This guy ran the numbers for the 2008 US Senate elections across the country and calculated the amount spent by each candidate per vote earned.
The results show that Tom Allen spent $21 for every vote he received in November, making his run the most costly unsuccessful major-party challenge to an incumbent anywhere in the country, per vote. Allen's votes were cheaper only compared to the candidates in tight races in Alaska and New Hampshire and incumbent Max Baucus' campaign in Montana.
Susan Collins spent more money, but also won a lot more votes, resulting in an expenditure of $17 per vote.
Those numbers pale in comparison to the third party per-vote expenditures. If we accept the totals reported by the Secretary of State and broken down on Herbert Hoffman's website, (which are probably way off) Hoffman spent $76 for every one of his votes while Laurie Dobson (who still probably thinks she's running for something) spent a whopping $528 for each of her 27 votes.
The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza gives Susan Collins an honorable mention for best senate campaign of 2008.
In an election cycle where Republican senators in blue states were an endangered species (John Sununu in New Hampshire, Gordon Smith in Oregon, Norm Coleman -- maybe -- in Minnesota), Collins was never seriously challenged by Rep. Tom Allen.
Allen did everything a challenger should do in an anti-incumbent year -- try to tie Collins to Bush, hammer her for past votes -- but nothing stuck. The simple fact was that Maine voters liked and trusted Collins and saw no reason to fire her. Her campaign deftly took advantage of her high personal and job approval numbers by using their campaign ads to remind voters of why the liked Collins.
Her 23-point victory in a year where Republicans across the country were scrambling for their political lives speaks to the kind of candidate Collins is (wildly underestimated) and the quality of campaign she ran.
Pat Callahan sat down with Steve Abbott, Susan Collins' chief of staff and campaign manager, to discuss the recent campaign and what's next for the Senator and for Abbott himself.
Thanks to your support and hard work, the Collins for Senator campaign is celebrating a phenomenal victory – with 596 of 612 precincts reporting, 435,598 to 273, 213. That's 61 to 38 percent – a 23-point win! Senator Collins, whose race was specifically targeted by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and numerous out of state special interests, bucked the national trend and emerged victorious on Election Day. Here are a few statistics from the election returns that we thought you'd enjoy:
Susan won each of Maine's 16 counties.
Susan won all but 16 of Maine's 498 cities and towns.
In half of Maine's 16 counties, Susan won every single town, including all the towns in Aroostook, Maine's northern most county, and all the towns in York, Maine's southern most county.
Proving her strength with both Republicans and Democrats, Susan won the largely Democratic communities of Lewiston (55% to 45%), Biddeford (53% to 47%), Rumford (53% to 47%), Jay (53% to 47%) and Millinocket (63% to37%), and Madawaska (51% to 48%)
Susan out-polled Barack Obama, who won Maine with 58%.
Susan Collins emailed out one last web ad to her list today, again attacking Allen on the issue of congressional attendance. I imagine her campaign is thrilled to be closing the campaign sparring over voting percentages rather than talking about the economy or Iraq or a half-dozen other hot-button issues that are cutting against Republicans this year. If she wins this week, which seems almost certain, it will be because she has almost completely controlled the narrative of the campaign.
Kevin Wack implies that the Rasmussen poll showing Collins with her largest lead since April likely signals that the game is over. Even Collins Watch seems to have given up the ghost.
Dennis Bailey took a break from running CasinosNo! recently to offer Rep. Tom Allen some advice on his blog on how he should have handled the attendance issue.
As a former college football player, Tom should know you can’t score on defense. Here’s what he should have said:
"Yea, I missed some votes. There were times I had to care for dying parents and be with my wife who was suffering from health problems. Maybe Susan can’t but Maine people can certainly understand that. But you know what? Maine and this country would have been a lot better off if Susan Collins had missed a few votes, like her vote to give tax breaks to the very wealthy instead of Maine people; like her vote that got us into the Iraq War that has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives; like her vote to (insert outrage here). On the votes that really matter, it would have been better for all of us if Susan Collins had taken the day off."
Allen is closing the race with an attack highlighting Collins' broken term-limits pledge.
Update: The Bangor Daily News has some (fashion) advice for Bailey, who they label as the state's worst-dressed politico.
