With 1980 just a memory, Maine returns to the caucus system for the first time in a decade, searching for a little more political influence.
The phone rang as Harold Pachios reached for the door of his Cape Elizabeth home on a memorable Sunday 24 years ago.
The caller was Pat Brown, the former governor of California. He was looking for his son, Jerry.
“Send him home,” the elder Brown barked at Pachios. “He’s the governor of California and he’s been in Maine for more than two weeks!”
Jerry Brown had not been vacationing in Maine, seeking lobsters on the coast or moose tracks on the Appalachian Trail.
Instead, the Democrat had been crisscrossing the state for the past 16 days in search of votes that he hoped would earn him the title of Democratic presidential nominee.
1980 was the year that Maine held its presidential caucuses before the famed New Hampshire primary. It also was the first time Maine’s towns and cities held their caucuses on a single day.
Two hundred Democratic Party activists in Maine likely remember 1980 as the year they picked up their home phones to hear then-President Jimmy Carter live on the line, urging them to cast their political lots with him.
After pleading for his son’s return, Pat Brown asked Pachios how son Jerry was likely to fare in the caucuses. Brown was asking the right person.
At that time, Pachios was serving as chairman of the Maine Democratic Party. He was credited with engineering the pre-N.H. primary event, which put Maine on the politically influential top shelf of presidential primary states.
“It was big,” he said. “As big as Iowa.”
It didn’t last long.
A year later, capitulating to New Hampshire protests, national leaders in the Democratic Party changed the rules again, requiring that Maine hold its caucuses after its neighboring state’s primary.
Maine’s brief moment in the presidential limelight had been eclipsed.
The dry years
“The only time that Maine ever had significant political impact was in 1980,” Pachios recalled recently, sitting in his lawyer’s penthouse corner office in Portland.
Few would disagree. These days, Maine’s clout is diminished.
For several presidential elections after 1980, Maine’s caucuses were the next important test for presidential aspirants after the prominent New Hampshire primary. For that reason, Maine continued to attract contenders who hoped for a quick bounce to boost their candidacies in states where larger lodes of delegates waited to be mined.
Now, however, nine other state contests are wedged between Maine’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary, likely winnowing further the pack of would-be Democratic nominees.
For many party faithful, it could be worse.
The parties could still be holding primaries in Maine, as they did in 1996 and 2000.
During those years, candidates paid even less attention to Maine before the general election. Although it was among the earlier primary states, it was lumped in with several other New England states and New York, blunting its impact. So muted was the campaigning in Maine that many supporters of primary candidates had to travel across the state border to New Hampshire to find campaign literature or catch a glimpse of a live presidential candidate.
Holding a caucus instead of a primary also tends to better motivate and organize party officials locally and unifies them in preparation for state, then national conventions, said Aymie Walshe, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party.
Critics, however, view the caucus process as more exclusive than a primary, shutting out a more representative cross section of the voting population that will be voting in the fall. For instance, if a local official charged with scheduling that town’s caucus fails to organize it, as is currently the case in Livermore Falls, Democrats in that town would forfeit their votes – and thus their state convention delegates – for the presidential nominee.
Maine’s political parties switched back to the caucus system after the 2000 elections, with the legal blessing of the Legislature, saving the state and municipalities the cost of staging formal elections.
On Feb. 8, Democrats and last-minute party enrollees in roughly 350 of Maine’s towns and cities are expected to meet locally to pick their favorite Democratic presidential wannabes.
Because Maine will be the only state holding its party contest on that day, it is expected to generate a bit more media attention than it has over the past decade, Pachios predicted, but only a bit.
“Maine has slightly more impact,” he said.
More face time?
So far, two of the seven surviving candidates have opened campaign offices in Maine.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean leads the pack with three staffed offices, one in each of the state’s largest cities. Massachusetts U.S. Sen. John Kerry follows with two offices, in Portland and Bangor.
Several candidates who are less well financed, such as U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, have volunteer campaign organizations in Maine that schedule rallies, raise money and distribute literature.
Many of the candidates have been to Maine and plan to return on or before Feb. 8. Kucinich has visited the state four times, Dean twice, retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark and Kerry once apiece. The Rev. Al Sharpton almost made it, but had to cancel at the last minute. Several of the candidates have launched advertising campaigns on Maine television.
With no clear front-runner emerging, the importance of Maine’s handful of delegates grows, said Dennis Bailey, a political consultant to Maine’s last two governors.
The candidates will be looking to states where they might do well in hopes of grabbing headlines, he said. In a tight race, no candidate can afford to take any state for granted.
“I think there’s going to be a bit more than normal attention paid to what happens here just because it’s close … and we’re on our own that day,” he said.
Going Republican anyway?
Although Maine’s caucuses require the attendance of party members, absentee ballots are available this year for the first time. More than 1,500 have been mailed out so far, “which is huge,” said Dorothy “Dottie” Melanson, chairwoman of the Maine Democratic Party.
Another factor that should put greater focus on Maine is its reputation for independence, often making it hard to predict a winner. Because Maine is considered a toss-up state, Melanson said many dark horse candidates view it as winnable, or showable.
That’s especially true in the general election. In 1992, Maine picked Ross Perot over then-President George H.W. Bush, giving Perot his best showing nationally.
Son George W. is hoping to paint Maine red his second time around, said Bush’s national campaign chairman, former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, who paid a recent visit to college Republicans in Lewiston.
“We’re going to win Maine. That’s what we believe. That’s why we’re here,” he said.
Some believe the fact that Maine is one of only two states (the other being Nebraska) that can split their electors accounts for the state’s added appeal. Unlike winner-take-all states, a candidate can win Maine overall, but lose an elector if he loses a congressional district.
The distinction, however, is unlikely to cause political consultants to shift the strategies of their political campaigns, according to Douglas Hodgkin, a GOP activist and retired political science professor at Bates College in Lewiston.
“It would only have the tiniest margin of difference in terms of the strategies the parties would pursue,” he said.
If polls show a dead heat during the week leading up to Election Day, President Bush might fly into Bangor, where 2nd Congressional District voters might deliver their district and lone electoral vote.
Then again, if the election appears to be that close, Hodgkin said, “The whole of Maine could go Republican.”
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