Don’t tell residents of Maine’s Second Congressional District that ticket splitting is a thing of the past – even though it’s currently represented by in the House by Democrat Jared Golden, the vast, heavily-wooded district cast its electoral vote for Donald Trump by a fairly comfortable margin in both 2016 and 2020, making it the only congressional district in New England to vote for the Republican in both elections. 

Given its highly rural character, Trump is unlikely to lose the district in 2024, even if the threat of a strong third party challenger could force him into a runoff via Maine’s ranked-choice voting system.  Under ranked-choice voting, any election that ends with no candidate receiving a majority of the vote is retabulated while eliminating the smallest vote receiver. In other words, Maine voters don’t just vote for one person for president – instead, they rank every candidate by order of preference, and if none of the candidates receives 50% of the vote in the first round of balloting, the lowest performing candidate is eliminated, and the votes of those voters who ranked that candidate first and redistributed to their second choice, and so on and so forth. Ranked-choice voting instead serves to protect the naturally favored party from hemorrhaging disaffected voters, and in Maine’s Second District, that’s clearly the Republicans.

In fact, given the district’s apparent fondness for Trump, the better question might be if such an independent can usurp Harris for second place, much in the same way that Ross Perot beat out George H.W. Bush for runner-up in this district back in 1992. It’s not likely on any eventual reallocation of votes due to ranked-choice voting, but some interesting things could occur in the initial round if both Trump and Harris underperform in this rebellious district.