Is Susan Collins toast?
Models and Mainers disagree. She has a track record of massive overperformance, but is facing her toughest environment yet.
This is the second article in our series on the most interesting 2026 House and Senate races. Make sure to check out the first entry in the series on Georgia’s Senate race.
Before we get to the, uh, Maine event, Nate jumping in with a couple of quick announcements. First, Eli McKown-Dawson, the author of today’s story and the backbone of so much of what we do here, has been promoted to Senior Elections Analyst and is now working full-time for Silver Bulletin! It’s been a huge pleasure to work with Eli and I hope this signals our ambitions for the months and years ahead. With Joseph George also in the fold as our Assistant Sports Analyst, we’re still a small team, but it does very much feel like a team. We greatly appreciate your patronage and hope you’ll consider supporting our work with a subscription.
Second — and a bit less excitingly — we’re due for another SBSQ soon-ish, probably next week although we’re behind on a few things as we work to get our various NFL dashboards up and running. You can submit questions in the comments to Edition #23. —Nate Silver
The adage “As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” reflecting the state’s bellwether status in the 19th and early 20th centuries, doesn’t really work anymore. Instead, Maine is now something of an outlier for the opposite reason: it’s been holding onto a bipartisan, independent streak that’s gone missing from the rest of the country.
Consider the state’s political history. The closest Ross Perot came to winning an electoral vote in 1992 was in Maine’s second congressional district. Maine’s two most recent governors are the current incumbent, Janet Mills — a fairly moderate Democrat — but before that, the Tea-Party-friendly Republican Paul LePage. And while both members of Maine’s U.S. House delegation are currently Democrats, one of them is Jared Golden, a Blue Dog who was reelected in Maine’s Trumpy 2nd Congressional district in 2024. Meanwhile, in the upper chamber, Senator Angus King is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.
And then of course, there’s Susan Collins, the state’s senior senator, who’s up for reelection next year. By some measures, she’s the most moderate Republican in the Senate, but that also makes her an outlier in an era of record political polarization.
I probably don’t have to sell you on the stakes of Collins’s race. Why? Because it’ll be pretty much impossible for Democrats to take back the Senate next year — and difficult in 2028 — without defeating Collins. She’s the only Republican incumbent up for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024, which automatically puts her in the “most vulnerable Republican seats” category — a lonely group that also includes North Carolina’s open seat and Senator Jon Husted’s seat in Ohio.
Democrats will have to win some difficult 2026 Senate races no matter what, but if they lose Maine, they’ll have to compensate by winning a much redder state. Even with Maine in the bag, Democrats will need to compete and win somewhere like Iowa, Texas, Florida, Alaska, or Nebraska to take back the Senate majority. That’s not an easy task: those states' 2024 presidential margins ranged from R +13.2 to R +20.8. But if Maine stays in the Republican camp, Democrats will need to pick up two of those seats. Could that happen with a big enough blue wave? Sure. But it still makes for a much murkier path back to the majority.
However, flipping Maine might be easier said than done. Democrats had high hopes of beating Collins in 2020, and much of the polling suggested that their nominee Sara Gideon, then the Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, was poised to do it. But there turned out to be a lot of Shy Susan voters. Collins won re-election by 8.6 points, enough of a blowout that it didn’t even trigger Maine’s ranked-choice voting provisions because Collins secured a majority of the initial vote.1 How’d she do it? By separating herself from Donald Trump and from some of the GOP’s most unpopular policies. According to the exit polls, Collins won the votes of 38 percent of Mainers who thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and even 16 percent who had an unfavorable impression of Trump.
Six years later, that 8.6-point margin still looms large. In the first entry in this series, we said our goal was to “combine data-driven analysis and conversations with local experts to see how well the conventional wisdom about these races holds up.” We really should have said “conventional wisdoms” (plural) because there are two fairly distinct ways to look at the Senate race in Maine. One — that I see mostly from national observers and number-crunching types — is that Collins is meaningfully more vulnerable than she has been in past elections. In this scenario, she has a real chance of losing given a decent Democratic opponent. The other story — that I heard from people working in Maine politics — is that Collins is substantially stronger than the data would indicate. If you buy this argument, it’s Collins’s race to lose.
