Over on As Maine Goes, Jim Cyr poses a question to the gathered group of Maine conservative viewers: “What Turned Maine So Liberal?”
The basis of the question is a sound one. Until the arrival of Ed Muskie, Maine had been so overwhelmingly Republican that Democrats were meaningless to governance in the state. But something happened that completely reversed the poles in the state and handed it squarely to the Democrats.
What followed Cyr’s question in AMG was a predictable litany of everyone’s favorite example of liberal annoyances, like “the damned schools are too liberal!” and “its all them union thugs!” Such analysis, however much it might make the particular conservative feel better at the time, is hardly the real answer – after all, “the damned schools” are liberal everywhere in the country, there is nothing overly special about Maine’s education curriculum that brainwashes zombies of young Nancy Pelosi acolytes to fall in line and support the Democrats. Indeed, I managed to go through the Maine school system and come out every Democrat’s worst nightmare.
Finding the reality of the situation is far far more complicated, if you want a real picture of what has happened. It involves a macro understanding of societal changes, and a detailed knowledge of the history of political parties. Keep one thing in mind – nearly everyone who tells you why something happens politically, has no idea why something really happened, and is more likely just using the topic as an excuse to rant about something completely unrelated.
So, I’ll try to come up with some form of rudimentary answer to Jim’s question here, in a fashion that would befit a more academic (ie, “real”) answer.
But one little reminder, before we begin – when we say “turned liberal”, for the purposes of this conversation we are talking about the usurpation of the Maine House, Maine Senate, Governorship and Federal offices by mostly Democrats for the last 30-40 years. We are not talking about the actual political sensibilities of the state, which I think anyone who knows Maine will tell you, is neither really liberal nor conservative, but in fact a different animal altogether.
The Economy
It’s the economy stupid – the transition of the economy, that is.
Over the years Maine has lost jobs in shoes, potato farming, chicken processing, paper making and timber, and has gained them in tourism, hospitality, service, call centers and high tech.
The causes are hardly “Democrats screwing up the state”, but a combination of a number of factors – the biggest of which are the move toward free trade and the general decline of these industries nation wide.
With the change in the economic base from a production economy to a service based economy, the types of people that fill those new and different jobs betray a very different type of political sensibility. The old jobs were entrepreneurial in nature, very rugged and individualistic, so it comes as no surprise that the types of people who would work in them would trend a little more toward the more “leave me alone and let me take care of myself” mentality that is so common in today’s conservative and libertarian communities.
The new jobs that have supplanted them are more centered around work that tends to attract a more liberal minded person. For example, jobs in the high tech sector that exists in Maine brings people who have spent a lot of time in universities, while the hospitality industry attracts wealthy transplants from metropolitan areas in nearby states – urban areas which have trended overwhelmingly Democratic since Roosevelt’s New Deal.
A conservative would argue that “job killing taxes” and “Democratic regulations” have driven producers, businesses and jobs out of Maine, and with them, productive earners who tend to be Republican. This may have a grain of truth to it (Democratic policies in Maine have unquestionably hurt the business environment and driven away thousands of Maine jobs), but the real driver behind this change was the larger economic trends of the country, and their local effect in Maine. The policies of Democrats in power in Augusta may not have helped, but they aren’t the root cause.
Migration
Specifically, out-migration of the younger generation of Mainers, and the transition of the state toward an older population.
This transition has drastically changed the landscape. Currently, Maine is most similar in demographics to a western European country (which may help explain a few things) – by that I mean, low birth rates and an older population.
Maine has the lowest birth rate in the United States, and in the modern American political landscape, booming families are a major driver of Republicanism in many areas. But more importantly, the older generation of Americans is more dependent on state services than the younger generations, and as such, they vote out of self interest.
Threaten any of the typical pillars of social security, or medicare, and you will face a backlash. Promise to protect them and you will be rewarded. As we all know, Republicans have been far more willing to go out on the limb and say that those pillars need to be reformed, changed, but or restructured, while the Democrats have relied on them as central to their agenda.
