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Maine’s unique ranked-choice voting system reared its head again in Tuesday’s primaries, with four of the five Democrats running for governor packed together with real chances to win.
That includes Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is in the strangest position of anybody on the ballot. She finished fourth in the first round but has the highest chance of winning the primary, according to simulations using real first-round results and a SurveyUSA poll released last week by the Bangor Daily News and FairVote.
Here’s why Democrats are in this spot and the ways our data could be right and wrong.
Bellows has some sneaky broad appeal across the party.
Ranked-choice voting doesn’t just reward the candidate with the most first-round votes. It rewards the candidate who is most broadly acceptable. By that measure, Bellows has a case to be the strongest candidate in the field.
Almost half of former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson’s supporters preferred her in our poll as their second choice, the largest transfer weight among any pair of candidates in the race. As of noon Wednesday, she was only 700 votes or so behind Jackson, who is in third place behind former public health chief Nirav Shah and former House Speaker Hannah Pingree.
The fifth-place candidate, Angus King III, will be eliminated. Our poll found nearly a third of his voters back Bellows. This would send Bellows into third place and eliminate Jackson.
There’s a Jackson coin flip at the center of the pro-Bellows case.
Bellows’ fate in this round is far from assured. She has a 37% chance of winning, according to our simulations. But King’s votes eliminate Jackson before Bellows in only about half of all scenarios. When that happens, nearly half his votes flow to her, vaulting her from fourth place into the lead heading into the final round.
Shah reaches the final round in about 60% of simulations, as does Pingree. But Shah is a weak closer and his supporters prefer Pingree and Bellows as backups. That’s why he leads in only about 25% of all simulated races despite leading in the first round. Pingree’s win rate is slightly higher at 28% because of a broader base. Jackson is down at 10%.
A word of caution: There’s noise in our data.
The first-round numbers in our simulation come directly from Tuesday’s actual results. But the transfer preferences — how each candidate’s supporters rank their lower choices — come from the poll of 430 likely Democratic primary voters conducted May 28 through June 3. That poll asked voters to rank all five candidates, and we used those responses to model how votes move when candidates are eliminated.
The main limitation is sample size. When the poll asked Jackson supporters specifically about their second and third choices, it was working with roughly 90 respondents — enough to establish a direction, but with a margin of error of about 10 percentage points on any individual transfer percentage.
This means the 48% figure for Jackson voters preferring Bellows could realistically be anywhere from 38 to 58%. To account for that, our simulation draws transfer proportions from a range of plausible values each time it runs. The wider the uncertainty, the more the simulation reflects that later rounds are harder to call than the first.
Bellows’ position as the narrow frontrunner is a finding we have some confidence in, given how dominant her second-choice support appears across multiple candidates’ voters. But this is a close-enough race that a polling miss on any one of those transfer percentages could flip the result. After all, we had her at 11% in our polling, missing many of her backers.
This isn’t gospel. Wait for the count.