Bad news for Baldacci (continued)

Kevin Raye, a former Republican Second District congressional candidate and now a state senator from Washington County, seems barely to contain his anger when speaking of Baldacci’s opposition to a racino proposed by the Passamaquoddy Tribe for the Eastport area.

"There’s a very real disconnect between the governor and the people of Maine," he says, "and he seems not to recognize it."

Raye believes the 2003 statewide referendum vote against the Sanford casino proposal was against that specific plan and did not mean that Maine people in the majority are opposed to gambling.

"Washington County was always strong for him," Raye says of Baldacci, but because of the governor’s opposition to the racino (he recently vetoed the bill that would have allowed it), support for him down east "absolutely just plummeted."

He also cites Baldacci’s $447-million borrowing plan as another example of a disconnect: "At a fundamental level people get it. You don’t put your light bill and your groceries on your Visa card."

Although the Maine State Chamber of Commerce’s president, Dana Conners, has worked closely with Baldacci, its lobbyist, Chris Hall, asks, in explanation of why Baldacci has sunk in the polls, "Is it because expectations have been disappointed?" He says the business community feels it is not getting from state government what it wants, such as lower taxes and lower health-care costs: "They’re saying ‘Where’s the beef?’"

At first, Hall says, he thought the budget-and-taxes snarl tying up state government was "insider baseball," but now he speculates that the public may be blaming it on the person at the top. Echoing other critics, he agrees Baldacci may be reaping what he has sown by suggesting his economic policies will bring prosperity.

Peter Mills, the Republican state senator, has another reap-what-you-sow figure of speech: "He who lives by the sword," he says, raising his eyebrows, meaning that such a person metaphorically also dies by the sword. Although Mills cites what he believes are specific failures in Baldacci’s leadership, he conjectures that Baldacci also may be falling on his own rhetorical sword.

If he were governor, Mills says, "I would never claim responsibility for the economy" — unlike Baldacci with his tax pledge and other fiscal policies that he promises will attract corporate investment — since so much of Maine’s economic health depends on national and international trends.

Inevitably, of course, a governor will have to bear political consequences if a state falls on hard times, whether he has had anything to do with it or not. And now, with the huge economic threats looming over Maine of military base closings, Baldacci may be facing, Mills says, "his own version of the ice storm [see sidebar, this page]."

WHAT EXACTLY DO THOSE POLLS SAY?

Tony Buxton, a Portland lawyer, lobbyist, and Democratic Party warhorse, illustrates his view of some of the governor’s troubles with a story from ancient political history. When his wife was going door-to-door in a gubernatorial campaign for Kenneth Curtis (a Democrat who served as governor from 1967 to 1975), she once encountered, he relates, a woman who told her, "Yeah, I’ll vote for him. The fish are running."

"I’m not excusing Baldacci," Buxton observes, but "the fish are running backwards" — Maine people are not feeling good about the state’s economy.

That factor heavily contributes to Baldacci’s increased unpopularity, says MaryEllen Fitzgerald, head of Critical Insights in Portland, one of the polling firms that saw the governor’s numbers dive.

"The economy is what’s driving that erosion of support," she believes, at a time when people "aren’t wowed with his performance" and when he’s the man "out front." Moreover, she sees "almost a perfect storm" of negative events hitting Baldacci, many self-created: the controversial borrowing plan, his cuts to state services, the continuing news about the state’s enduring budget gap, the state’s rating drop by the bond agencies, and others.

FitzGerald has a very recent poll that quantifies Maine people’s pessimism about the economy. In an "all-time high" for a Critical Insights survey on this question, of 600 people polled 51 percent said they believed the economy will get worse over the next 12 months. Soon after Baldacci took office, in the spring of 2003, only 25 percent were as pessimistic.

The Critical Insights poll on Baldacci himself, taken in mid-May, found 37 percent of 600 Mainers surveyed (with a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points) had an unfavorable opinion of the governor. Twenty-nine percent had a favorable opinion, and 34 percent were undecided. In the northern part of the state, the unfavorable number was up to 47 percent. In the Second Congressional District, which Baldacci used to represent in Congress (he’s from Bangor), those inclined to see him unfavorably were at 43 percent compared to 30 percent in the First District. The Second District has suffered much more economically in recent years than Southern Maine’s First District.

On the survey’s Baldacci job-performance question, respondents split, with 45 percent disapproving, 43 approving, and 12 percent undecided. But here’s the big contrast: Baldacci’s job-performance numbers in three previous Critical Insights polls dating back to late 2003 had averaged 62 percent approval, with a high of 72 percent in the fall of 2003.

These previous numbers are in line with other Maine polling firms’ published results. For example, two polls in 2003 by Market Decisions gave Baldacci an average 62 percent job-performance approval, and Strategic Marketing Services had Baldacci as recently as this January at 67 percent job approval.

Baldacci spokesman Lee Umphrey dismisses the extent of the governor’s drop in popularity found by Critical Insights by calling FitzGerald a Republican pollster (though this charge doesn’t explain why her polling had given Baldacci high numbers for years). Umphrey also notes that the bad news about the possible military base closings came out in the middle of the polling period. A venerable Republican pollster, Chris Potholm of Command Research, also has doubts about the extent of the Baldacci drop because the recent Critical Insights poll rates Tom Allen, the First District Democratic congressman, unaccountably low, he believes, when compared with his own findings.

Potholm thinks Baldacci has come down only 10 to 15 points in job performance and favorability ratings — though he says he hasn’t polled on these questions recently — largely because of the negative impact of his gay-rights stand with Franco-American Catholic Democrats in the Second District and some "slippage among Republicans and independents over the budget" and borrowing issues, rather than the 20-points-plus plunge found in the Critical Insights survey.

However, a 600-person "bullet" poll of Mainers done in early May for two Maine TV stations by a national firm, SurveyUSA, bears out the Critical Insights results. It found that 55 disapproved of Baldacci’s job performance, 37 percent approved, and 9 percent were unsure. Some polling professionals criticize bullet polls, which rely on a computerized telephone survey. On the other hand, SurveyUSA’s poll was done before the announcements about the base closings, so there could have been no skewing by that negative development. In SurveyUSA’s results, slightly more Democrats disapproved of Baldacci’s job performance than approved; Republicans overwhelmingly disapproved.