In his Dec. 2 letter to the editor, Jay Kilbourn of Kennebunk responded to the Nov. 18 letter from Andy and Sara Torbett of Atkinson that charged arrogant southern Maine liberals with imposing ranked-choice voting to weaken the influence of conservative voters in northern and rural Maine.
Noting that Bruce Poliquin’s 2,000-vote Election Day margin over Jared Golden in the 2nd District was reversed by ranked-choice voting, which lost by 20,000 votes in the 2nd District in 2016 but passed narrowly statewide because of 1st District support, the Torbetts argued that ranked-choice voting is southern Maine liberals’ way of overcoming “the obvious intellectual deficits of northern Maine hicks, those lovable, quaint and postcard-worthy but not vote-worthy backwoods Mainers.”
“Voting the southern Maine way,” the Torbetts lament, “is all we have left.”
Democrat Kilbourn replied that he “did not work to impose (his) views on northern Mainers,” while admitting to “blind spots and prejudices about conservatives in rural Maine, just not those suggested by Andy and Sara Torbett.”
Two questions for Mr. Kilbourn: 1) Just what are his “blind spots and prejudices about conservatives in rural Maine”? 2) If Democrats had back-to-back Blaine House victories the last two elections with less than 50 percent of the vote, do you think the ranked-choice voting issue would have even surfaced? I’d bet the Torbetts wouldn’t have proposed it.
Coincidentally, in a Nov. 30 interview with NPR, defeated Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill blamed her loss on the “failure” of the Democratic Party “to gain enough trust with rural Americans,” i.e., Barack Obama’s “clingers” and Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.”
If the choice were put to me to have the country governed entirely by metropolitan Maine or entirely by rural Maine, I’d choose the dumb, lovable, quaint, postcard-worthy, backwoods hicks every time.
Charles Todorich
South Portland
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