Update from Maine

by: Adam Bink

Mon Nov 02, 2009 at 11:00

So I'm back on the ground in Maine helping the online team. Things are a little intense, so a few quick bullet points:

• The latest polling from Public Policy Polling came out at midnight, showing us down 51-47%. Their methodology has a few problems with it, but they've consistently shown our opponents trending upward.

• The field team is firing on all cylinders. Biggest concern is youth turnout in off-year. In 2005, an anti-discrimination ballot initiative went our way and we had one campus field organizer for the whole state. This year we have nine. But the numbers are tight as hell, and if turnout is like a normal election year, we'll lose. Everyone is saying we have to execute a flawless program.

• A fun chunk of the progressive and LGBT blogosphere has come to Maine for the final push. John and Joe from AMERICABlog are both here, Julia Rosen from Courage/Calitics/C&L, Jeremy Hooper from Good As You, a number of others. We're all spread out in field, online, video.

• Our opponents just pushed out a $25,000 fundraising push yesterday and used it to buy this radio ad that just came out:

  They also jumped their online ad buy (it's really fun being here in Maine and now ads are geo-targeted to me, so I see them a lot more).

  The campaign needs to increase its own buy to respond, but we need to raise to do it- we've put a lot of money into field. We put up a red alert this morning. $15,000 has come in the last hour. The campaign is calling it a "red alert" because we literally could be swamped on radio, online, and TV today and tomorrow- and as I wrote here, their last two ads are the most effective of the cycle. $25,000 buys a LOT of time in Maine.

  If you could give just one more time for the campaign, it would go a very, very long way. Tomorrow is the big day. Thanks for this one last bit of help.