With the certification of the official election results by the Secretary of State’s office, we can examine the outcome of the 2022 elections here in Maine from both the macro and micro level, for each major office and both chambers of the Legislature. For starters, let’s take a look at the results in the Maine House of Representatives.
The overall picture is unchanged from election day: 82 Democrats, 67 Republicans, and two unenrolled members. Democrats boosted their statewide popular vote numbers, mainly by counting in all of the uncompetitive districts, but it’s not hugely different.
It’s worth noting a slight disparity here, though: Even though Democrats got only 50.2% of the statewide vote in House elections, they won 54% of the overall seats. As far as those gaps go, it’s not so bad for a two-party system that doesn’t employ any form of proportional representation. It means that, going forward, we can make projections in future elections based on the overall statewide popular vote; the four-point gap is essentially a bonus for the effectiveness of a party - and those uncompetitive seats. House Republican candidates, as I noted previously, did significantly better than Paul LePage, running about three points ahead of him.
Janet Mills didn’t really help down-ticket Democrats either, however. Although Democrats gained seats, if they’d been able to match her popular vote performance statewide, they’d probably have added even a few more. In Maine, it seems, coattails were quite limited in this election.
This election is an important benchmark for the future, since these districts will be in effect for the next four cycles, until 2030. Analyzing this cycle’s results allows for the projection of the overall seats for each party in a future election based on a swing in the statewide popular vote. This concept, called a swing-o-meter, is common in British election coverage, but employed less frequently on this side of the Atlantic. For instance, since the overall (rounded) popular vote was 50% Democratic to 46% Republican, let’s take a look at how a three-point change would affect the overall outcome. That would lead to a (rounded) 49% Republican, 47% Democratic statewide popular vote outcome. That small a change would be enough to give the Republicans the majority, if it were spread evenly across all districts and all other factors were equal.
Of course, all other factors are never entirely equal: Take, for instance, turnout. Theoretically, the overall statewide popular vote number of approximately 643,778 should have been distributed evenly across Maine’s 151 House districts, averaging around 4,263 total votes per district. All of the districts are, after all, supposed to be about the same size, or as close as practically possible.
In fact, there was quite a disparity in turnout all over the state, ranging from just 1,854 votes cast in District 95 (part of Lewiston, where Democrat Mana Abdi won unopposed) to the 6,053 votes cast in District 123 (part of Cape Elizabeth, where Democrat Rebecca Millett won with 74.19% of the vote). As one would expect, distribution of that range was pretty close to even: 78 districts had a below-average turnout, while 73 had an above-average turnout.
Most of the districts on the lower end of the turnout scale were uncompetitive, like District 95. Of the 25 lowest-turnout House districts, only two were within ten points. One might expect that the reverse would be true in the higher-turnout districts, but this wasn’t the case: only two of those were within ten points as well.
That would seem to indicate that, when it comes to voter turnout, neither major political party in Maine has a very good ground game. If they did, then the higher-turnout seats would also be much more competitive, but they’re not. One commonality of both the high and low turnout districts is Democratic dominance: Republicans won just two of the twenty-five highest-turnout districts, while they won eight of the twenty-five lowest-turnout districts. That reflects both Democratic strength overall and the fact that Democrats had more uncontested seats to begin with.
It also suggests a window of opportunity for both parties to expand the playing field: emphasizing voter turnout. Take, for example, District 88 (part of Auburn), one of the closest seats the Democrats won - Kathleen Shaw defeated James Sorcek 2,074 votes to 2,003, or by just 71 votes. There were a total of 4,077 votes cast in that district, 186 votes less than the average turnout - more than enough to make up the difference. One way for either party to expand the playing field would be to build an extremely fine-tuned and focused voter turnout operation in a few key districts - especially if they did it where the opposition didn’t see it coming.
That’s a big picture of the Maine House, based on the official numbers as posted. In a forthcoming post, I’ll take a more detailed look at how Republicans might gain nine seats - and the majority - in 2024.
Spot on Jim. This is an impressive look at the turnout. To your upcoming article about winning; A good candidate that is prepared to take the majority in 2024, has already decided to run, and should be whispering it to their closest circle (kitchen table).