Hillary Clinton is the favorite to win a majority of Maine voters in Maine’s presidential election this November, but even if she does, that doesn’t necessarily mean Donald Trump will go away empty-handed.

Maine is one of only two states (Nebraska is the other) that doesn’t divvy out its electoral college votes on a winner-take-all basis. Instead, Maine awards two of its votes to the statewide winner, and one vote to the winner in each of its two congressional districts.


And Maine’s 2nd Congressional District seems much like Trump country. The district — an expanse that covers all but the state’s southwest corner and is by land area the largest district east of the Mississippi River — is 72 percent rural and 95 percent white, according to U.S. census data.

It’s also fertile ground for Trump’s brand of economic populism. Thousands of Maine paper mill employees have been laid off in recent years due to dropping demand and foreign competition, the exact type of economic malaise Trump claims he would cure en route to making the American economy great again.

Trump on Wednesday visited Bangor in an address where he ripped Clinton and reiterated his plans to build a stronger U.S. economy.

He arrives days after a poll brought more good news for Trump’s hopes in the 2nd District. A recent Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram poll had Clinton at 42 percent of the statewide vote to 35 percent for Trump, but the poll put the pair essentially tied in the 2nd District . (Trump had 37 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 36 percent, a difference within the poll’s margin for error.)

“This is a unique year,” said Matthew Gagnon, chief executive officer of the Maine Heritage Policy Center, a conservative, free-market policy think tank based in Portland. “I think that Donald Trump is a candidate that has the right kind of issue profile for some of the people that are in the 2nd district, particularly his views on trade and his appeal to working class voters will play very well.”

Democrats are hoping the Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric — including controversial comments about women, immigrants and Muslims — will turn off a broad sector of the electorate. And indeed, Trump’s Wednesday rally featured a warm-up speaker who mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a “war whoop” gesture referencing the controversy over Warren’s claims of Native-American heritage.

But Maine voters have shown a tolerance for a politician whose rhetoric strays outside normal bounds. Republican Gov. Paul LePage has won the past two governor’s races employing brash, at times even racially charged, rhetoric. He had told President Barack Obama to “go to hell ,” told the NAACP to “kiss my butt” for criticising him for not attending Martin Luther King Day events and blamed the state’s heroin epidemic on drug dealers with the names “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” who, LePage said, come to Maine to ply their trade and return home after impregnating a “young white girl.”

LePage counted the 2nd District as his power base en route to winning in 2010 and 2014, winning both contests with a plurality of the statewide vote in multi-candidate elections.

Trump has his work cut out for him in Maine. Clinton has an overall 7 -point lead on Trump, and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won Maine since George H.W. Bush did in 1998; and, even though the state dropped its winner-take-all presidential election plan in 1972, no presidential candidate has managed to notch a win in either district without winning the statewide vote.

And 2016 isn’t the first election to feature talk of an in-state split.

“Every four years people make this case,” said Matt McTighe, who was the campaign manager for LePage’s 2014 opponent, former Rep. Mike Michaud. “It happened with [Mitt] Romney, it happened with [John] McCain: ‘Oh this is the year that it’s gonna split.’ And it just never happened. And if it didn’t happen in those years, it’s gonna be really hard for Donald Trump to overcome the extremely high negatives he has in both districts.”

