The recent Hurricane Helene at the end of September and then Milton just 13 days later are an unusual onslaught. It is not only a tragedy for the southeastern U.S. but also one also one with potential implications for the choice of national leaders at a time only a few weeks out from the November election.

It’s a situation reminiscent of a similar Maine experience just 70 years ago at this time: two hurricanes not just weeks but merely days before our 1954 state elections, Hurricane Edna two days before and Hurricane Carol 11 days before a landmark decision by Maine voters, one that signaled the end of a generation of GOP domination and the dawn of a two party system in Maine.

Past and Prologue

The timing was unique here in part because we then held our state elections in early September, two months before the rest of the nation. I t would not be until 1960 that we joined the rest of the country in staging our elections in November. Thus when Hurricane Carol struck Aug. 31 and Hurricane Edna made landfall Sept. 11 they were — next to the 1947 Bar Harbor and York County fires — the costliest natural disasters in the state’s recorded history up to that time — $25 million along with 11 deaths. They were also on the immediate brink of a Sept. 13 election.

Meet Burt Cross and Ed Muskie, the two lead players on the Maine political stage that year. Cross, the fifth consecutive Republican incumbent governor and Democrat Muskie, a struggling politically active young Waterville lawyer. In one of the more stunning upsets in the nation that year, Muskie, the Rumford native son of Polish immigrants, would unseat the seemingly impregnable Cross.

The storms hampered Cross and assisted Muskie in various ways. First was Cross’s belittling observation, that he “was amazed at how little damage” was caused compared to what he had expected. Such a response offered limited consolation to storm victims. Moreover, roads rendered impassable by the storms were perceived as keeping more remotely situated voters, who usually vote Republican, from the polls.

The Democratic strongholds were by no means spared, however, even though the largest one, Lewiston, was further away from the eye of the storms than the harder hit coastal area. Power and telephone outages were widespread there and in Biddeford, another Democratic bastion, for example.

The second of the two storms, Edna, coming only just two days before the election one would have expected a dramatic fall off in turn out. Bear in mind that early voting was not a typical phenomenon any place in America, this due to the strict requirements and red tape for absentee voting in the 1950’s. Surprisingly, 2,000 more voters turned out — a total of 249,000 — than had done so in the previous, 1952, gubernatorial election.

To be sure in the six coastal counties from York through Waldo that were declared disaster areas turn out fell off by about 5% from what it had been two years earlier. it is, however, difficult to find a significant correlation between the hurricanes and Muskie’s decisive nine percentage point victory. Three of the six counties most affected by the storms, including the state’s most populous, Portland based Cumberland, still supported Cross, despite some Muskie inroads on the normal GOP majorities there.

Moreover, the most massive reversal in voter allegiance away from the GOP and in favor of the Democrats between 1952 and 1954 occurred in Aroostook, the county located the furthest away from the hurricanes. The potato county went from casting 59% for Cross in one election to only 40% the next.

Cross had antagonized “the County” in part because he had closed down its sanitorium and had promoted a highway expansion program perceived to have emphasized southern Maine needs over those in the north. Many of Aroostook’s state highways — already handicapped by more ardent winter weather conditions — remained unpaved. Besides, the region in this era had even hosted a movement to give Aroostook independent state-hood status. In effect, Cross’s chances of doing well there were not too much greater than Abraham Lincoln’s prospects of carrying South Carolina before Fort Sumter.

Aroostook of course was not in any other way a South Carolina, however, nor was Cross a Lincoln.

It was Muskie, a future Maine Senator and U.S. Secretary of State, who often drew comparisons to the Civil War leader. Both were a physically imposing 6’4” tall. Both were masters of small talk, storytelling, came from austere economic working class backgrounds, to become small town attorneys and knew how to read an audience.

We will never know, however, how Lincoln compared with Muskie in another influential sphere in the 1954 elections: the medium of television, on the air for the first time in a Maine election that year. As Muskie’s campaign manager, Frank Coffin, recalled in an interview with this columnist in 1999, TV was a “tremendous boon,” because Muskie was so good on it, Coffin observing that Muskie was “more at ease on television than Gov. Cross or some of the others.”

It is too early to know the effect of the recent Helene and Milton might have on this year’s national elections and which party might be favored. If the lessons of Maine’s 1954 experience with its own twin hurricanes is any indication, however, such storms have a significant though not necessarily determinative impact on the voters’ choices.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his history and analyses of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by email: pmills@myfairpoint.net.