Al Diamon
It's Either Big News....
(page 1 of 2)
A change in the climate?: The Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram have lost all their experienced political reporters, but that doesn’t mean the journalists left behind can’t score a major scoop. Or, possibly, a major screw-up.
On July 20, staff writer Dieter Bradbury wrote a story on the presidential race in Maine in which he stated, “About 39 percent of voters [in this state] are unenrolled, 29 percent are registered as Democrats and 32 percent as Republicans, according to figures from the Secretary of State’s Office.”
The same figures turned up the next day in a story by Elbert Aull, again attributed to the secretary’s office.
In addition, Bradbury claims, this time without any attribution, that, “Democrats control the first [congressional] district in southern Maine …. Lewiston is in the second district, where Republicans hold the edge.”
This is all big news. If it’s true. Which I don’t think it is.
For at least three decades, Democrats have had more party members in Maine than Republicans. That’s according to the Secretary of State’s Office. If a reporter has evidence that’s changed, he should have made a lot more of that shift than a couple of sentences buried deep in an inconsequential story about John McCain visiting the state.
I called the Department of State today for the most recent voter registration numbers it could provide, which are from the 2006 election. At that time, unenrolled voters comprised almost 38 percent of the electorate, Dems had just over 31 percent and the GOP managed a tad over 28 percent. About 3 percent were Green Independents, who for some reason don’t show up on the Bradbury/Aull scale at all. A Google search turned up some slightly different numbers on various news and political sites, but none varied enough to give Republicans anything close to edge over Democrats.
As for the claim the 2nd District is a GOP stronghold, I await evidence. The northern part of the state voted Democratic in the last four presidential races. The area’s congressional seat has been in Dem hands since 1994. State senators from the region skew slightly to the right, state House members slightly to the left. That doesn’t sound like much of a Republican “edge.”
If the Press Herald has a scoop on this alleged power shift, it needs to call attention to it with a big headline. If the paper made a mistake (or two), it needs to run a correction and stop repeating the error(s).
Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008 in Permalink
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Reader Comments:
Bill Richards has written several excellent pieces about the Blethen family's sorry escapades here in Maine.
What's startling as you read them is that the Blethens apparently borrowed the entire $230 million they paid in 1998 for the Maine newspaper chain. Newspapers were riding high in the late 1990s. They tended to sell for 8 to 10 times their yearly earnings, before taxes and interest and depreciation. So in essence the Blethens were probably pledging every penny of profit they hoped to make on the Maine papers for the next 10 years as repayment of the money they borrowed to buy the papers.
Talk about a sucker's bet!
What's hard to figure is who was more stupid: The folks who borrowed the money? Or the bankers who loaned it to them?
Either way, the employees of the papers (and those of us who read the papers) are the big losers in this sorry story.