The case for Collins’s vulnerability
The best way to reconcile these stories is to take them one at a time. We’ll start with the case for Collins being truly vulnerable. The easiest way to make that claim is by looking at Collins’s job approval polls. According to Morning Consult, Collins’s net approval rating in the second quarter of 2025 was -16. That's the lowest it’s been in their tracker, which runs back to 2017.2 It also makes Collins meaningfully less popular than Mills (net approval rating of +3), who is considering a Senate run. For comparison, Collins had a net approval rating of -6 when she won reelection in 2020.
It’s not just Morning Consult. Polls from The University of New Hampshire (UNH), Public Policy Polling, and even the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) show Collins underwater in terms of both job approval and favorability. And according to that UNH poll, 71 percent of Maine residents do not think Collins deserves to be reelected. Collins has also seen some better results, like a June Pan Atlantic Research poll that showed her with a net approval rating of +4. But even there, she was less popular than other Maine political figures, including King (+38), Rep. Chellie Pingree (+29), Mills (+8), and Golden (+7).
Collins’s potential opponents are certainly banking on her staying this unpopular. Jordan Wood, the former executive director of democracyFirst (a Democratic PAC) who is running in the Democratic primary, thinks that “Senator Collins is going into a re-election right now that is different than any political environment that she's faced.” In his view, Collins’s lack of opposition to Trump’s legislative agenda — combined with political developments since her last campaign, like Roe v. Wade being overturned and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol — has made Collins uniquely unpopular. “I couldn't tell you how many times Democratic voters have come up to me since we launched this campaign… saying ‘I have voted for Susan Collins in the past, and I will never do so again,’” said Wood.
Wood, like some other declared Democratic candidates, is betting on the outsider angle. He’s pledged not to take money from corporate PACs and said his campaign is focused on two issues: “the first is what's at stake for a democracy and the need to reform a corrupt political system… and affordability is the other issue that this campaign is about.”
But if you follow national politics, there’s another outsider candidate that you’ve probably heard more about. Graham Platner — an oyster farmer and former Marine who announced his candidacy two weeks ago in a slick launch video — is taking a similar approach with an added dose of populism. Platner has already been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and his messaging has been focused on fighting a corrupt political system — including what he regards as a corrupt Democratic establishment — and addressing economic issues like housing affordability. He’s also taken a more combative posture toward Collins than other potential Democratic candidates.
Adam Cote, who ran against Mills in Maine’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary, told me he hasn’t “seen a candidate that's completely unknown before in the state of Maine come out so quickly… and make an impact the way [Platner] has.” More importantly, “what is clear to me is the Republicans already, I think, are starting to recognize the potential that he would have as a threat,” said Cote.
“But Eli,” you might ask, “haven’t we seen this story before?” Collins trailed far behind Democrat Sara Gideon in the 2020 polls but won that race easily. The answer, according to those who see the 2026 race as truly competitive, is that even if Collins repeats her 2020 overperformance, there’s a good chance it won’t be enough to win in 2026. Why? Maine is getting bluer. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.1 points but she won Maine by 3 points, so Maine was about 0.9 points to the left of the nation. That gap between the national environment and Maine environment expanded to 4.6 points in 2020 and 8.4 points in 2024.
That’s partly because the erosion in support Democrats experienced in 2024 was concentrated in urban areas and among nonwhite voters. But Maine is the whitest state in the country. It’s also the 6th-most rural state according to the Silver Bulletin Urbanization Index, which measures how many people live within a 5-mile radius of the average resident. Along with Vermont, it has long resisted the trend of rural white states shifting red — and now that trend may have peaked.
Split Ticket estimates that Collins beat expectations by 14 points in 2020. So if Maine is somewhere around 8 points to the left of the nation and Democrats end up with a 2018-like performance in 2026 (winning the national popular vote by about 7 points), Collins would still lose in 2026 if you plugged in her 2020 numbers. Even if the national environment only ends up at the current generic ballot average of D +3, Maine would still be a D +11 state based on how it voted in 2024, so not exactly friendly territory for a Republican.
And a 2020-esque overperformance from Collins might not be possible this time around. Ticket splitting has declined rapidly over the past decade, making it harder for candidates like Collins and Jon Tester to buck national trends. In 2020, Nate’s forecast for FiveThirtyEight had Collins with better than a 40 percent chance of winning despite her deficit in the polls because of factors like her moderation and her strong track record. We’ve also found, however, that those factors are becoming less predictive and increasingly often, the only thing that matters is whether you have a “D” or an “R” by your name.
