According to Maine’s newest state senator, her victory Tuesday was propelled not by people in favor of school budgets, but by people against negative campaigning.

State Rep. Cynthia Dill of Cape Elizabeth downed her Republican challenger, Louie Maietta Jr., by a 2:1 margin in the race to fill the District 7 seat vacated by Larry Bliss, who left Maine to pursue job opportunities elsewhere.

Dill racked up 5,081 votes to Maietta’s 2,405. By contrast, Bliss held on to his seat last November by a mere 75 votes.

Dill won her town with 67.9 percent of the vote, Scarborough with 61.2 percent, and perhaps most embarrassingly for Maietta, she took his South Portland home by a 69.1 percent margin.

After the vote, Maietta said he faced an almost impossible task, given that balloting coincided with school-budget validation votes in all three district towns.

“In my honest opinion, I think when the governor made the point to put the school budget on this ballot, it was going to be a Democrat vote, because he’s already (angered) all of the teachers with everything that’s happened already in his administration,” said Maietta.

“I do not blame them,” said Maietta. “The governor played right into their hands.”

However, officials in all three towns reported that traffic for the school budget vote was far greater than normal, suggesting that the senate race affected the budget vote, rather than the other way around.

“Last year’s [budget] validation drew a little under 1,000. This year it was 1,635. So, it was a big change,” said Scarborough Election Warden Guy Gledhill.

Dill says she doubts the school budget vote had a party-line impact on the senate race. Instead, she said, the race reflected dissatisfaction with the “tone and direction of the LePage administration.”

On Wednesday, Dill also attributed her win to mailers sent out by Maietta boosters during the campaigns final days.

“People, unfortunately, don’t distinguish between people and the people who work for them,” said Dill. “Whether Louie did anything personally is kind of irrelevant in the minds of most people, because they were just overwhelmed with negative mailers from the Republican Party in the last week.

“In a lot of people’s minds, it was just kind of shocking, in both the volume and the viciousness of the mailings,” said Dill, noting how some depicted her in a clown hat.

“I’m not some crazed lunatic that people can’t trust their kids with, and that was the suggestion of some of the mailings,” said Dill.

The result of Tuesday’s special election opens Dill’s House seat in District 121, which represents Cape Elizabeth. Dill will begin casting ballots in the upper chamber as soon as the results are validated by the Secretary of State’s office, and she is sworn in.

“I feel ecstatic,” she said. “It’s not only a victory for me, it’s a victory for the whole community.

“This was, in my view, a very bold statement by the people of District 7,” said Dill. “It’s a clear repudiation of negative campaigns and personal attacks. It’s a mandate to get to work on what’s important – jobs, the economy, and protecting the environment.”