By FRANCIS X. QUINN,Associated Press Writer

AUGUSTA – Gov. John Baldacci, ready to rely on private fund-raising, is said to be on the verge of quietly filing formally for re-election while a field of Republican hopefuls seeking to challenge the Democratic incumbent appears just about set.

The announced GOP candidates are the two Peters: Peter Cianchette, a former South Portland legislator from the Cianbro construction family who lost to Baldacci in 2002, and Peter Mills, a state senator from Cornville who hails from a family prominent in both Republican and Democratic circles.

Heading into October, state Sen. Chandler Woodcock of Farmington was still on the fence.

Cianchette, who like Baldacci eschewed public financing under Maine’s Clean Election system the last time around, is expected to do so again, according to Maine Republican Party Chairman Randy Bumps. Mills says he is leaning toward public financing.

More than eight months from a Republican primary and 13 months before the general election for governor, campaign organizations are in an early stage of development. As the office seekers begin trying to position themselves, so too do the consultants who cluster around them.

Baldacci, who travels widely around Maine as chief executive, has been conferring for months with a revolving circle of supporters and advisers at Blaine House sessions known in shorthand as friends meetings.

Participants, according to some who attend, include veteran political activists such as Larry Benoit, who worked for Baldacci in Congress, Jim Mitchell, a former state party leader who ran unsuccessfully against Baldacci for a Democratic congressional nomination, and Patricia Eltman, who like Benoit and Mitchell does work at the State House from the outside nowadays and who has managed and advised Democratic candidates for two decades.

The friends meetings bring together “a group of folks who the governor talks to about politics and that sort of thing,” says Rich Pelletier-Simpson of the state Democratic Party. “It’s not necessarily campaign-specific.”

On the Republican side, Cianchette and Mills have struck out separately on the campaign trail. In their first few weeks of jockeying, a side issue has become the role of Bumps, who works professionally with Cianchette.

Mills says he had been led to believe Bumps would step down from his party post, but Bumps says he intends to retain the chairmanship.

Bumps said last week he does not plan to endorse a candidate or to work on the campaign of one. “I will continue to serve as chairman for the duration of my term,” Bumps added.

Without an opponent in his own party, Baldacci professes to be unconcerned about what others say of him at this stage – “I’m focused on myself.”

But looking toward engagements with opponents, Baldacci selects one issue frequently cited by Republicans critics – the Dirigo Health subsidized insurance program he has championed – and all but vows to make it his own.

“That’s going to be a major part of this campaign,” he says.

Bumps, meanwhile, says the Blaine House race is just getting through the initial shakeout.

“That is one thing that is true. It is very early,” he says.

Still, Bumps offers what could be a preview of a Republican line of attack in asserting that Baldacci “ties everything” to woes real or imagined that he inherited upon taking office.

Baldacci, in an interview last week, allowed that administration accomplishments should be seen against the backdrop of “the mess that was here when we got here,” extending from paper industry troubles to a broad gap between anticipated state revenue and the demand for government services.

A Strategic Marketing Services poll released in mid-August found 53 percent of those surveyed holding a favorable opinion of Baldacci, while 41 percent had an unfavorable opinion of him.

Two percent rated Baldacci’s job performance as excellent, 48 percent rated it as good, 32 percent said it was not so good, and 17 percent rated it poor.

The quarterly poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, was based on telephone interviews with 400 randomly selected adults from July 23 to July 30.

Across the nation, “this is just a rotten time to be a governor,” says Christian Potholm, a political science professor at Bowdoin College who said he aided Cianchette in the past, maintains a “bilateral relationship” with Baldacci now and is undecided about what to do in the new Blaine House contest.

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