BANGOR, Maine—Troy Jackson, former president of the Maine Senate, defeated long-serving Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), flipping a Senate seat to bring the Democrats’ freshly minted majority to 53 seats.
The battleground Senate race was among seven flips by Democrats on Election Night, when the party gained control of the Senate.
A scandal jolted the race earlier this year, engulfing the previous Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, who dropped out in July while facing allegations of sexual assault.
Collins, first elected to the Senate in 1996, has repeatedly won reelection in an increasingly blue state and region as a centrist and moderate who sometimes parts ways with other Republicans—including Trump.
She was joined on the campaign trail at times by former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin, a former Democrat who became an independent amid conflicts with that party, described her as an independent lawmaker who does not operate as a proxy for Trump.
The chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee has campaigned on her ability to deliver concrete projects for Maine.
At a shipbuilding facility in Bath on Oct. 28, Collins said she had “worked very hard in previous years to make sure that the funding was there for another destroyer to be built.”
That same day, at a brewery in nearby Brunswick, Jackson hit familiar progressive themes in an appearance with Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). Kelly and other Senate Democrats, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have accompanied Jackson on the trail.
“I’ve seen how people with power and influence hold other people back,” Jackson said, criticizing cuts to food stamps under the Republican-led Congress and energy price increases linked to the Iran war.
Jackson won the nomination at a special convention over the summer just weeks after Platner dropped out.
An OpenSecrets analysis identified more than $140 million in spending in the race, a particularly colossal sum for a state of fewer than 1.5 million people.
Attack ads have dominated the airwaves in the Pine Tree State, and many Mainers seemed exhausted by the midterm spectacle.
Not far from the brewery where Jackson and Kelly were campaigning, Trina Metcalf, who was providing homeless veterans with free haircuts, told The Epoch Times she was sick of all the fliers, door knockers, and text messages.
Though she preferred one candidate to the other, she was pessimistic about the outcome.
“No matter what, we’ll lose,” she said.
Outside a snowmobile show in Augusta on Oct. 24, David Cogley said that Collins and Jackson were “slinging mud at each other.”
“Tell me what you’re going to do for me—not what he did because you don’t like him, or she did because you don’t like her,” he said.
In Lewiston on Election Day, Nov. 3, a woman named Elaine, who declined to share her last name, told The Epoch Times that she had issues with both Collins and Jackson.
She didn’t share her vote choice.
“I really feel that there should be term limits,” she said in relation to Collins—though she was equally, if not more critical of Jackson.
“Susan Collins [has] been in a long time, but I feel like you got to come up with a viable candidate,” she said.
Outside a busy polling place in Waterville that same day, Donna Sellers declined to share who won her vote in the Senate race. Yet the retiree made it clear she wasn’t happy with Collins.
Sellers said Collins had been a “good senator over the years, and we can’t take that away from her,” adding that her vote in the race was “a really hard decision.”
When asked what brought her out to vote, Sellers was critical of Trump. “He reminds me of my ex-husband, and I just wish I could divorce him.”
In Bangor, not far from Collins’ Election Night party, Chuck Jameson told The Epoch Times he cast votes for Collins and former Gov. Paul LePage, the Republican congressional candidate in Maine’s 2nd District.
“I don’t believe anything he says,” he said of Jackson, Collins’ opponent.
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