Susan Collins concedes to Troy Jackson, the first Maine senator voted out since 1978

Susan Collins$ conceded Maine's U.S. Senate race to Democrat Troy Jackson early on Wednesday, ending a Senate career that began in January 1997 and handing Democrats the seat of the last Republican senator in a state Trump lost three times. CNN called the race just after 12:15 a.m. Eastern with about 68 percent of the expected vote counted and Jackson ahead by roughly five points, per Newsweek. The Bangor Daily News put the count at 12:19 a.m. at 52.5 percent for Jackson and 46.3 percent for Collins, with no precinct share or raw totals attached, per the Bangor Daily News. Maine Public reported that Collins conceded before the Associated Press had called the race, with about two-thirds of precincts in, per Maine Public.

The figures above are unofficial and were still moving as this was written at about 1:30 a.m. Eastern. Maine uses ranked-choice voting in federal general elections; if Jackson's first-choice share holds above 50 percent in the final count, no additional tabulation rounds will be needed. The Secretary of State's office had not published a statewide total on any page we could open.

What Collins and Jackson said

Collins's statement, as carried by WGME and quoted in full on X by Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio, opened: "It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Maine in the United States Senate. I'm proud of all I have been able to accomplish for our state and for our country in the past 30 years." She said she had called Jackson to congratulate him and that her staff would work on a smooth transition, per WGME and Desiderio's post.

Jackson declared victory shortly afterward. The Portland Press Herald's live blog headline quoted him saying "we must deliver for working people," per the Press Herald; the page would not load fully for us, so we have the headline but not the full remarks. The Bangor Daily News reported that his stated priorities are ending the Iran war and moving toward Medicare for All, and that he will be sworn in in January, per the Bangor Daily News.

Why this result stands out

No sitting Maine senator had lost a general election since 1978, when Republican William Cohen beat Democrat Bill Hathaway, per the Bangor Daily News. Collins was seeking a sixth term; a win would have made her the longest-serving senator in Maine's history, per WGME. She chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee and was the only Republican senator from a state Trump lost in 2024, per Newsweek.

Her margins had been shrinking for a decade. She won more than 68 percent of the vote in 2014; her 2020 share was nearly 18 points lower, per Maine Public. In 2020 she trailed Democrat Sara Gideon in every public poll and still won with more than 50 percent, which is why Democrats stayed nervous this year even as Jackson led nearly every survey after late September, per the Bangor Daily News. In the final University of New Hampshire poll, fewer than half of Jackson's own supporters believed he would win.

The seat was one of six Democrats flipped on Tuesday, alongside North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, Texas and Iowa, which we covered in our report on Democrats winning the Senate majority. The Collins profile and the Maine Senate race page carry the background and the market history for this contest.

A nominee chosen in 100 days

Jackson was not the Democrats' first choice, or their second. Gov. Janet Mills entered the primary in October 2025 with encouragement from Senate Democratic leaders, then suspended her campaign on April 30. Sullivan harbor master Graham Platner won the June primary with about 72 percent of the vote. In July, after a Maine woman accused him of sexual assault, which he denied, Platner left the race. He had already weathered controversies over old Reddit posts and a tattoo resembling a Nazi-era symbol, per the Bangor Daily News and Newsweek.

With no precedent in Maine for replacing a nominee after a primary, the party built a convention process. On July 25 in Bangor, Jackson, a former logger from Allagash and former president of the Maine Senate who had finished third in the June Democratic primary for governor, won 566 of 571 delegates. That left him about 100 days to campaign, per the Bangor Daily News. Maine Public described his platform as close to Sen. Bernie Sanders$'s, built on his labor ties and blue-collar background, per Maine Public.

1. 2025-10Gov. Janet Mills enters the Democratic primary
2. 2026-02-10Collins formally launches her bid for a sixth term
3. 2026-04-30Mills suspends her campaign
4. 2026-06-09Graham Platner wins the Democratic primary
5. 2026-07Platner leaves the race after a sexual assault allegation he denies
6. 2026-07-25Troy Jackson wins 566 of 571 delegates at a Bangor convention
7. 2026-11-04Collins concedes to Jackson after midnight

Source: Bangor Daily News

The arguments each side made

Jackson's campaign tied Collins to Trump. It pointed to her 2018 vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, who later joined the majority overturning federal abortion rights, and to her procedural vote that brought Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act to the Senate floor before she voted against final passage, citing cuts to Maine's Medicaid program, per the Bangor Daily News. Jackson also cited a September ProPublica report that FBI agents sought as late as 2024 to widen a bribery investigation that could have involved Collins; she called the allegations false. In a post before their second debate, Jackson wrote that he did not "owe Donald Trump or the billionaires anything, unlike Senator Collins," per his X account.

