AUGUSTA – It’s not a perfect match, but there are some striking similarities between this year’s race for the Blaine House and the simultaneous referendum campaign on taxes and the gubernatorial campaign and tax initiative battle of 1982.

That election year nearly a quarter of a century ago pitted a Democratic incumbent, Joseph Brennan, against a Republican challenger who emerged from a three-way GOP primary – Portland lawyer Charles Cragin. Coinciding with his unsuccessful quest for the Blaine House, Cragin also championed a winning ballot question designed to curb the amount of income that Mainers were required to turn over to state government.

Brennan, who defeated a primary election opponent by a margin of 3-1, went on to steamroll Cragin, racking up 61 percent of the November general election vote to Cragin’s 39 percent.

At the same time, however, the tax indexing proposal that Cragin brought forth was approved by a lopsided ratio of 57 percent to 43 percent.

Fast-forward to 2006, when the first Democratic chief executive since Brennan, John Baldacci, is running for a second term after winning nomination in a contested primary by a margin of 3-1.

Baldacci’s Republican opponent who emerged from a three-way GOP primary, state Sen. Chandler Woodcock of Farmington, may not have been at the birthing of the Taxpayer Bill of Rights going before voters this year, but he has become the candidate of choice for many TABOR backers.

Richard Barringer, a Democrat who worked as state planning director for Brennan and now is at the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie School of Public Service, and Michael Healy, a Republican lawyer who was a legal partner with Cragin, recall that Cragin initiated and drafted the tax-indexing proposal in the early 1980s.

“The idea had been around for some time,” Barringer says, suggesting it was an outgrowth of 1970s concerns in an era of stagflation in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo.

“I do not recall an organized opposition to it,” Barringer added, saying Brennan, while opposed, did not emphasize the issue in his successful re-election drive.

Cragin’s central role in the tax-indexing effort was different from Woodcock’s involvement with TABOR, says Paul Mills, a Republican lawyer in Farmington and political analyst and history buff.

Woodcock has become “identified some with TABOR,” Mills said, but not like the initiative’s most visible advocate, anti-tax activist Mary Adams.

“Woodcock is not the leader of the TABOR campaign, even if he supports it,” says Mills.

The nature of the tax debate now, as well as the professional nature of referendum campaigning, also distinguish the current political scene from the former.

Mills says tax indexing was greeted with “public indifference” when it came up and struck a chord mostly with “a couple of CPAs and a few lawyers.” He too remembers that Brennan didn’t get out front in opposition.

“It was just a sort of by-the-way kind of thing,” Mills says. “It was such a sleeper that the Legislature didn’t have much trouble” changing it immediately.

TABOR, designed to limit spending growth at the state, county, municipal and school district levels and require voter approval for tax or fee increases, has drawn support from people and organizations beyond Maine’s state lines and is being energetically pushed by the Maine Heritage Policy Center, among others.

The citizen initiative also faces highly organized opposition by a coalition that led an effort two years ago to defeat a tax cap promoted by controversial Maine Taxpayer Action Network leader Carol Palesky.

Larry Benoit, a political operative and policy consultant who formerly worked for Baldacci, says TABOR opponents – organized as Citizens United to Protect Our Public Safety, Schools and Communities – are well aware of its appeal.

A recent survey gave supporters of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights a 2-1 edge over opponents.

“We of course dealt with the same dynamics with Palesky. We’re seeing similar early polling,” Benoit says.

As far as any link between the referendum campaign and the gubernatorial race, Benoit says he doesn’t anticipate much overlap.

“We don’t expect to have a major clash of political leaders going at it on this issue,” Benoit says – adding that’s the view from the anti-TABOR perspective.

“I’d be surprised if this is a major issue amongst candidates,” Benoit says.

At a Portland forum sponsored by the heritage policy center this month, Woodcock reasserted his support for TABOR.

“Chandler’s campaigning hard on TABOR and we definitely plan on making it an issue for us and the race for the Blaine House,” said Woodcock campaign manager Chris Jackson.

In the 1982 balloting on tax indexing, which was to annually adjust individual income tax laws to eliminate inflation-induced increases, 240,023 voted yes and 182,939 voted no.

Two other ballot questions that year failed: one to repeal the control of milk prices and another to set an end for the use of nuclear power to produce electricity.

Baldacci, in 1982, was winning his first election to the Maine Senate. Cragin, who besides practicing law was a member of the Republican National Committee from 1983 to 1990, went on to serve in the federal Veterans Affairs and Defense departments.

In a personal and professional homecoming, Cragin has joined Maine Street Solutions, LLC, a consulting unit of Verrill Dana, his old law firm, as its senior government affairs counselor.

“The biggest challenge with indexing was explaining it,” Cragin says now, looking back more than two decades.

Cragin began the petition drive in the early ’80s – “I was out in a shopping center pretty much every weekend” – so by the time the question got to voters, it carried a retroactive provision.

Brennan and other opponents contended the state could not afford to send back to taxpayers $32 million as refunds for 1981 and 1982 taxes.

The measure won voter approval anyway. But right away the Legislature, in which Democrats had added control of the Senate to their hold on the House of Representatives, acted to scrub its retroactive impact.