The Civic Stakes of the Maine Senate Race

By Fred Bauer

Tuesday, October 06, 2026

 

Susan Collins has proven the consummate political survivor. For close to a decade, she has been the only Republican elected to federal office from New England. When some analysts were writing her political obituary in 2020, she surged to a 9-point reelection victory. Today, most polls find her in a razor-close race for reelection to a sixth U.S. Senate term against former Maine State Senate President Troy Jackson. As in her 2020 reelection race, there are distinctive visions of governance on the line.

 

While he is a former Republican, Jackson has now become a rather standard-issue member of the progressive left. Rather than compromise, he supports heightening political conflict. He has called for abolishing the Senate filibuster and expressed an openness to packing the Supreme Court. The policy page of his campaign website is rather sparse, but the positions espoused — abolish ICE, pass a federal “right to abortion,” and so forth — are mostly indistinguishable from the policy proposals of the Democratic Socialists of America. In fact, the Maine branch of the DSA endorsed him in his failed run for governor earlier this year.

 

While she no doubt disagrees with Jackson on many policy issues, Susan Collins also has a fundamentally different theory of the political case. Resisting the centrifugal tendencies of contemporary American politics, she has continually run to the center and stressed the importance of making bipartisan deals. She helped negotiate the infrastructure package during the Biden presidency and also backed the CHIPS semiconductor bill. She has continually defended the legislative filibuster, which is one of the great bulwarks of bipartisanship in the Senate.

 

On judicial nominations, Collins has been neither a partisan rubber stamp for Republican nominees nor a reflexive opponent of Democratic ones. She has overwhelmingly approved judicial nominations from presidents of both parties, whether it’s Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Donald Trump. According to data from the American Constitution Society, she voted “aye” on just as many Biden judicial nominations as West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin did. Some senators of both parties vote in lockstep for an allied president’s judicial nominations; in Massachusetts, neither Elizabeth Warren nor Ed Markey cast a single vote against any Biden judicial nominee, according to ACS data. But Collins has been willing to vote against the nominees of presidents of her own party.

 

Collins’s record on the Supreme Court is instructive here. She has made clear that she will not use litmus tests to evaluate Supreme Court nominees, so she voted for all the Supreme Court picks of Bush, Obama, and Biden. Her only vote against any Supreme Court nominee — on Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett — turned on process, not policy. In explaining her vote against Barrett, she said it had nothing to do with the nominee herself. Rather, she had long said she would oppose any vote taken before the election on a Supreme Court nomination made during a presidential election year.

 

Collins is an increasingly rare bird in the Capitol aviary: Neither a loner nor a part of some ideological blob, she is an independent voice who is nevertheless still a member of a political coalition. Collins’s career offers a potent counterexample to the trend of smaller but purer political parties. Maine has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, yet she has continually racked up wins by significant margins. Collins’s maverick moderation may play especially well in Maine, which has a proud independent streak, but it might also offer a broader political lesson. Voters do, in fact, respond to a candidate’s record. The party that adopts more of a “big tent” strategy could expand its reach.

 

There are deeper civic stakes here, too. No small part of our political dysfunction is downstream of a broader constitutional abdication. Political polarization, judicial rulings, and a sheer lack of ambition have risked transforming Congress into a performative appendage of an executive dynamo. While the president invokes his “pen and phone,” members of Congress are tempted to settle for the echo chambers of cable news and social media. That hollowing out of Congress — where members are either fawning attendants to or spittle-flecked foes of the president — has made serving in those marble halls a much more boring business. But it has also worsened our politics. A quadrennial election for an absolute executive is simply not flexible enough to govern a nation as heterogeneous as ours. The executive speaks with one voice, but the legislature is a vehicle for bringing many voices together. The piecemeal nature of legislating may frustrate ideologues, but it also tempers political conflict.

 

However, the legislature can fulfill those duties only if individual members of Congress see themselves as political actors with agency — if they are willing to craft deals across the aisle or dissent from their own party. Further escalating political conflict would only strengthen the dynamics of bitter polarization that have so frustrated Americans in recent decades. Collins has bet her political career on the idea that voters will reward someone who swims against the tide of total political warfare. November will test whether that bet still pays off.