A political prognosticator in Washington, D.C., has included Chellie Pingree of Maine among five incumbents in the U.S. House of Representatives whose seemingly safe seats may be in jeopardy on Election Day.

Stuart Rothenberg, a Colby College graduate who is a contributing writer for Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress, lists Pingree as a “Currently Safe Democrat” on the website of his Rothenberg Political Report. However, he wrote in a Roll Call column published Tuesday that the race “could become a lot closer than anyone expected.”

Rothenberg cited Pingree’s history as head of Common Cause and wrote that she can “credibly campaign as a good government reformer.” But he noted that she won an open seat in 2008 with “only” 55 percent of the vote and has been involved in a controversy over her use of a private jet owned by her fiance, S. Donald Sussman, a wealthy hedge fund manager.

Challenging Pingree is Republican Dean Scontras, a businessman from Eliot who has never been elected to political office.

“The Democrat said she is abiding by ethics rules, but the controversy may have given Scontras an opening in a state that exemplifies quirkiness – and hates hypocrites,” Rothenberg wrote.

Pingree and Scontras are running in Maine’s 1st Congressional District, which voted 61-38 percent for Democrat Barack Obama over Republican John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.

“It’s significant in that some people are really starting to pay attention,” Scontras said. “She won by 10 points in a big Democratic year. It was a pretty good victory but it wasn’t as good as the top of the ticket.”

Scontras has trailed Pingree by 24 and 28 percentage points in two waves of The Maine Poll, an independent survey commissioned by MaineToday Media.

Results from a third wave are expected to be released on mainetoday.com today and published in The Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel newspapers Thursday.

A poll – commissioned by a conservative website – that intentionally over-sampled Republican voters last week because of an anticipated “enthusiasm” gap in midterm elections, showed Pingree with a 46-38 advantage.

Pingree’s spokesman Willy Ritch said he was not surprised that a poll by a conservative website would paint a better picture for a conservative candidate.

Even so, he said, “We always expected it to tighten up significantly. Polls will probably be all over the place, but Chellie doesn’t spend a lot of time paying attention to polls. She’s out there every day, working hard, and as she has said before, the only one that matters is the one on Election Day.”

Also on Tuesday, the Maine Democratic Party attacked Scontras for coming out, during a call-in program last week on Maine Public Radio, against a minimum wage increase and tariffs against Chinese imports.

Mary Erin Casale, the party’s executive director, cited a report in March pegging China’s minimum wage at about 85 cents an hour and the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

“Dean Scontras seems to think that to become competitive with China, we need to pay our workers even less,” Casale said in a prepared statement.

Scontras said that when he speaks with people who run small businesses, they tell him that a wage increase would lead to higher prices at the cash register or fewer employees.

“We have to look at the real economic issues,” he said. “Does it work or does it cost jobs?”

Casale also said Maine’s entire congressional delegation – Democratic Reps. Pingree and Mike Michaud and Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins – testified before the International Trade Commission about China and India illegally subsidizing their paper industries, costing workers at Maine paper mills their jobs.

Scontras told a radio caller who asked about potential tariffs that the likely result would be a trade war.

“That sounds like a good idea when you want to put up tariffs,” Scontras said Tuesday. “But history shows, that forces the other guy to do the same thing, and pretty soon that tariff wall is pretty high. All of our trade agreements need to be free. If they’re not free, then the title is misleading, then you’ve got my support to change that.”

 

Staff Writer Glenn Jordan can be contacted at 791-6425 or at: gjordan@pressherald.com

 

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