The casino promoters hired many of the leading political consultants in Maine to get Question 2 passed, and several top consultants in Washington. Millions of dollars, a 6-1 spending advantage over their opponents, weeks of incessant TV ads, kids going door-to-door armed with the latest iPad technology, online ads that would pop up on top sites like MSNBC, direct mail up the wazoo, newspaper ads, a website and Facebook page, robo calls to targeted likely voter households. They used every tool available to them.

And they lost. Big time.

It wasn’t even close. 55% of voters rejected the casino for Biddeford, according to the latest figures.

The day after the vote, the campaign manager for Question 2 Toby McGrath blamed the loss on Maine’s two casinos that ganged up on them “to keep their monopolies here in Maine.”

He’s wrong. First of all, two casinos owned by two separate companies do not a monopoly make (and did he ever think the other casinos wouldn’t battle for their turf?) He’s also overlooking the fact that his side spent more than $3 million to get its message out, compared to about $600,000 in combined spending by the opponents.

This is like going into a battle with a full arsenal of advanced weaponry and being beaten by a kid with a slingshot – and then blaming the kid for not fighting fair.

The opponents didn’t win, the casino proponents lost. There’s a difference. They had the wrong message and ignored the basics like history, geography and demographics.

History: Just a year ago, Maine voters narrowly approved a casino for Oxford County by just a few thousand votes. The proponents in that race also spent $3 million (spread out over many months, as opposed to just a few months by the Biddeford casino promoters). The opponents, CasinosNO!, spent just $273,000, and came excruciatingly close to defeating the casino.

There’s an important lesson here that the masterminds behind the campaign for a Biddeford casino apparently ignored. In 2010, during the height of the recession, when the Oxford casino ran a smart, disciplined $3 million campaign promising jobs, jobs, jobs, nearly half of Maine voters – in a gubernatorial election year – said “No Thanks.”

That the Oxford casino won was more of a fluke, not because their message was overwhelmingly successful.

That should have told the backers of the Biddeford casino that many voters in Maine – maybe a majority – have serious misgivings about casinos, and that the jobs message in a casino campaign isn’t really all that strong or persuasive. Instead, they interpreted the narrow victory of the Oxford casino as a sign that Maine people are now more accepting of slot machines and casinos, particularly when jobs are the focus. So they stuck to the “jobs” message, at the exclusion of nearly everything else. And, to what should have been no one’s surprise, it didn’t work.

Geography: Months ago, I warned that regional voting patterns would make it very hard for the Biddeford casino proponents to stitch together a winning coalition to get their casino passed. My prediction was based on past casino referendums when places like Washington County voted in favor of a casino for Calais, but voted against casinos in Oxford County. Because the casino backers had stupidly put three separate casinos on the same ballot – along with a referendum in Penobscot County for the expansion of table games at Hollywood Slots – I knew that you’d see a lot of voting that would cancel each other out – Biddeford voting against Lewiston, Lewiston voting against Biddeford, Oxford voting against all of them, etc.

Tom Varley, senior vice president of Ocean Properties, the New Hampshire-based company behind the Biddeford casino, who as far as I know knows nothing about political campaigns in Maine or anywhere else, summarily dismissed my prediction. He told the Associated Press that this type of regional voting may have occurred in the early days of casino referendums, but now that casinos are so well accepted in Maine, it was unlikely to happen this time around. (So well accepted that voters have rejected casinos and slot machines in four of the last six statewide elections, and in at least four local votes as well.)

So what happened on Election Day? I hate to say “I told you so,” but in fact Biddeford voted 60-40 in favor of their casino, but voted 60-40 against Lewiston’s. Lewiston voted 56-43 in favor of their casino, but turned around and voted 56-43 against Biddeford’s. Meanwhile, Oxford County voted 70-30 against all of them. The margin in favor of a casino in Biddeford was entirely wiped out by the votes in Oxford County.

