (and Ernst... and Marshall... and Sullivan....) isn’t so much some major disparity in "candidate quality" as it is good/bad luck + the difference between a favorable and an unfavorable national environment.

[MT Treasurer]

The only thing she can (but wont) do to substantially help her out would be to endorse Biden.

I mean, if she wants to get Kirked...