People in their 20s, 30s and 40s do not respond the same way when those programs are talked about. When President Bush proposed reforming social security, for example, most of that demographic clapped and said “go for it, we don’t believe we’ll see a dime anyway”. As the population ages, this particular voting trend continues to solidify.
The problem isn’t really people in their 20’s leaving – indeed those people are far more liberal minded than the general population and certainly wouldn’t make the electorate any more conservative were they to stay. No, the problem is that those people who leave when they are in their 20s eventually become 30, 40 and 50, start families, maybe start businesses, and in so doing, trend much more conservative. With the “fresh blood” leaving the state, it is providing a vacuum those demographics, resulting in fewer young people, fewer children born, fewer families, and a nigher proportion of older citizens.
As Maine’s population has trended older and older, the importance of specific issues that benefit Democrats reach a much higher level. Interestingly, this may also be part of the reason why ticket splitting is so common and the state has such a reputation for independence – these same older citizens tend also to be much more socially conservative. Something to think about.
Poverty
Maine is one of the poorest per capita states in the nation.
Starting mostly with Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party has chosen rhetoric and policies designed to appeal to the poor. Be it subsidies for certain industries, infrastructure development plans, welfare or unemployment benefits, Democrats have aggressively pushed ideas that have consolidated support from the low income voters in this country for roughly eight decades.
Maine was only one of two states that never voted for Franklin Roosevelt (Vermont is the other, in case you are wondering), despite his New Deal and policies. Maine, however, was a different place when Roosevelt was pushing his agenda, and since the 1930s has trended steadily poorer and poorer as key industries left the state and population growth is stuck in limbo. While the rest of the country was developing their economies, expanding and growing, Maine seemed to be stuck in the mud. Maine’s largest city – Portland – is essentially as big now as it was at the turn of the 20th Century (Boston has grown by more than 100,000 people, and in fact peaked at about 250,000 resident growth before the decline of the American cities and growth of the suburbs post WWII).
Which is all to say that relative to the rest of the country, the income of the citizens of Maine has declined for a very long time. With that decline (and the almost more important to note rise in other states) comes more low income families and voters who either need or want some form of state assistance.
As more time went by, the parties continued to solidify into what they are today, and Republicans in Maine started to sound much more like their national counterparts, railing against spending, waste, bums who take advantage of the system, and so on, while offering abstract notions of growth through cutting taxes. Meanwhile the Democrats in Maine similarly adopted national Democratic rhetoric and policies that championed helping the disadvantaged by spending money on programs and entitlements. This came to a head in the Johnson Great Society initiatives, which also coincided with a period in American history where politics and parties, changed forever.
The Changing Nature of the Republican Party
Shockingly, most people don’t realize this, but the Democratic and Republican parties have only really existed as they are currently in our minds for a few decades. The idea that the Republican Party is the home for the social conservatives, for example, is relatively new, was essentially started over the Civil Rights Act, and really came to prominence with the rise of the moral majority and Christian right in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Consider the following maps of landslide elections only two cycles apart, for instance:
If you go look at the maps of presidential elections from 1860 until 1960, you will notice a very obvious trend – that Republicans were headquartered in the north-east, strong in the cities, and weak in the south. The Civil Rights Act, Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the rise of social conservatives in the Republican Party (and, incidentally, former anti-communist Democrats put off by the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party who would later become known as [cue creepy, evil music], neo-conservatives), and the polarization of figures in the respective parties in the post-Reagan era all would serve to completely flip the map upside down and reshape politics.
Sadly, nearly everyone who talks about politics today is stuck in the most modern incarnation of what political identity means, with basically no knowledge (or perhaps, interest) in tracking and learning “what brought us to this point”. These people think the Republicans were always the champions of state’s rights and Federalism (ha!). Shame, because seeing those trends helps us predict the future. But I digress.
Suffice it to say, what a Republican was in 1950 was not the same as what a Republican is today, and the radical changes that began within the parties in the 1960s and beyond – specifically how the Republican Party changed – is really the major culprit here.
Maine’s Republicanism that dominated its political history was never what you would consider modern Republicanism.
