The two issues that finally brought down Susan Collins
· Vox
Democrats won a critical US Senate seat on Tuesday, as Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins conceded her long-held seat to Democratic challenger Troy Jackson just after midnight.
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Collins, who has been serving for nearly 30 years, has for years been able to beat back rivals in her increasingly blue state, where residents valued her ability to bring home federal funds and buck her Republican Party when it seemed to count. Her ability to win even against unfavorable conditions has earned her the reputation of being something of a “unicorn” in national politics.
This year, however, she could not escape the long shadow President Donald Trump cast over her state. Collins was the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state Trump lost in 2024, and a late October poll from Marist found just 42 percent of likely Maine voters approved of the president’s performance, while 58 percent disapproved. A Fox News poll from August found that more than half of Mainers felt Collins voted with Trump too often.
While Collins did have some notable breaks with Trump — including voting to convict him after January 6 and to stop his Canadian tariffs — she lacked good answers on Mainers’ rising costs.
In the Marist poll, 46 percent of likely Maine voters said their family finances had gotten worse over the past year. The cost of living was also the top issue for Mainers in the final Times/Siena poll before the election, released this week, with 51 percent of voters trusting Jackson on it, compared with 44 percent for Collins.
Collins’s slide could also be seen in the polls over the past few months. The Times/Siena survey had her up 49 to 46 percent in September, with Jackson leading in the latest one, 51 to 45. Collins’s favorability also dropped 3 points in that time.
Two other issues shaped the race in Maine.
One was abortion. While nationally reproductive rights played a much lower-profile role compared to 2024 and the 2022 midterms, with candidates running far fewer ads on the subject, Maine was a notable exception. As Vox reported in September, abortion rights was the second biggest focus of campaign ads in the state, after Trump and healthcare. Planned Parenthood made its biggest ad buy of the 2026 cycle there against Collins, and a super PAC aligned with Senate Democrats spent 70 percent of its TV, streaming, and digital money in Maine on abortion-related ads.
The logic was that it was the first time Collins would face voters since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and despite identifying as pro-choice, her Senate vote was pivotal in confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes told me in September that abortion is “the number one negative in Maine voters’ mind,” even as fewer than half a percent of Mainers would call it their top issue. It didn’t help that Collins doubled down on her vote for Kavanaugh this past summer, saying she did not regret it.
Throughout the campaign, Democrats made a point of emphasizing that Collins continued to confirm anti-abortion judges, as recently as this fall. While historically Maine voters have given Collins a pass on certain votes because she’s been skilled at bringing home federal dollars, advocates bet that they could convince some voters that Collins’s Kavanaugh vote revealed something important about her character and trustworthiness. One of Planned Parenthood’s ads featured a woman who voted for Collins pledging to “not make the same mistake twice.”
The second major issue to shape the race was healthcare costs, one of the biggest issues facing Republicans nationally this cycle. Some Republicans warned last year that their party would face backlash in the midterms for gutting Medicaid, with even Trump warning his party to avoid going “too crazy” on cost-cutting.
Republicans are facing blowback for the party’s vote last year to gut Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade, a move that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will leave more than 7 million Americans without health insurance by 2034. Though Collins ultimately voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, she helped the package get to the Senate floor. When defending herself against attacks that she shared responsibility for Medicaid’s gutting, she pointed to her advocacy for including in OBBBA a new $50 billion rural healthcare fund. But critics said that the new fund does not offset the Medicaid cuts, which are estimated to strip $137 billion from rural healthcare systems.
“Sen. Collins is like an arsonist who helped set the fire, and then she wants credit for bringing a cup of water to put it out,” Troy Jackson said in their October debate.
And it’s not just Mainers on Medicaid who are worried about healthcare costs. Employer healthcare plans are expected to rise next year by more than 8 percent, and a KFF annual employer survey found the average American worker is paying more than $600 more toward a family plan this year than in 2025. An AARP Maine poll from October found that 80 percent of voters age 50 and older said the cost of healthcare would factor into their vote. Jackson led by 3 percentage points among all voters in that survey, though Collins was ahead by 9 points among those 50 and older.