Kevinstat
Jr. Member
Posts: 1,823
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« on: July 22, 2007, 04:33:56 PM » |
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I think part of the reason Muskie didn't run for President in 1976 was because in 1975 then-Congressmen Bill Cohen was contemplating a challenge to Muskie in '76, and Muskie's own polling in June 1975 didn't put him up by that much (and Cohen's polling, according to Cohen aid, Bowdoin Professor and self-important veteran campiagn manager Christian Potholm, put Cohen ahead 49 percent to 41 percent at that same time before Muskie recovered by moving to the right and giving more focus to Maine).
Potholm, presumably with Cohen's blessing, actually met with a Muskie aide in May 1975 and offered to give Muskie six months to "make up lost ground" (although Cohen would be unofficially campaiging hard then as well) and if Muskie had then Potholm wouldn't urge Cohen to go through with the race. Potholm refers to this period as "'The Election That Never Was' of 1975." By December of that year, Cohen's polling only put the Congressman up by 2% which, in Potholm's words (from one of his several books on Maine politics), "masked even worse news within." At around (if not exactly) the same time, Cohen put a poll between him and Maine's Junior Senator, Bill Hathaway (who had unseated Margeret Chase Smith in 1972 and whose open Congressional seat Cohen had won), and that poll put Cohen up by 20 points. In early January Cohen announced that he would not run for the Senate that year, but in 1978 he challenged Hathaway as expected from January 1976 on and won by 23 points, 57% to 34% (a Longleyesque conservative and two more minor independents split the remainder).
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