Collins is also in the less-than-enviable position of having to balance the competing demands of Maine’s eccentrically moderate electorate and Donald Trump’s legislative goals. She voted to confirm most of Trump’s second-term cabinet picks, but against Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary and Kash Patel as FBI Director. She also voted against the Big Beautiful Bill. But that vote was somewhat symbolic because it didn’t prevent the bill’s passage, and she had previously let the bill proceed through an early test vote.
These kinds of votes could hurt Collins, but Democrats have a harder hand to play than you might think. There's a risk in attacking her too harshly when she’s so well known to Mainers — that approach crashed and burned in 2020. But they can argue that Collins is too passive, too often “concerned” but not much more than that. As Wood put it: people “are looking for a senator with the courage to stand up to Donald Trump, but more importantly, to stand up for the people of our state who are under threat right now.”
Collins’s moderation could also cause her issues in the Republican primary. Trump said he would like to see a “better option” than Collins in the state. Is it likely that Collins loses to a primary challenger? Successful challenges are rare and we wouldn’t bet on it. But there’s more risk than in 2020, when she was the only named Republican on the ballot. “Susan Collins is starting to get more unpopular among the Republicans as well,” said Cote. “So… this is going to be the most interesting Susan Collins race.”
Sound convincing? Well, as a national observer who likes data, it sounds reasonable enough to me. And people who are betting on the outcome agree. The prediction market Kalshi gives Republicans a 46 percent chance of winning Maine’s Senate seat compared to Democrats’ 54 percent chance.
The case for another Collins term
Ordinarily, I’d stop the article here, conclude that the race is a toss-up, and remind you to check in next summer once we officially launch our midterm forecast. But talk to political operatives in Maine, and you get a strikingly different picture of the race, one where national reports of Collins’s demise are greatly exaggerated. Lance Duston, a Republican strategist who worked on Collins’s 2020 campaign and was the communications director for her 2014 campaign, told me “It'd be hard to say that the race is competitive or a toss-up. Senator Collins has been underestimated over and over again, and she consistently dominates the political landscape in Maine.”
From this perspective, the only person who can beat Collins is Collins. She’d either need to experience a major setback — a health issue, for example (she’s 72) — or have her ability to secure funding for Maine neutralized by Trump. If she loses her pull in Washington, Maine Democrats and independents who have voted for her in the past might not be able to overlook her voting record. But otherwise, people in Duston’s camp think “the idea that this is a top-tier race is… a wishful fabrication problem from D.C. Democrats.” And it’s not just Republicans who see the race this way. Cote told me that “most political observers in Maine are, myself included, a bit more skeptical of Susan Collins's vulnerability then I would say most of the national political observers are.”
Why so much confidence in Collins? First, it’s hard to call the race a toss-up when Collins doesn’t have an opponent yet and the field of potential rivals has been relatively slow to develop. Dan Kleban — the co-owner of Maine Beer Company — joined Platner and Wood by jumping into the Democratic primary last week, arguing that Collins is the wrong person to represent Maine because she “refuses to stand up to Donald Trump when it really matters.”3 But Democrats haven’t been able to secure who they see as their top pick: Mills, Maine’s term-limited governor.
Mills has been noncommittal about entering the race so far, and no one I spoke to for this article knew when she’d make a decision or why it’s taking her so long to do so. But two weeks ago, she told reporters that she’d make a decision by November. And yesterday, Mills said she’s still seriously considering a run. Cote told me that he “didn't think originally Janet was going to run, but now I'm not so sure.” She might just be weighing personal preference against supporting her party: Mills is 77 years old and said in July that she “wasn’t born with a burning desire to be in Washington, D.C.” But if the race is seen as too tough to win, she might just want to avoid ending her career on a loss.
Even with more candidates entering the picture over the past month, national Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer are still focused on convincing Mills to run.4 Wood and Platner have vowed to stay in the race even if Mills does decide to jump in, but the governor’s slow deliberation has put the rest of the field in a bit of a holding pattern. Other more established Democrats — like Ryan Fecteau (the Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives), Aaron Frey (Maine’s attorney general), and Cathy Breen (a former state senator) — seem to be waiting for Mills to make up her mind before they enter the primary. Kleban has also been noncommittal. He told The New York Times “I don't know what Governor Mills is going to do, and I'm not going to commit to doing one thing or the other,” when asked if he’d continue his run if Mills declared. But he later told Semafor “I’m 100 percent in this race. I don’t really care who gets in.”
