Susan Collins Maine Senate race tests her split-ticket appeal
Troy Jackson will challenge Susan Collins as Democrats try to tie the Maine Republican to Trump in a pivotal 2026 Senate race.
By Georgia Hale · Staff Writer
3 min read
The Susan Collins Maine Senate race now has its general-election shape: Republican Sen. Susan Collins is set to face Maine Democratic nominee Troy Jackson, and Democrats are already reaching for a familiar playbook, according to NBC News.
NBC News’ Sahil Kapur reported that Collins is leaning on the political identity that has kept her alive in difficult territory before: a Republican with an independent streak in a state Donald Trump lost in all three of his presidential runs.
Jackson, nominated by Democrats on Saturday in Bangor, is trying to make the contest about Collins’ relationship with Trump. In his nomination remarks, he pointed to her votes for Trump’s tax law and for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who later cast a decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“Who has she served? She has served Donald Trump,” Jackson said, according to NBC News. “She voted with him 96% of the time.”
Can Susan Collins win Maine again in 2026?
Collins’ argument is that Maine voters know her as more than a national Republican. NBC News reported that she has been emphasizing issues where she parts ways with Trump, including his recent tariffs on Canadian goods.
After walking in a parade in Casco, Maine, on Saturday, Collins told NBC News she was “disappointed” by the tariffs and said she had opposed them from the beginning.
“It makes no sense from an economic perspective, particularly for a state like Maine, where our economies and Canada’s are so intertwined,” Collins said. “So I have opposed the president when I think he’s wrong, and I’ve supported him when I think that he’s right.”
The big question for Collins is how much distance a candidate can create from her party in a federal race. A ticket-splitter is a voter who backs candidates from different parties on the same ballot, and NBC News reported that a shrinking pool of those voters helped doom another red-state survivor, former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, in 2024.
Tester had repeatedly won in a state his party usually lost, but Republican Tim Sheehy defeated him in 2024 after tying him to national Democrats, according to NBC News. A former Tester campaign operative, granted anonymity by NBC News because a new job bars going on the record, said Collins could face the same problem in 2026.
“The lesson there is you can’t outrun the national environment, or you can only outrun it so much,” the operative said. “Susan Collins is the same story — how much can she outrun the ticket?”
The former Tester operative told NBC News that ads linking Tester to then-President Joe Biden were “incredibly potent” in Montana. The person said Biden and Kamala Harris were deeply unpopular in the state, making it harder for Tester to make up the gap even while outperforming national Democrats.
For Jackson, NBC News reported, the opening is a political climate that appears friendlier to Democrats, with Trump’s approval ratings declining and voters giving him low marks on economic issues.
For Collins, the path is the one she has traveled before: persuade enough Maine voters that her record is separate from her party’s brand. The 2026 race will test whether that pitch can still beat the pull of national politics.
This story draws on original reporting from NBC News.