The Maine Event
If the state has to get by without a McCain visit, Maine has stood out this year in one way: while Democrats appear ready to make sweeping gains everywhere else in the country, and as the final GOP House member in New England, Chris Shays, might lose, Maine’s incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins, is cruising to re-election. Despite facing popular Democratic congressman Tom Allen, Collins hasn’t trailed in even one poll taken all year. In fact, her lead hasn’t fallen below 10 points. How to explain this development?
Maine’s other senator, Olympia Snowe, is the last of the Senate moderates. But while Collins cultivates a moderate image, she has reliably backed the Senate GOP leadership when her vote was really needed. In theory, the kind of campaign Sheldon Whitehouse ran against Lincoln Chafee—tying Chafee, despite his liberalism, to the Senate GOP leadership—should have worked against Collins.
The Maine Senate race, however, has offered a textbook example of how the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment, dating from Buckley v. Valeo, all but nullifies effective campaign finance reform. Both Collins and Allen (along with the two parties’ Senate campaign committees) have run hundreds of TV ads. But the most effective—and, at various points in the campaign, frequent—ads have come not from the candidates but from outside groups. They have focused on two issues, and have overwhelmingly benefited Collins.
In the late summer, before either candidate was advertising extensively, business groups hired one of the Sopranos actors as part of the following ad. The piece attacked Allen for supporting the “Employee Free Choice Act,” which would strip from workers the right to a secret ballot in union organizing efforts. (As someone who works at an institution with an oppressive union leadership, I am sensitive to this issue.)
In early October, the NFIB spent several hundred thousand dollars on another anti-Allen ad, focused on the workers’ secret ballot issue. Although technically the ad campaign was “non-political,” and technically it did not coordinate with Collins, in fact it dovetailed with one of Collins’ central arguments: that Allen always voted the party line, even when the interests of his constituents might have dictated otherwise.
Throughout the fall, meanwhile, first pharmaceutical groups (with the Orwellian name “America’s Agenda: Health Care for Kids”) and then the AMA invaded the state with positive ads, like the one below: This ad campaign dovetailed with Collins’ other central argument: that she was someone who worked across party lines, and had a record of accomplishment. (She rarely mentioned that most of her"accomplishments" came on issues that the Bush administration supported.)
Barack Obama’s decision to opt out of federal funding in the presidential race should prompt a reconsideration of the campaign financing system as a whole. As long as Buckley is law, and as long as ads like the “Kids Health” campaign can be run without restriction, perhaps a system of unlimited donations, with instantaneous disclosure, is the better way to go.