Politics
Golden Sweeps Maine’s 2nd’s Congressional District Race
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Democratic candidate Jared Golden has won Maine’s Tuesday 2nd Congressional District primary.
Voters chose assistant Maine House Majority Leader and Marine Corps vet Golden over conservationist Lucas St. Clair and bookseller Craig Olson. With 68 percent of the district voting, Golden captured 49.7 percent of the vote compared to St. Clair’s 40.6 and Olson’s 9.7 percent.
Golden had a significant monetary advantage going into the primaries, but experts predicted the race would be tight.
“The farmers, the fishermen, the people working in logging and recreation, they’re working hard and they want to know what [their representative] is doing and how they’re doing it,” former Gov. John Baldacci said before election night, the Bangor Daily News reports.
Golden will attempt to defeat incumbent Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin, who was first elected in 2014 and again in 2016, winning the seat back from the Democrats’ 20-year long run. Golden will have a difficult task given that Poliquin has raised almost double the money of his opponents, but he is popular and gained notoriety after working for Maine Sen. Susan Collins.
The district’s elections are traditionally tight given the many blue and red pockets that make up a diverse and massive electorate: Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is the largest district on the east coast. The district supported former President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, but backed President Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
Maine’s uses a “ranked-choice voting,” a system that has never been used in any statewide U.S. election previously. Rank-choice voting means that voters rank the candidates based on preference rather than voting for one candidate. If one candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, that candidate wins the primary. If not, the candidate who received the least first-choice votes is eliminated. The votes of those who ranked the eliminated candidate first are given to their second choice candidate and the counting resumes until one candidate receives a majority.
In addition to ranking their preferred candidates, Maine residents voted on whether the state would continue or abandon ranked-choice voting ahead of the November 2018 elections. Voters chose to keep the system in place.
Golden and Poliquin will now face off on the general election ballot in November 2018.
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