Olympia Snowe’s Primary Challenger Hires Consulting Firms

Maine’s Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, who is up for re-election next year, has long drawn the ire of many in her party for being insufficiently committed to conservative principles. While she has avoided a serious primary challenge in her previous three Senate campaigns, her vulnerability this time around has been evident since at least November 2009, when a Public Policy Polling survey found that just 31 percent of Maine Republican voters would support her over a more conservative primary opponent. Now, with businessman and former congressional candidate Scott D’Amboise gearing up to take her on, Snowe’s electoral troubles within the Republican Party have become impossible to ignore.
 
Indicating the seriousness of his campaign, D’Amboise recently engaged the services of two prominent Republican consulting firms: The Prosper Group will take care of general consulting, online fundraising, and telephone voter contact, while Base Connect will handle direct mail fundraising.
 
In 2010, the Prosper Group provided similar services to the campaigns of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, and Indiana Sen. Dan Coats as well as congressional candidates including Rep. Allen West (R-FL). In 2010, Base Connect was responsible for the $16 million that Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle raised through direct mail.
 
D’Amboise, a former selectman from southern Maine, ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2006. In facing Snowe, he has several large hurdles to overcome, including a significant name-recognition gap and Snowe’s ample financial resources. As of April 1, she had more than $2 million in cash on hand and had raised over $877,000 in the first quarter of the year.
 
Nonetheless, D’Amboise hopes to emulate the success of Gov. Paul LePage, who wa s elected last year, showing that a conservative Republican (not to mention an extremely outspoken one) can win statewide in Maine, given the right conditions. LePage ran as an underdog in the seven-way Republican primary and pulled out a 20-point win over the second-place finisher. He went on to ride the GOP wave in the general election, winning by 2 points over his Democratic opponent.
 
“In Maine, you’re only talking about thirty to forty thousand households in a primary like this, particularly if there is low turnout,” says Kurt Luidhardt, vice president of the Prosper Group. “Just like Paul LePage, who won his primary with only $20,000, a lot can be done in Maine with little money and hard work.” Luidhardt hopes to spearhead an online effort to fundraise and increase name ID on D’Amboise’s behalf through social media ahead of Maine’s June 2012 primary.
 
In his favor, D’Amboise has Snowe’s still-lackluster polling numbers among Republicans. A PPP survey from March 3 to 6 found that only 33 percent of Maine Republican voters would vote to send Snowe back to the Senate for a fourth term, while 58 percent would support a “more conservative challenger.” The same poll, however, found that, in a head-to-head match-up, 43 percent of Republicans supported Snowe, compared with 18 percent support for D’Amboise (and 10 percent for fellow challenger and conservative activist Andrew Ian Dodge). The poll also found that 84 percent of those surveyed had no opinion of D’Amboise.
 
Snowe, meanwhile, has her own model of success to follow—Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who won re-election last year as an independent write-in candidate after losing the primary to a Tea Party–backed rival. The PPP survey found that Snowe enjoyed more than 50 percent support in several different three-way match-ups, each pitting her against a conservative Republican and a Democrat.
 
Meanwhile, D’Amboise has already gone on the offensive against Snowe. On Tuesday, he released a statement calling on her to resign after the U.S. Justice Department joined a lawsuit alleging fraud against the state of Maine by an education company that Snowe’s husband headed for over a decade. In the statement, D’Amboise claimed that Snowe had “directly benefited” from her husband’s affiliation with the firm and had therefore been complicit in the firm’s mishandling of taxpayer funds.
 
In a strongly worded statement released in response, Snowe said that her opponents’ statements are a “reflection of their character.” “I find it deeply regrettable that my opponents apparently are going to run their campaigns based on slurs and innuendo and not facts,” her statement concludes. 
 
The 2012 campaign for Senate in the Pine Tree State has already begun.
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E. E-mailhim at nrothman@campaignsandelections.com