 I’m not sure there was a way for the Biddeford casino campaign to avoid this, other than to have waited a year so their casino would be the only one on the ballot. But as usual, the casino crowd got greedy and pig-piled their proposals onto a single ballot, dooming all of them.

Demographics: According to our polling over the last 10 years, casinos are favored by people with low to moderate incomes, a high school education or less, and young people, under 35. Older folks, people in the high-income brackets and college graduates tend to oppose casinos.

But it’s that latter group that tends to vote in much larger numbers and with much more frequency than the former, especially in off-year elections. It sounds simple, but this is a major reason why casinos lose: the opponents vote, the supporters don’t.

The Question 2 campaign made the mistake of running ads appealing to that non-voting group. They showed blue-collar construction workers “Joe and Jeff” talking about jobs that “will help guys feed their families.”

I know guys like Joe and Jeff. They’re my friends. They haven’t voted in 20 years and ads like this one do nothing to change their habits, or convince opponents that the best way to help Joe and Jeff is to bring a casino to Maine.

One of the reasons the Bangor casino passed in 2003 is because the pro-casino campaign came on late with an ad featuring a little-old-lady saying that a Yes vote would help lower the cost of her prescription medicines. It was a very effective ad, aimed right at the people who normally would oppose a casino but because there was something in it for them (and people generally vote their self-interests), they were persuaded to change their minds. That ad is why we have a casino in Bangor today.

I thought that maybe the Yes on 2 campaign had figured this out when I saw their ad in the closing days of the campaign that featured Tom Walsh, the elderly head of Ocean Properties. But the ad was ineffective, for several reasons. Walsh is a stand-up guy, revered by everyone who knows him (and I worked closely with him on a previous project). The problem is not many people in Maine know him. He’s not exactly a household name, and his last minute appeal just didn’t have the juice.

The Message: Lastly, the casino lost because they had the wrong message. Sure people are concerned about jobs, but their polling should have also told them (and probably did) that there is a huge stigma attached to casinos that hasn’t gone away since the days of Bugsy Siegel. People are suspicious of casinos. But instead of trying to ally these fears, the Yes on 2 folks tried their best to avoid them. Their ads rarely even used the word casino or racino, or showed any slot machines, the very heart of their proposal.

Voters felt they were being duped, that the Yes on 2 folks were trying to sneak something by them. That’s not a good way to convince people to support your cause. We saw this first hand in door-to-door canvassing when we’d tell people to vote no on Question 2, and people would actually say, “That’s a casino? I thought Question 2 was a jobs bill?”

This is one of those cases where a campaign can be misled by their own polling. The polls show people don’t like casinos, so your natural tendency is to avoid the issue. In fact, a better approach would be to hang a lantern on it. Convince people that this casino will be the safest, most secure casino in the world, part of the community, like any other business, a modern entertainment venue that would attract world-class entertainment. And yes, for people who want to gamble, there will be slot machines, but there will be so much more for everyone else. (This in effect is why the Oxford casino won. It wasn't the jobs issue, it was because they convinced voters that unlike other casinos, theirs would be locally owned and operated by respected Maine businesspeople. It wasn't true, but it worked.)

Even if they were upfront about the casino, the Question 2 folks still would have had an uphill fight. But it would have had a better chance than simply repeating the jobs mantra.

And just so you know, here is a partial list of the Yes on 2 companies, consultants and advisors, many of whom earned tens of thousands of dollars each on this failed campaign:

Maine Street Solutions, Augusta

Grassroots Solutions, Minneapolis, MN

Kiley & Co., Boston (polling)

Media Strategies and Research, Denver, CO

Digital Turf, Kennebunk

Strategic Telemetry, Washington, DC

76 Words, Washington, DC

Stone’s Phones, Rancho Mirage, CA

Canney Communications, Portland

Eaton River Strategies, Upton, MA

Raven Strategies, Scarborough

Maxwell Media, Cape Elizabeth

Harvest Consulting, Augusta

Baldacci Communications, Portland