Troy Jackson beats Susan Collins in the Maine Senate race, unseating a five-term Republican incumbent and delivering Democrats one of the night’s most symbolic victories, according to election-night reporting. Ms Collins, one of the Senate’s longest-serving members and a fixture of its moderate wing, conceded to the Democrat, according to the Brussels Reporter account of the results.
Maine had been rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, and late polling pointed the same way: forecasts cited before the election gave Democrats a lead of about 3.9 points in the state, while a final New York Times/Siena set of surveys also put the Democrat ahead. The Associated Press data listed the Maine Senate race as called, with about 70 per cent of precincts reporting and an estimated 86 per cent of the expected vote counted by Wednesday morning.
The end of a Senate era
Ms Collins first won her seat in 1996 and had survived repeated Democratic challenges by building a brand as an independent-minded moderate. Her defeat removes one of the last Republicans who regularly broke with their party on high-profile votes, and it narrows the Senate’s ideological middle at the same time as the chamber changes hands. Mr Jackson, a Democrat, ran in a state where Democrats have held the governorship and much of the congressional delegation, but where Ms Collins had repeatedly defied the state’s Democratic lean.
Maine uses ranked-choice voting in federal elections, but the race was called without a prolonged tabulation, indicating a clear margin on first choices. The result was among the earliest Senate flips to be reported on election night and helped set the tone for the broader Democratic wave that followed.
Part of a six-seat wave
Maine was not counted among the six flips in the NBC News tally cited by several outlets — that tally named North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Kansas and Iowa — because some tallies treat Maine’s flip differently depending on the timing of calls. But the Associated Press called the race for Mr Jackson, and multiple Wednesday-morning summaries list Maine among the Democratic pickups. Whatever the exact count of flips, the direction is unambiguous: Democrats added seats in states across the map, from New England to the Deep South to the Great Plains, and Ms Collins’s defeat is the most prominent individual loss of the night for Republicans.