Maine’s dominant “Yankee Republicanism” of the early 20th century up until about the late 50s and early 60s was much more aligned with what eventually became known as the “Rockefeller” wing of the party – in other words, Republicans who supported large spending projects for infrastructure and education, pro-civil rights movement types of politicians.
Barry Goldwater’s pseudo-libertarian brand of conservatism was not what the successful Republicans in control of Maine were interested in. You could call them “moderates” if you would like, but in reality, the Republicans of this ilk were advocates of modernization, and viewed the Federal government as a proper actor to spur that modernization. This brand of the GOP was personified by people like Dwight Eisenhower, who was the enemy of the Taft wing (the highly fiscally conservative) of the Republican Party and gave us major national projects like the interstate system. Again, the “state’s rights” pro-federalism Republican party didn’t really exist at this point.
The point is, the Republicans that were succeeding in Maine were not very similar to today’s Republicans. As time has gone by and each party has consolidated and entrenched its ideological base and gone on successive purging campaigns of “impurity”, the Maine Republican Party, and Republicans in Maine in general, have started to look more and more like the national brand, which in the past 30 or 40 years has been increasingly distant from what the people of the state respond to.
As the brand of Republicanism gets increasingly socially conservative and fiscally conservative, the increasingly old, and poor population of the state, who work in service based jobs respond to it less and less. Yankee Republicanism is dead, and National Republicanism has supplanted it, and today, the only Republicans who succeed on the state level (namely Snowe and Collins), seem to be throwbacks to that old school brand that favors federal involvement in key sectors, pays attention to the poorer and older segments of the state, and have a more moderate sensibility on social issues ranging from abortion to gay rights.
Outmaneuvering By Democrats
See Muskie, Ed. The stranglehold that Republicans had in Maine was so strong that from 1937 to 1955, Republicans controlled every single major elected office in the state, and maintained absurd majorities in the Maine House and Maine Senate.
Then came Ed Muskie. Muskie was the first Democrat in Maine to figure out how to put together a winning state wide coalition since FDR began to redefine party politics. He was able to identify groups of Mainers who had been voting for the GOP out of either tradition or habit, but could be separated and potentially vote Democrat.
From that point on, Democrats did just that, and wedged away a significant portion of the Maine electorate from the GOP. This was in many ways long overdue, given the previously mentioned changes to politics that swept the nation with Roosevelt, but had yet failed to sweep Maine. But more than this, it was a triumph of organization and tactical politics.
Perhaps atrophied from too long (and too easily) dominating Maine politics, the Maine Republican Party never really seemed to have much of an answer, and consistently lost more and more across the state, until they finally lost the Maine House in 1975, and the Maine Senate in 1983. Since then, the Democrats have consistently outperformed the Republicans at political organizing, voter identification, coalition building, and tactical political strategy. Maine Republicans have had virtually no support from the national Republican apparatus since 1992, and the infrastructure that is the party has mostly withered on the vine, with only a few brief blips of hope, such as Snowe and Collins (though many Republicans wouldn’t call them “hope” at all), 1986 when John McKernan recaptured the Blaine House after a 20 year absence, the 1994 election that saw the Republicans re-take the Maine Senate and elect a Republican in CD-1, and the power sharing agreement in the Maine Senate in 2002. Other than that, it has been a woefully pathetic stint of four decades for the GOP in the state.
But still, in the end, even despite its radical shifts in demographics, economy, industrial base, and the macro party trends that have conspired against Republicans, the state is at its core a stubbornly independent one who is more than happy to accept a Republican or a Democrat, depending on who they are. I’ve said it before, but Maine really isn’t blue in anything other than who controls the government – rather it is gray. The same people who wonder why the state is so blue could easily witness a complete reversal of everything we have seen over the last several decades, given the right set of circumstances (I wouldn’t hold my breath, though), so don’t be so quick to swear about the nature of the state, politically.
In the end, though, I hope that this article has somewhat answered Jim’s question, in a more realistic and honest way than what I think we have gotten so far.