In France, political advertising on television, radio and even the Internet is banned both the day before and on the day of its elections. Even though here in Maine we prohibit political advertising within 250 feet of polling places during voting, our First Amendment precludes a more pervasive ban.

Nevertheless, as we greet the final tsunami of media advertising, it’s worth taking a look at a couple of our previous electoral episodes to speculate how the outcomes might have been different had the French moratorium on last-minute advertising been in effect.

The 1974 Longley election

The Maine electorate was in a restive mood. The aftermath of Watergate, a recent energy crisis, inflation, unemployment and an independent candidate with less campaign cash but more charisma than his competitors all converged to give rise to one of our more stunning election upsets. With a beleaguered GOP administration in Washington, the nation seemed to be heading toward a Democratic landslide, one that was also widely anticipated in Maine. George Mitchell, the front-runner for governor, played up his party’s perceived popularity with billboards that conspicuously proclaimed “Democrat for Governor.”

The weekend before the election, two independent polls showed Mitchell with a wide lead over Independent James Longley, who placed a distant third in the two most widely circulated voter samplings. The Portland-based Sunday Telegram headline proclaimed, “Mitchell is seen easy winner over Erwin.” It then went on to publicize a poll taken by Northeast Markets Inc. that gave Mitchell 42 percent, the GOP’s Erwin 33 and Longley 23 percent. The Bangor Daily’s statewide poll showed a greater undecided vote and a much closer race between Mitchell and Erwin, but still showed Longley with a poor third-place finish. Their poll had Mitchell at 26, Erwin at 23 and Longley a mere 13 percent.

With less than 36 hours before the polls were due to open, Longley seized the initiative by taping new TV ads that would appear the day before and the day of the election. In them he emphasized not that his poll numbers were low but that his base of support was growing. The version of the ad that ran the day before the election showed Longley’s laser-beam eyes firing from a Mount Rushmore-like gaze of dignified determination. The Lewiston insurance executive thus proclaimed “Your support for my election has skyrocketed during the past five or six days. Some say if we had another week we could upset the professional politicians. I say we can do it tomorrow.” Ads that ran the day of the election urgently substituted “today” for “tomorrow.”

Buoyed by Longley’s dynamic optimism, voters responded to Longley’s election eve summons to repudiate the establishment. In an election whose outcome surely would have been different had an immediate pre-election advertising moratorium been in effect, Longley won with 39-percent of the vote over Mitchell’s 36-percent, a difference of just 10,000 votes.

The crucial role last-minute advertising played in Longley’s victory is further underscored by the fact that Longley’s overall campaign spending was dwarfed by both his major rivals, who each spent some 50 percent more than Longley’s $100,000. (The campaign was also the only one in Maine history with absolute spending caps on gubernatorial campaigns. No candidate could raise more than $160,000. Such limits were by 1976 ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but were nevertheless observed by the candidates in Maine’s 1974 race.)

Emery’s 1974 upset over Kyros

The seemingly impregnable incumbent congressman from Maine’s First District the year Longley won, Peter Kyros, was considered a shoo-in for a fifth term. Running against an obscure, studious appearing 26-year-old engineer, Rep. David Emery of Rockland, Kyros headed into the election without bothering to take out ads for television, an omission he had never before risked. Kyros, an Annapolis and Harvard Law educated former chair of state Democrats, was one of the party’s top vote getters, winning resoundingly over such illustrious household names as retailing magnate Bob Porteous and state Sen. Horace Hildreth Jr. in his career as the undefeated political grand master of southern Maine.

Two days before the election, the Northeast Market’s survey thus showed Kyros heading for yet another decisive win, 59 percent to 41 percent.

Suddenly, Emery burst onto the scene with a hard hitting newspaper ad in the Sunday Telegram. Within less than two days before the poll doors swung open, voters were greeted with a 2,400 word in-your-face full page display that led with the bold headline “Thanks to Peter Kyros, your hard earned paycheck is buying less every week.” Playing upon voter discontent with the most inflationary pressures in more than a generation, the ad sought to connect Kyros with a perceived spendthrift voting record that undermined household pocketbooks.

The ad also featured one of the earliest uses in Maine of the “Call my opponent, ask and find out for yourself,” technique, inviting the reader to “ask Peter’s First District Field Office in Portland to verify,” then giving the phone number at which it could be reached.

Two days later, voters would for a second time in the same election rise up to upset the polltakers’ pre-ordained wisdom by narrowly electing Emery in our closest major Maine election of the last 32 years.

Though unlike Longley’s final commercial that year, the Emery ad would have made it under the wire of France’s pre-election ban, Emery’s key ad appearing two days rather than one before the election, the Emery episode is still a vivid illustration of how a well-designed and effective final message made the crucial difference in the outcome of one of the more unexpected election upsets in Maine.

So, if in the closing hours of this campaign year in Maine, we yearn for a French-styled moratorium on last-minute political advertising, we should also remember that such orchestrations can and have made a crucial and surprising difference in whom we elect to some of our state’s highest positions.

Will they this year? You decide.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].