The Pan-Atlantic Poll

The new Pan-Atlantic Research omnibus pole of Maine. If you don't know what this thing is, about quarterly, the Pan-Atlantic group. files this big poll that they do statewide. It's usually somewhere in the neighborhood of like 800 or 1,000 respondents, so it's usually a fairly large poll. They ask about a whole bunch of stuff, which is why they call it an omnibus poll. So they talk about, you know, politicians and how popular they are, the right track, wrong track number, key issues that people care about, you know, and of course the political races. the political races and how they are head to head. Now, I have, uh, over the course of many years, been quite critical of this poll and this pollster. They, on their, you know, on their main page, if you go to their website, And you find the Pan-Atlantic omnibus survey. It's literally just their website slash omnibus. You know, they tout how good they are. You know, five out of five citizens' initiative questions polled right in 2024. Seven of seven gubernatorial elections polled since 98, six of six, presidential elections since 2000, seven of eight Senate elections since 2018. You know, that's... What we like to call in the business a little statistical manipulation here because most of those questions were not really contentious. So I don't really congratulate you for getting it right. I mean, if you get a citizens initiative which passed like 80, 20, you get that right in the polling. Guess what? I don't care. Doesn't count. It doesn't count to me. What matters is how you do in the highly contested elections like, oh, I don't know, say Susan Collins versus Sarah Gideon in 2020. Yes, correct. Senator Gideon says hello, or other close ones. And there aren't actually that many close ones to deal with, and their record in the close ones going back quite some time is really not great. And all the time, this survey produces results that make my head scratch and look like an outlier compared to other polls. So I've never really, honestly, had very much respect for this polling outlet. The other thing you brought up with the sampling, I looked at that. 827 people. That's a good sample, though. Like I will. You think that is? Okay. Usually it's in the thousand. You want a thousand or two? Anything above 500 is acceptable to me. When you get into like 800, it's pretty good. When you get into a thousand, it's great. Yeah. You know, it's really great. But 827 is fine. The problem with 827, though, is that they also do split it. And this is where it does get into not that great. They split it between Congressional District 1 and Congressional District 2 for questions like, who do you plan to vote for for Congress? And then you're getting into half the size of that sample, so 400 and something, which is not.

You know, again, 500's my line where I take it seriously. And it might just be barely below it, but it's still below it. And what they have they have by, I think, Colin's up by four in District 2 and him up by quite a bit, 20, I think, in down here. Something like that, yeah, which is, you know, in the zone of maybe correct. But, I mean... I'm going to go down all of this poll. In the zone of correct. Well, I mean, in the first district, I bet you Graham Platner has a bigger lead than she has the lead in the second district. But, you know, I'm going to get to that because there's a lot of stuff in this poll. It's an omnibus poll after all. So I do want to go through it. And, you know, as I do, given the criticisms and the complaints that I have about them, take it all with a very big grain of salt. The results you like and the results you don't like. I got one question now. With a big grain of salt. And that is being kind of big and red. And knowing about this and following polls here for so long. Now, I look at that poll and as kind of an outsider or somebody with not a lot of knowledge, I see it looks like I would just deduce that based on that result right there, it may not be right, but based just looking at it, it would seem to me that the district two. is not as heavily Republican as District 1 is heavily Democratic. I think that's probably actually how it really is. So that's Jared Golden gets elected in District 2. Yeah, I mean, it is a pretty, I don't know if I would say heavily Republican District, but it's a strong Republican district. But District 1 is stronger blue than District 2 is red. Is Lewiston in District 2? Lewiston's now in District 2. It didn't used to be. Which is part of our market here. Part of our broadcast market. Correct. Yeah, that's interesting. That's one of the justifications I've had for talking about Golden and interview with stuff. It's like, you know, we actually do reach your people. Yes. So, yeah. So I think that is accurate. The question, though, is. The partisan lean of each district is something that historically has been often overwhelmed by the independent voters. The independent voters are a gigantic chunk of the electorate. It's still today the second largest group of voters behind the Democrats. For a long time, it was the largest. But it's still 30% of the electorate, the unenrolled non-party affiliated group. I did look into that found that interesting here. And believe it or not, that's declined a little bit. It used to be like 36, 37%. But nationally, I think it's probably on the incline, independence. It's recently on the decline. It's recently on the decline. Nationally, okay. No, here. But I'm thinking nationally independent might be. I think that nationally everywhere, it's actually on the decline because what's ended up happening in the Trump era is there used to be a lot of soft indies that kind of drifted right or drifted left election to election, but they just didn't want to be affiliated with the party or whatever. But as the polls of politics have grown more sort of extreme.

