In a new poll from Greenburg Quinlan Rosner, all of the ballot-listed candidates for governor of Maine are included, which means that voters got the opportunity to choose independents Eliot Cutler, Shawn Moody, and Kevin Scott. Cutler, a Carter Administration official and former Democrat, is at 10 percent. Moody, a laregly self-funded millionaire, is surprisingly close to Cutler, is at 8 percent. And Scott, a Maine businessman with significantly less money than Moody, is at 2 percent.
Both Cutler and Moody saw increases in support from GQR’s last poll in July, and the two major party candidates are receiving less than 80 percent of the total support (7 percent of it is “undecided”). While this does fit into the apparent emergence of conditions that are somewhat harder on the major parties these days, this is not unprecedented for Maine. They have elected two independent governors in the past 40 years and given consistently high vote totals to the Green Party (who is not running a candidate in the gubernatorial race this year).
Shawn Moody will continue to gain traction as the truth about Cutler begins to spread visa vie the “secret files of Eliot Cutler” which is an expose’
of his years as a Democrat, working for Edmund Muskie and as director of OMB for the Carter admninistration, as a Washington lobbyist, Trustee of now bankrupt Thornburg Mortgage, and his years in Beijing advocating for corporations and lobby’s in support of the transfer of US jobs and technologies. Verification of this can be found on the site of Washington law firm Akin Grump, which defines this groups activities and provides Mr. Cutlers profile.
Moody is eating into Cutler’s support more than anything else. The two Independents split a base of the independent voter.