Town By Town: Old Orchard Beach

A town ripe for an upset.

Legislators: Rep. Lori K. Gramlich (D-Old Orchard Beach), first elected 2018; Sen. Donna Bailey (D-Saco), first elected 2020.

For the most part in my town by town series, I’ve been using two races as benchmarks because they tell different, yet equally useful, tales: gubernatorial races and presidential races. Gubernatorial races are notable because they’re somewhat, yet not entirely, divorced from national partisan politics. They show Maine’s willingness to consider non-party candidates, and how a local race can differ greatly from a purely national one, giving us insight into possibilities in state legislative contests. Presidential races, though, offer us a different point: the baseline partisan character of a particular place. This is especially true in Maine, which has been a competitive swing state in the past, but where now only the Second Congressional District is in play in presidential contests. That’s because Maine, as a whole, is slightly more Democratic than the entire country, while the Second District is slightly more Republican.

However, if we only examine those contests, we would completely miss out on towns like like Old Orchard Beach(pop. 6,276), on the southern tip of Cumberland County right in the middle of the First Congressional District. As you can see below, in those races Old Orchard Beach hasn’t been particularly competitive. Apart from the 2010 gubernatorial race, when independent Eliot Cutler won it, the Democrat has won it handily every single time - often by nearly thirty points.

When we examine the political makeup of the town’s voters, this makes sense. Even though Democrats don’t even account for a majority of the town’s voters, they’re the overwhelming plurality. That makes Old Orchard Beach similar to the last town we examine, Damariscotta: For a Republican to win there, they’d have to get all or almost all of the unenrolled votes and dip in to the Democratic base.

However, it greatly differs from Damariscotta in one major respect: In the closely-watched US Senate contest between Democratic Speaker of the House Sara Gideon and incumbent Susan Collins, Collins very nearly pulled off this remarkable feat, only losing Old Orchard Beach by five points in a 49%-44% margin, quite closer than the thirteen-point cushion Gideon enjoyed in Damariscotta. One would have thought that, in such a partisan race with major national political implications, Gideon would have done far better than recent presidential and gubernatorial races in places like Old Orchard Beach. Instead, she did far, far worse.

This is indicative of two points that ring especially true about Maine politics, but are a good reminder for politics anywhere. First and foremost, it’s important to note that just because the national pundits and political operatives have decreed a race to be important doesn’t mean that the voters will, in the end, view it through a purely partisan sense. That was clearly the case during the 2020 US Senate race in Maine, when despite the barrage of partisan advertising voters continued to display their stubborn independence streak. Maine’s independence is exactly why cookie-cutter campaigns run by the national parties fail to gain ground here; the Democrats’ stubborn insistence on continuing this strategy ad nauseam is one of the biggest reasons they haven’t simply swept every federal office. Indeed, their greatest success at the federal level has been with an independent, Angus King, facing only nominal Democratic opposition, and a centrist in the Second District, Jared Golden, who often generates enormous media coverage out of politically-convenient votes against his own party.

In Maine, at least, politics has yet to be fully federalized or split down party lines - the actual person running for office still matters, not just the letter next to their name. The 2020 Senate race provides an excellent example of a very low-quality candidate with enormous resources and partisan advantage completely failing against a well-known centrist candidate with whom voters were very familiar. The 2020 results in Old Orchard Beach are important because they show how a candidate from one party can overcome the odds when the partisan tilt in the area is against them: by having their own personal brand apart from their party, working hard, and running a smart, well-disciplined campaign attuned to local issues.

Now, this formula isn’t going to work in every single district dominated by Democrats: Sometimes a candidate that matches the above description will still be unable to overcome the inherent obstacles, just as Susan Collins was unable to win either Damariscotta or Old Orchard Beach. However, the differing results in that race in these two towns show it’s important to recruit high-quality candidates in every legislative district all over the state: some of those candidates might be able to actually succeed, becoming part of your formula for winning the majority. Neither party has the resources to be truly competitive in every single district in the state, which is why it’s important to not just hope and pray for upsets, but create them. Any time there’s an upset, it’s rarely purely a matter of luck: it’s a combination of both the favorite having a bad day and the underdog doing everything perfectly right. That’s just as true in politics as it is in sports, and it’s a vitally important lesson for anyone hoping to craft a legislative majority to keep in mind.

You may follow Jim on Twitter or Facebook. He is also a weekly political columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Maine’s largest daily newspaper.