paint her as a Trump stooge who's just like rolling over for the president and giving him everything he wants all the time and what and like that just isn't It's not reflected in the votes, for one, but it's also not reflected in the rhetoric either. I mean, she was just, you know, on Capitol Hill, like last week, you know, taking the Pentagon to task a little bit. I mean, it's very clearly, she's an independent voice. The thing is that Trump has so sucked the gravity out of the room that if you ever agree with him about anything, you now have sided with the enemy to a fair amount of the electorate. And that's what I think her problem is, is that the Democrats have so. thrown their chips in the middle of the table that Trump is an existential threat to the country that if you ever do anything I mean the best example of this is the Brett Kavanaugh thing the Brett Kavanaugh thing is the thing that set off I mean she before this she was bulletproof Before Brett Kavanaugh, she was unbeatable. She would win routinely 65% of the vote, and it was not even a challenge. She was taking down, like, sitting congressman from the first district who were considered to be very strong by like 30 points. It was not even a contest. The Brett Kavanaugh vote changed that. And the Brett Kavanaugh vote, if you just take it in the totality of what she does and how she does it and why and everything else, she voted for contentioning Ketanji Brown Jackson, she voted for Elena Kagan, she voted for Sonia Sotomayor. she has always had deference to the President of the United States on the Supreme Court nominees and if she finds them to be judicially qualified, we'll vote for them. And she said that from the very beginning all the way back in the Clinton administration. That would be... Consistency. It would be. And so you're basically hammering her for something that she has basically been doing for 20 years. And no one, everybody appreciated it. Like every time she voted for a Democratic president's Supreme Court nominee, the Democrats and the independence of the state were like, well, that's a great example of Susan Collins' independence. But she votes for a Republican president's nominee. And she's Satan. It's absurd. It's absurd. I'll give you all the results in this segment, okay? But let me start off with the gubernatorial race because you just heard Ben Midgley's new ad on our break there. And that's obviously a part of his closing argument here. When you want to goad and see what the Republican primary electorate looks like, I think these results are one of the things that makes me look at this poll and say, really? Seriously? Is that actually what you think is happening? The results for the first choice. Remember, this is a ranked choice voting election. In the Republican primary are thus. First choice, Bobby Charles, 36%. Jonathan Bush in second place at 20%. Then you have Garrett Mason at 13. And then from there...

It falls off a cliff pretty quick. You get David Jay Jones at three, Robert Wessels at one, Ben Midgley at 2%, and Owen McCarthy at 4%, which is, to me, not very credible. Now, I have, there's Aaron Chadbourne made this case to me earlier, and he thinks, and I think he makes a good argument. that Midgley's status as like the second choice guy, like the second place guy, is questionable because a lot of what you've heard that has suggested such is like insider talk. And the insider talk really is driven by, I think, a really powerful force inside the Republican Party of Maine still of the LePage group. And that group is really thrown its weight behind Midgely. So, you know, that makes sense that they would be, you know, boosting him and that it would make him appear strong, et cetera. Does he really have second place? Does he really have substantial support? I think you could debate that. But I do think that the idea that he has 2% is a joke. I can't for the life of me believe that Ben Midgely after the... Conversations I've had with people and what we've heard from callers and everything else, he very clearly is liked enough and chosen enough to be, God, 10%, 15%, something like that. Maybe second place, like originally thought, who knows, but certainly not two. Two sounds very odd to me. And so you look at that, that's one thing that fills me with a little confusion. You know, the Jonathan Bush and Garrett Mason numbers, I might believe that a little bit. Bobby Charles at 36%, maybe. Maybe. I think that might be a little high, but we'll see. I just, I think that it looks suspicious to me. When you include the second choicers, by the way, you get another 7% for Charles, 16% for Bush. So Bush picks up steam a little quicker. Garrett Mason is at 20%, Jay Jones at 7, Wessels at 6, midgely at 6, and own McCarthy at 1. So when you combine the two, the top 2, like you're either number 1 or 2. Bobby Charles is leading 43 to 36 over Bush. So Bush is making some inroads. And I will do another segment, by the way, on a conflict inside this primary based on some ads and some text messages that are being sent out by Bush right now, which are making claims using the main wire. Which are odd and leading to a lot of backlash. So we'll get into a lot of that stuff. Okay. But that's your main Republican primary. On the Democratic side, it's Shaw. First choice for Shaw, 29%. Angus King III at 24. Nobody believes that. Everybody I know in the Democratic Party and outside of it is fairly certain that Angus King, the third, is going to come in fifth place.

Now, if this ends up being right, then I'll tip my cap to Pan Atlantic, but I don't believe that for a minute. Hannah Pingree is at 9. Shenabello's is at 10. I don't find that credible either. She's in my book. She's clearly higher than that. And Troy Jackson is sitting around 12. So you see what I'm saying? These numbers don't really make sense on their face based on what we already believe that we know. Anecdotally, I will admit about these races, but still, I think... It's very important. When you get into Susan Collins versus Graham Platner, the overall number is the big one that you care about. It's 48 Graham Platner 41 Susan Collins with 11% undecided. Jason detailed the CD1-CD2 split. He was correct about that. That, of course, I will say, was conducted before the last week or two, which has not been good for Graham Platner, but it's pretty consistent with other polls we've seen recently. And there's a few other things in here, which are of note that I'll get to later.