Breaking with Olympia Snowe, John McCain and even Sarah Palin, Susan Collins has announced her support for convicted Senator Ted Stevens remaining in office.
It's a rather inexplicable move, politically. Dan is enjoying himself.
To put Mitchell's encouraging comments in perspective, while he did enter the 1982 US Senate race significantly behind in the polls (after being appointed to the Senate in 1980), by a week before the election he was up by at least 4 points according to UPI (based on partially-reported internal polls). He ended up winning 61-39 over first-district congressman Dave Emery.
A better source of hope for Allen from Mitchell's political history might be his 1974 race for governor. The Press Herald gave Mitchell a 19-point lead over James B. Longley on the eve of the election, but in the end Longley pulled off a 3-point win to become the state's first independent governor.
Drop the defensiveness about Senate attendance records (which is playing completely on Collins' turf) and he's got a strong argument, one we should have been hearing more forcefully and more often before now.
Also from Jessica Alaimo's great field reporting: George Mitchell doesn't trust the polls.
Campaigns often object to their opponents' negative ads, and sometimes even try to get them pulled off the air. Last night is the first time I've seen a campaign send their opponent's attack ad to their own email list.
The Collins campaign sent the email to tout her dominance of recent newspaper endorsements, but the piece also attacks an Allen ad for being dishonest, and the most prominent link in the email reads "Click here to listen to the ad." Clicking through allows the recipient to hear an mp3 of an Allen radio ad (hosted on Collins' servers) and read the campaigns rebuttal of one of its points - that the Collins campaign is unfairly criticizing Allen for missing votes due to family emergencies.
Interestingly, that particular attack is only about 12 seconds of the minute-long ad. The rest of the spot is about Collins' support of the Bush economic policies, claims that are not rebutted on that page.
The New York Times says Collins is "gliding towards a third term" and contrasts her position with the rest of the national Republican party.
While other Republican incumbents have found themselves brutally assailed by Democrats as allies of President Bush, who is mortally unpopular, and have seen their poll numbers plummet as a result of the financial crisis, Ms. Collins has offered Republicans a very bright spot on an otherwise bleak political map.
“She is absolutely untouchable,” said Rebecca Fisher, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “It truly is a case where she has elevated above party. She is their senator, and they love her, and they don’t care about anyone else.
A new WCSH-WLBZ/SurveyUSA poll of 642 likely or actual voters conducted on Sunday and Monday finds Allen gaining on Collins, but likely not quickly enough to win the election now less than two weeks away. Collins leads 54-43 in the survey, compared to 55-39 four weeks ago.
This survey has a higher sampling of Democrats than the previous poll (28% of whom say they're voting for Collins).
The one ray of sunlight for Allen is the 14% of respondents who report that they've already voted. Allen is winning this group by 5 points (with a higher margin of error).
In the same poll, Obama is winning the second CD by 6 and the first by a stunning 22 points. In the poll 4 weeks ago, Obama led by 5 points in both districts.
It looks like McCain's spending in CD2 and the Palin visit have kept it from being a blowout like southern Maine, but this result puts it squarely in the second tier of battleground states, which include Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
In a testament to his campaign's early voting operation, Obama leads by 27 points among those who have already voted. The poll has a ± 3.9% margin of error.
Liberal magazine The Nationweighs in on Collins' lukewarm opposition to McCain's robocalls:
If Susan Collins wants to be like Margaret Chase Smith, she needs to make her own "Declaration of Conscience" -- and then she needs to act upon it.
[...]doesn't she need to speak up, forcefully and in detail about why the McCain campaign's tactics are wrong? Doesn't she need to take her party's nominee to task and say, as Margaret Chase Smith did more than half a century ago: "I don't want to see the Republican Party win that way."
And what if McCain does not listen to Collins? What if he and his campaign refuse to halt not just the robo calls but related smear tactics against Obama, who happens to be a colleague of the Maine senator?
If McCain refuses to right the course of his McCarthy-like campaign, shouldn't Collins quit as his campaign co-chair for Maine?
Kevin Wack thinks the robocall issue helps the Collins campaign and represents a tactical mistake by the Democrats.
If the new numbers from Research200/DailyKos are right, it doesn't really matter. The poll has Collins up by 13 points. They also have Obama up by 11 in the second district.
