Did Maine Taxpayers Pay for a Poll that Parses Findings to Persuade Mills to Challenge Collins?

Why would a nationally-recognized Democrat pollster pen an article about her political research in the state of Maine?

It could be that Celinda Lake is just really interested in the showdown between Maine Governor Janet Mills (D) and U.S. President Donald Trump (R) over whether transgender students should play on girls’ school sports teams. Or, more likely, she was paid to do so.

As The Maine Wire reported last week, Maine’s Equity Commission awarded Lake’s firm a head-scratching $200,000 in 2023 in a no-bid contract.

[RELATED: Maine’s Equity Commission Doled Out Lucrative No-Bid Contracts to Politically Connected Consultants, NGOs]

Last week, Lake weighed in on next year’s U.S. Senate race in Maine, in which Senator Susan Collins (R) will be seeking re-election for a sixth term in Washington, where she now chairs the Senate Appropriation Committee. While a Democrat former Hill staffer has expressed interest in challenging Senator Collins, no serious contender for the nomination of the party that currently controls the Blaine House, both chambers of the state legislature and both congressional districts has yet come to the fore.

National Democrats, like Lake, are actively praising Governor Mills in the hope she throws her hat into the ring. Noting the failure of the attractive though non-substantial Sara Gideon to oust Collins five years ago — even with a historically unprecedented war chest — Dems seem to have gotten the memo they’d need a heavy hitter to do better next year.

“To be clear, neither we nor Maine People’s Alliance, of which Beacon is a project, is reporting these numbers as a way to urge Mills to run for office, or to indicate that we would necessarily support her if she did (even as we admire her strength in opposing Trump’s agenda.) That having been said, these numbers are compelling,” Lake and her co-authors assert in a Maine Beacon column.

Really? In other words, they’re painting a picture of a vulnerable Collins and an indomitable Mills ‘just ’cause.’ Hmmm.

Aside from being disingenuous on why they’re writing, the high-flying Beltway pollsters face another credibility deficit: they’re focusing on relative favorability as opposed to electability, which is measured principally by ballot-test questions, ie. ‘for whom will you vote.’ That is a very different, and altogether more consequential question.

And as an experienced pollster, Lake knows that.

While making much of Collins’ lukewarm favorability among Republicans, their article ignores the reality that when push comes to shove, Maine Republicans have for nearly thirty years been coming home to her despite disagreements on various issues.

According to the latest Pine Tree State Poll from UNH, Janet Mills now has a negative net approval of -1.

This is the first time UNH has showed her with negative approval and below 50% support. Much of the decline has come from rising Republican disapproval #mepolitics https://t.co/ihLs9BMRzP pic.twitter.com/qxRFkjlc3w

— Maine Politics (@ME_Politics_) February 24, 2025

On February 24 — three days before her initial stand-off with Trump over transgenders — Mills was falling in job performance ratings, as a UNH poll then showed. That closer-to-home survey showed her disapproval at 49 percent and her approval at 48 percent, a one percent performance deficit. According to UNH, that was the first time Mills was underwater in a poll.

That the more recent Lake poll showed her favorability to be 51 percent, and recognizing that here too there is an element (though less of one than with the ballot test) of apples-to-oranges, we hardly see a massive bounce gained by her donning the armor of Joan of Arc.

Efforts to draft Mills into the Senate race are not restricted to out-of-state pollsters who have been paid handsomely both by a state-funded commission and probably also by the Maine Peoples’ Alliance. Two weeks ago, The New York Times ran a fawning feature on Mills as the plucky governor “staring down” the dragon known as Trump. Was that gratuitous ego inflation, or did it too have a purpose?

One thing is crystal clear: people from away REALLY want Mills to run.

Fluffing aside, the question of whether Mills would walk away with the Senate seat that was once held by Margaret Chase Smith is by no means answered.

The other question that Lake’s “we’re really not trying to urge Mills to run, honest” screed raises is who paid for her poll? If it wasn’t Maine taxpayers, then what was that no-bid $200,000 payment for? Chump change for a big name pollster perhaps, but here in Maine it kind of matters.