When President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress made Alaska and Hawaii our newest states 49 years ago, they signed the death warrant for one of Maine’s three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. This was done to make room for three new Alaska and Hawaii representatives, and reflect lethargic increases in Maine’s population.

Once national dictate and demographics shrunk the number of our Congressional emissaries, re-drawing the boundaries for the two remaining districts fell to Maine’s 100th Legislature in 1961. The result merged the Bangor and Aroostook Third District into most of the old mid-state Second District, a configuration substantially the same as today. The Second District’s GOP rural constituencies were sandwiched between Democratic strongholds, the St. John Valley to the north and the Androscoggin Valley to the south.

And so the Second District of Maine was born, the largest congressional area east of the Mississippi.

Though its population is equal to Portland/York County-dominated First District, Second District representatives have achieved disproportionate prominence in the 45 years since its first Congressman, Aroostook County’s Cliff McIntire, took office in 1963. Of its five alumni, four went on to win statewide office. Three became U.S. Senators – one of these, William Cohen, also became Secretary of Defense – and a fourth has twice been elected governor.

Besides Cohen, who won national acclaim in 1974’s televised Judiciary Committee Impeachment hearings during his first Congressional term, the other Second District solons who graduated to the Senate were William Hathaway and Olympia Snowe, both from Auburn.

Hathaway, first elected to the House in 1964, won prominence for sponsoring legislation that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970. Being rated one of the most liberal members of the House in his four terms, and supporting gun control legislation, didn’t seem to impair his popularity. His conscientious, low-key, well-informed, good-listener approach won him re-election resoundingly. This was the basis for his 1972 upset of Margaret Chase Smith, whom Hathaway defeated to move into the U.S. Senate.

Snowe, a veteran of the Maine House and Senate, had also been one of Cohen’s district office managers. In Washington, she became one of the highest-ranking GOP members of several House Congressional Committees.

Though she served one term as one of two deputy House minority whips, her approach to issues – like most other Maine members of Congress – has been largely bipartisan.

Her 1994 election to the Senate made history. She was the first woman ever elected to both houses of a state legislature and both houses of the Congress. Time Magazine, in 2006, named her one of America’s ten best senators.

Snowe’s Second District successor was our present governor, John Baldacci, a Democrat who earned election in a Republican year, 1994. (Swimming against the national tide is a characteristic of both our Congressional districts.)

In contrast to Cohen-Hathaway-Snowe-Baldacci, the First District has been a graveyard for six of its seven past Congressmen. David Emery and Tom Andrews were defeated in Senate bids, while Jim Longley, Jr. and Joe Brennan were defeated in their attempts to win the Blaine House after leaving Congress. The seat was also end of the line for congressmen Stan Tupper and Peter Kyros.

The lone representative who left the seat for a successful statewide campaign was John McKernan, who was elected governor in 1986. But McKernan had deep Second District roots, as not only a former Bangor state representative before relocating to Portland, but, like Cohen, a celebrated Bangor High basketball icon.

Does this mean the fate of Tom Allen, the District’s present incumbent, is sealed in his bid to unseat Bangor-based Susan Collins? Certainly not, particularly in what’s expected to be a hospitable year for Democrats, in a state that has voted Democratic in more than half its federal elections for some 20 years now.

More than fate or happenstance was at work in the failures of First District and successes of Second District representatives in subsequent elections. Chris Potholm, a noted professor of political science at Bowdoin College, says two factors give the inside track to a Second District representatives seeking other offices.

“In the Second District it’s hard to get to know the district as there are a lot of miles and territory…you can’t just rely on going to a few places. The First District is a lot easier to get around and get to know and you take the small size of the area for granted,” says Potholm.

The other major influence, he says, is the television market. The Second District has two, Bangor and Presque Isle, 163 miles apart. “Whereas in the First District there is only one TV market, Portland, and it’s just a few blocks or a few steps from one station to the other,” says Potholm.

Thus, candidates who have achieved electoral success in the Second District brings this major media advantage to statewide campaigns, over those whose experiences were confined to the First.

Nevertheless, if Allen upsets Collins, he will become the first Mainer to arrive in the Senate by popular election from what is now Maine’s First District since the inception of both in 1961. And as the 2004 Red Sox showed, “curses” can be broken. Will this be First District’s year?

We shall see.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].