Democrats Are Struggling to Beat Susan Collins. You Can (Still) Blame One Man.
Slate · L · trust 50/100
Democrats hoping to retake the U.S. Senate have been enjoying a run of good luck. With Election Day barely four weeks away, polls show the party’s candidates leading in North Carolina, Georgia, and even Texas. Michigan, which looked iffy after a divisive primary that pitted centrists against progressives , seems increasingly winnable. Political forecasters have shifted races in deep-red Kansas and South Carolina toward Democrats, too, even though both remain long shots. And Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink, creating formidable headwinds for any candidate with an R next to their name.
But then there’s Maine. In the Pine Tree State, Democratic former state Sen. Troy Jackson appears to be struggling in his bid to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins. A gold-standard poll last month found Collins leading Jackson by 3 points, triggering a mini-freakout among Democrats. Conducted by the New York Times and Siena University in partnership with the local Portland Press Herald newspaper, the survey was notably worse for Jackson than others taken before and since. But polls generally show a close race , a major letdown in a state that went for Kamala Harris by 7 points in 2024 and where the Democrat running for governor this year remains comfortably ahead. Collins is the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state that Harris won. That means a Jackson loss would hugely complicate Democrats’ path to reclaiming the Senate, forcing the party to bank on winning far more conservative states.
So what’s going on? Some blame Jackson’s lack of charisma and mealymouthed speaking style . Others say consultants have transformed his campaign into a Washington-run effort ill-suited to a political moment that favors outsiders. Still others point out that Collins has repeatedly managed to get reelected , Maine’s blue-state status be damned. And some think the Times/Siena/Press Herald poll may be off , making things look more dire for Jackson than they really are.
Yet if Jackson really is losing, it could also be because there’s a specter haunting his candidacy like something out of Stephen King. That specter is Graham Platner, Democrats’ original Senate nominee in Maine, whose gravel-voiced populist rhetoric caused national donors, progressive pundits, and 156,000 primary voters to swoon. Despite weathering a series of scandals—including revelations that he’d spouted offensive views on Reddit, gotten a Nazi tattoo as a drunken Marine, received significant financial support from his well-heeled father, and cheated on his wife shortly into their marriage—Platner was forced to drop out in July after an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexual assault. (He denies the allegations.)
Those scandals left Maine Democrats with little choice but to replace Platner on the ballot. After holding meetings around the state at which voters nominated delegates, the party overwhelmingly picked Jackson at a statewide convention in late July. But swapping candidates didn’t erase the coalition that chose Platner in the first place, and did so with the most votes any Democratic Senate primary candidate in Maine has ever gotten. That fact has locked Jackson into a contest shaped in his predecessor’s mold, giving him the unenviable task of beating a resilient incumbent from a standing start with someone else’s playbook.
Platner’s catastrophic candidacy continues to shadow Jackson in multiple ways. For one thing, the two-and-a-half-week scramble to replace him left Jackson with a shorter runway to make the case against Collins, whose nearly three decades in office have made her a ubiquitous figure. A former president of the Maine state Senate, Jackson ran for governor this year and finished third in the first round of the June primary, despite endorsements from Platner and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Yet in the Times/Siena/Press Herald poll , fully 10 percent of likely Maine voters said they hadn’t heard of Jackson or didn’t know enough to have an opinion about him, nearly seven times the number who said so of Collins.
Simply having to replace someone else may also be putting Jackson behind. History suggests that voters generally don’t look kindly on candidate switcheroos. It can make the previous nominee’s supporters feel cheated and invite charges that his replacement lacks a genuine democratic mandate. Perhaps for that reason, such swap-outs rarely happen and succeed even less often. According to the Times, the major parties have replaced Senate nominees in just nine races over the past three decades , and in only two of those cases did the replacement candidate go on to win the general election. It probably didn’t help that Platner’s exit from the race was maximally bridge-burning. Bucking advisers’ entreaties , he released an 11-minute video in which he accused a “corporate media system and the political establishment” of acting “as judge, jury and executioner” to force him out.
Platner’s transgressions have also created political dilemmas for Jackson, who repeatedly vouched for the oysterman’s character until the rape allegation ended his campaign. “I know there’s a lot of people in here that were campaigning for Graham,” Jackson told voters in August. “I wish none of this would’ve happened like this.” New York magazine reports that Democratic consultants’ efforts to separate Jackson from Platner—including advising their candidate not to say Platner’s name—have alienated many of the volunteers who originally latched onto Platner’s candidacy. But at the same time, two-thirds of Maine voters in the Times survey had an unfavorable view of Platner, about the same share who disapproved of Trump. Jackson has attacked Collins for failing to strongly oppose the president, but here he is talking wistfully about someone who’s about as unpopular.
The association has left Jackson vulnerable from the right, too. Collins-aligned ads have also sought to play up their connections; one showed footage of Jackson…
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