So which one of these candidates could make the best case against Collins? Canvas Twitter or Bluesky, and you’re likely to see a lot of buzz about Platner. But Mills was the obvious choice for the local observers I spoke with. She’s popular statewide (winning her last race by 13 points), and Duston told me that “Janet Mills is an interesting figure because she's also from a rural county in Franklin County, Western Maine. And she's […] by all accounts […] a centrist Democrat, kind of in the older tradition.” But Duston also thinks that Mills’ increasing combativeness with Trump during his second term has hurt her with the moderates and Republicans she’d need to win over. Cote disagreed. “Mills has the advantage of being a household name and being viewed as a moderate but with the overarching theme that I think resonates with the majority of the Maine electorate,” he said. “That the Trump administration is a threat to democracy, that we need a check against that.”
In comparison, Wood, Platner, and Kleban represent higher-variance choices who begin with significantly less name recognition statewide. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing when trying to unseat a strong incumbent with a penchant for beating her polls. The case for a high-risk, high-reward choice arguably becomes better the tougher you think Collins might be to defeat, and the outsiders will certainly be well-funded. Wood has raised about $1.6 million as of the end of June, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Platner doesn’t have any FEC filings yet, but according to his X account, his campaign raised $1 million in 10 days. (For comparison, Collins has raised about $6 million as of June). Of Platner, Cote said “it's too early to tell what he can do” but he would “have the ability to appeal to your average Mainer” while speaking to general discontent with the Democratic Party establishment.
Selecting the right candidate could make or break the race for Democrats, because local observers’ confidence in Collins’s ability to beat expectations is backed up by the data, at least historically. Maine has voted to the left of the nation in every presidential election since 1988. And when you combine the state’s historical partisan lean with the national popular vote in 1996, 2002, 2008, 2014, and 2020, Maine was a thoroughly blue state in each of Collins’s past Senate races. But Collins has more than just survived; she’s thrived. And not just in 2020. Collins won Maine by nearly 23 points in 2008 when Barack Obama won the state by 17.
Even with Maine trending further left since 2020, there’s a surprising amount of confidence among those working in Maine politics in Collins’s ability to come out on top no matter who the Democrats nominate. Maine “is a very fiercely independent state […] it's a state where there is a tradition of ticket splitting,” said Duston. To win in Maine, you need to convince Democrats (who make up 33 percent of registered voters), Republicans (29 percent), and independents (38 percent) to vote for you, which is something Collins has been able to do historically.
And even though Collins’s potential opponents have critiqued her for not holding a town hall meeting for at least 25 years, she remains a massive presence in the state. Cote told me that Collins’s “staff is well known as being super responsive. They send notes to people when their relatives die. They send congratulatory notes to all sorts of folks.” And that sort of thing can matter in a state as small as Maine (about 1.3 million residents). To a sizable portion of Maine voters, Collins isn’t just an elected official they read about in the news; she’s someone who they could run into at the grocery store or share some other personal connection with. This factor is even baked into our model; we’ve found that the incumbency advantage is larger in smaller and more idiosyncratic states.
The more the state aligns with national trends, the more vulnerable she’ll be — to the point where the race is a toss-up, or even leans Democratic, as some early statistical models show. But she’s probably less vulnerable than a naive read of the data would suggest. We sometimes talk about “generic” candidates, but Collins has been about as far from a generic Republican as you can get when it comes to getting reelected in Maine.
So we’re in what I’ve taken to calling a Schrödinger's Collins situation: she’s simultaneously one of the most vulnerable Senate incumbents and as much of a Maine institution as the lobster roll.
She won 51 percent of Maine voters, while at the same time, Joe Biden won the state with 53 percent of the vote.
Morning Consult’s state-level approval polls tend to paint a very rosy picture for nearly every senator and governor, so a result this bad is sort of surprising.
There are a few other minor Democratic candidates in the race, but they’re in a decidedly lower tier than Wood, Platner, and Kleban.
That’s not particularly surprising: Platner has said he wouldn't support Schumer as Democratic Senate leader.
Collins is 72 and Mills is 77. Ugh. I feel for Maine voters having to tolerate these ancient candidates.
Congrats on the promotion, Eli!