President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House has helped end Susan Collins’ Senate career.
Collins, Maine’s five-term Republican senator, has lost her bid for a sixth term to Democrat Troy Jackson. The result gives Democrats a long-sought win over a senator who had overcome national political dynamics and more than one hostile political wave.
Democrats’ difficult path to a Senate majority ran through Maine. Collins was the only Republican incumbent on the ballot this year from a state that is neither a presidential battleground nor reliably red.
Collins is one of the few Republicans left in Congress who voted to convict Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Even so, Republicans recognized that she was their best, and perhaps only, chance to hold the seat in Maine, which is a more reliably blue state.
On paper, she was among the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country. Yet Democrats’ handling of the race gave Collins, a formidable campaigner, openings, even in a national environment that favored the party out of power.
Months before the primary, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee lined up behind Gov. Janet Mills, 78. It did so even though Graham Platner, a progressive oyster farmer and Marine veteran, had entered the race first. In a cycle when voters showed a clear appetite for outsiders, Platner drove Mills from the race well before the primary.
After the primary, Platner was accused of sexual assault. He denied the allegation but eventually dropped out. Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate, quickly replaced him as the Democratic nominee. Jackson had run for governor earlier this year as a Bernie Sanders-aligned progressive in the same mold as Platner.
That left Jackson roughly 100 days between becoming the Democratic standard-bearer and Election Day. With so little time, even Maine Democrats tried to make the race a referendum on Collins and her record as a Republican through both Trump presidencies, rather than about Jackson himself.
That approach paid off six years after Democrats thought they had finally beaten Collins in 2020. That year, the results showed the polls had badly underestimated her.
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