Susan Collins Didn’t Have a Chance
A nationwide rejection of President Trump swept out the moderate Republican.
The realization that Susan Collins would lose her bid for a sixth Senate term dawned slowly on the Republicans gathered last night in a hotel ballroom in Bangor, Maine. Democrats were notching victories up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and the wave was quickly spreading to Kansas, Texas, and points west. But Collins had confounded the doomsayers before. Republicans here believed she would undoubtedly do it again. “She’s sure to win,” a conservative activist, Tom Burpee, proclaimed to me shortly after 9 p.m. A few minutes earlier, another Republican had marched through the ballroom with a similarly confident prediction: “Maine,” he told me, “isn’t that stupid.”
Collins, too, betrayed no hint of concern. Around 9:40 p.m., she made a long, beaming pass through the party. As Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” filled the room, Collins accepted hugs and handshakes, small gifts and words of encouragement. She peered at the laptop screen of a Republican staffer who showed her a rosy analysis of the latest returns. Maine counts its votes at an agonizing pace, and as Collins worked the crowd, it was still possible for Republicans to believe she might defy the odds one more time.
Collins’s stroll around the ballroom was, in retrospect, not a victory lap but a farewell. She would not return to the party. Shortly after midnight, she called the Democrat Troy Jackson to congratulate him on his win. By that late hour, the ballroom throng had thinned to just a few dozen people, and Collins made no concession speech. She was the longest-serving Republican incumbent to lose a reelection bid last night. With almost 90 percent of votes counted this morning, Jackson was up by nearly eight points. “It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Maine in the United States Senate,” Collins said in a brief statement.
Democrats in Maine were only slightly less surprised to have finally ousted the most resilient of Republican senators. As Jackson pulled ahead of Collins in the polls during the closing weeks of the race, many Democrats found their optimism tempered by memories of the last time they tried to defeat her. Heading into Election Day in 2020, Collins was projected to lose to Sara Gideon, a well-funded former legislative leader in Maine. But Collins won, defeating Gideon by nearly the same margin—about nine points—that Joe Biden had when he prevailed over Donald Trump in Maine that year.
This year’s campaign was far more tumultuous for Democrats, and Jackson was not the candidate they thought—or hoped—they’d be running against Collins. A former logger who spent most of the past two decades in the state legislature, Jackson had campaigned for governor and finished third in the primary. But after Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy collapsed following allegations of sexual assault (which he denied), Jackson emerged as a potential replacement, and he won a quick-fire nominating convention in July.
Jackson, like Platner, is a progressive in the mold of Bernie Sanders. He campaigned on Medicare for All and vowed to oppose another term for Chuck Schumer as the Democratic Senate leader. But Jackson also previously held positions that made his campaign more complicated than the party would have liked. Democrats have assailed Collins for her support for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, Trump appointees to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet whereas Collins has long claimed to support abortion rights, Jackson was an opponent of legal abortion at the beginning of his career. “Troy evolved. Susan Collins devolved,” Mini Timmaraju, CEO of the abortion-rights advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told reporters as she campaigned for Jackson on Monday. After 30 years, Maine has evolved as well.
Collins reprised the message that won her a fifth term in 2020. She ran as Maine’s guardian in Washington, leaning on her reputation as a moderate who works across the aisle and on her ability to bring home billions of dollars in federal funding as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Both Jackson and Collins grew up in the same rural county in northern Maine, not far from the Canadian border. Despite Jackson’s many years as a leader in Maine’s legislature, Collins treated him as a novice who’d be in over his head in Washington. A Collins ad late in the campaign made the point more explicitly. “We’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here,” the retired Maine broadcaster Bill Green said in the commercial, a reference to Jackson’s logging background. “We’re sending someone to the U.S. Senate, and Troy doesn’t have the tools he needs to be effective.”
During their four debates, Jackson usually referred to her as “Senator Collins.” She just called him “Troy,” a choice that suggested small-state friendliness but was really designed to accentuate the stature gap. When Jackson told Collins to “shut up” during the final debate, her campaign linked the remark to reports that, as a legislator, Jackson was bullying and intimidating toward women.
Jackson denied that charge—a former colleague at one point told reporters that he sometimes lost his temper, though not “in a gendered way.” But voters in this election were angry, too, and eager to rebuff conventional politicians. Jackson was happy to engage in a debate over who was more senatorial, seeking to turn Collins’s experience into a liability. He dressed as a cord of wood for Halloween and concluded his campaign Monday night at a Portland bowling alley, where he returned to the populist theme of his candidacy. “I’ve waited so long for everyday people to rise up and demand a government that works for them,” Jackson told his cheering supporters.
As he made stops around Portland on Monday, Jackson tried to project a sense of optimism. “I’ve got a good feeling about this,” he told a group of volunteers at a canvass launch. He wasn’t entirely convincing. Mostly, Jackson just seemed exhausted, frequently rubbing his eyes and reminding his supporters—and possibly himself—that the campaign was almost over. Monday marked the 100th day of his Senate campaign, a sprint that was faster even than Kamala Harris’s abbreviated presidential campaign in 2024. By the end, Jackson had managed to mostly set aside concerns that he would be unable to marshal the excitement among younger, progressive voters that Platner had initially generated. Al Huntley, a retiree who was hosting a canvass launch in South Portland, told me that he encountered a few diehards who planned to write in Platner’s name, “but not many.” Both Huntley and his wife, Pauline, told me they were feeling confident about Jackson’s chances. But they said they’d felt the same way about Gideon as the election closed six years ago. “So I’m skittish,” Pauline Huntley said.
Such was the prevailing mood among Democrats I encountered throughout the final weeks of the campaign—the tentative belief, if not the conviction, that Collins’s hold on Maine voters had loosened, and that voters were angry enough with Trump and Republicans to oust a 30-year incumbent. “I am allowing myself to hope that she will lose,” Jennifer Tingle, a 64-year-old educator, told me at a Jackson rally in Lewiston.
Perhaps the Democrats did not have to fret as much as they did. Their national landslide proved far too big for a blue-state Republican to overcome, and a race that both parties once thought might determine control of the Senate instead became just one more in an enormous pile of Democratic triumphs. By this morning, Democrats had a path to controlling up to 56 Senate seats next year. The nationwide rout offered a measure of solace for Collins’s supporters. “It’s not a vote against her,” one of them told me. David Whitney, a local GOP chair, suggested that there was little more Collins could have done. “In 2024, Republicans spoke loud and clear,” Whitney told me; “2026 is the Democrats’ turn to do the same.” A Collins loss, after a long run of dominance, had been difficult for many in Maine to fathom. But to some Republicans in Bangor, as the full picture of the GOP’s midterm wipeout became clear last night, it came instead to seem inevitable.
