BRUNSWICK, Maine — In the last 50 years, Maine citizens have voted on a multitude of referendums covering everything from bear hunting to gay marriage to the fate of a nuclear power plant. During that time, Chris Potholm played in a role in many of them as a pollster or consultant, and now he’s written a book on the subject called “How Maine Decides: An Insider’s Guide to How Ballot Measures Are Won and Lost.”
To call Potholm an insider is to perhaps understate his credentials. His first big win came in 1972 when he managed the campaign that sent Bill Cohen to Congress from Maine’s second district. Along the way he worked on many other campaigns in Maine and beyond, offering advice to Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and to supporters and opponents of numerous referendums.
But Potholm also has an outsider’s perspective, one sharpened by the half century he spent teaching government as a professor at Bowdoin College. Clearly he has a zest for the game of politics.
In recent years, though, that enthusiasm has waned. As we talked about his book, I asked a simple question: What do you make of politics these days?
“I am so sad for our country,” he told me. “I am at such a low point.” The nature of political discourse troubles him deeply, as does the number of “really weird, strange things” that Americans embrace.
“The moon is not made of green cheese,” he says emphatically. “I don’t care who says it, or how often they say it. Two plus two does not equal seven!”
The book is filled with campaign axioms from Potholm (“Your friends will do you more harm than your enemies—if you let them”) and observations from political consultants who recall their hits and misses. If enough time has gone by, they can find humor in even their most lopsided defeats.
To quote a consultant’s maxim from the first page: “You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time. And those ain’t bad odds.”