For five terms, Susan Collins has perfected a particular brand of political theater: the furrowed brow, the carefully worded statement of concern, the hand-wringing press availability on the Capitol steps, and then the vote. Always the vote. With Donald Trump. Ninety-five percent of the time.
Now a Fox News poll, of all instruments, has measured the damage. In a survey of 1,000 registered Maine voters conducted August 6 through 10, Democrat Troy Jackson leads Collins 48 to 46, within the margin of error but directionally unmistakable. Jackson, a former state Senate president and fifth-generation logger, stepped in as the Democratic nominee in July after the previous candidate withdrew following a rape accusation. The race reset. And what it reset to is a referendum on Collins.
Fifty-five percent of Maine voters said they are very or extremely concerned that Collins votes with Trump too often. Trump carries a minus-20 net favorability rating in the state. That concern runs across every bloc Collins needs: independents at 52%, moderates at 56%, rural voters at 51%. Independents make up nearly a third of the Maine electorate. You do not survive numbers like these by issuing another press release about your bipartisanship.
Because here is what that celebrated bipartisanship actually looks like: a 95% loyalty rate to a president your state rejects by 20 points. Collins has spent years banking on the gap between what she says and what she does, trusting that Mainers would remember the hand-wringing and forget the roll call. They remembered the roll call.
The Collins campaign’s response is instructive. Spokesperson Shawn Roderick promised voters will learn about Jackson’s “backroom style of helping his cronies, and his temper.” Republican-aligned groups are amplifying a report about an altercation Jackson had as a teenager. They have a massive cash advantage to flood the airwaves with it. When a five-term incumbent cannot defend her own record, she changes the subject. That is not a strategy. That is a confession.
Meanwhile, the attack Collins’s allies want to stick, tying Jackson to the Democratic Socialist movement, is not landing. Only 43% of voters expressed concern about that, down from the 54% who were worried about the previous nominee’s DSA alignment. Fifty-three percent said they are not concerned at all or not very concerned. The scare word does not work when the person it is attached to is a logger from Aroostook County who served as Senate president. People can tell the difference between a caricature and a person.
Collins is ten points underwater on favorability, 44 to 54. Jackson is above water at plus-one. Democrats are more enthusiastic about the midterms than Republicans by seven points overall and by eighteen points on “extremely interested.” Sixty-one percent of Jackson’s supporters say they are voting against Collins. That is not soft support. That is a movement.
The structural advantage still belongs to Collins. She has the money, the infrastructure, the name recognition, and the institutional inertia of a five-term incumbent. Republican outside groups will spend whatever it takes. They will dig, they will distort, they will try to make this race about anything other than the 95%.
But the question on the ballot is already set. Maine voters were asked what concerns them more: a challenger’s politics or an incumbent’s record. The answer came back loud. The organizing work between now and November is making sure every single voter who told a pollster they are concerned walks into a voting booth and acts on it. Solidarity is not a sentiment. It is a turnout operation.