Collins ran on seniority and her Appropriations chairmanship, and on her breaks with Trump over tariffs and the Iran war. Newsweek noted she initially declined to back Iran war powers resolutions before becoming more critical of the conflict, and that she disputed the Democratic argument that her independence was selective by citing the times she broke with the administration, per Newsweek. Her allies attacked Jackson's lack of federal experience and his testy exchanges with colleagues in Augusta, per the Bangor Daily News.

A third reading came from the White House, where an unnamed official told AFP that "candidate quality matters" and that Trump "did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot" than they did themselves, per RTE. Trump himself had declined to endorse Collins, per Wikipedia's race summary. His own first post of the night, "I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!", did not mention Maine, per Truth Social.

What the polls and exit polls showed

Public polling pointed the right way this time. The three late surveys that Newsweek compiled all had Jackson ahead inside or near the margin of error, and our report on the final Siena poll had him up six. An earlier CNN/SSRS poll also showed a Jackson lead.

Sources: Newsweek for the three polls; Bangor Daily News for the count. Newsweek described the Marist sample as likely voters in one place and registered voters in another, so treat that row's population as unclear.

The Voter Poll by SSRS, the shared exit poll of the major networks, found that about six in ten likely Maine Senate voters said Collins was too supportive of Trump. In 2020, half had said she supported him "too much," and about eight in ten of those voters opposed her; among the 34 percent who said she backed him "about the right amount," 94 percent supported her. About six in ten also said Collins would do a better job than Jackson at securing federal funding for the state, per ABC News. Those figures are preliminary and will be reweighted to the final count; our overview of the national exit polls explains how that process works. The final polls also found roughly 60 percent of likely Maine voters disapproving of Trump's job performance, per the Bangor Daily News.

The most expensive race per voter in the country

Spending estimates vary by what is counted. Maine Public reported that Republican-aligned groups spent more than $130 million and Democratic-aligned groups $94 million, at least $224 million combined, a record for the state and the costliest race per capita in the country, per Maine Public. The Bangor Daily News, citing AdImpact, put advertising alone at $284 million aired or booked through the end of the year, with Republicans holding a $46 million edge led by the Senate Leadership Fund, per the Bangor Daily News. Jackson outraised Collins four to one in the most recent quarter, though Collins led in overall fundraising and outside help, per Newsweek.

Federal Election Commission data give a narrower, verified slice. A snapshot of Collins's principal committee (C00314575) for the 2026 cycle, retrieved November 2, 2026, lists 244 contributions on the committee's PAC receipts line (Form 3, line 11C). The largest was $13,000 from Jobs Opportunity Now PAC; dozens of others, including the PACs of American Airlines, BAE Systems USA and American Rheinmetall Defense, gave the $10,000 maximum, per the FEC candidate page. The same snapshot of processed independent expenditures shows Planned Parenthood Votes spending $753,805 against Collins, and Lead Maine Committee ($638,224), SLF PAC ($625,939), ClearPath Action Fund ($616,449) and Stronger Maine ($539,036) spending in her support, per the FEC independent expenditure data. Those processed totals are a small fraction of the ad-tracking figures above because much late spending is filed on 24- and 48-hour reports that the FEC had not yet processed; the snapshot also excludes individual and conduit donations and does not net refunds, so it is not a total of anyone's money.

The down-ballot picture

Democrat Hannah Pingree won the governor's race to succeed Mills. The AP called it just after 11:30 p.m. with 44 percent of precincts reporting and Pingree at 51.1 percent, Republican Bobby Charles at 40.8 percent and independent Rick Bennett at 8.1 percent, per Maine Public. Pingree raised nearly $5 million to Charles's roughly $2 million and Bennett's just under $1 million, per filings with the Maine Ethics Commission cited there. Bennett, a former state Republican chairman who left the party last year, argued that both parties had become obstacles to solving major problems; his 8 percent is the clearest measure of that view in Tuesday's returns.

Maine's 2nd District race between former Gov. Paul LePage and Democratic State Auditor Matt Dunlap had not been called on any page we could open at publication time.

What people were saying online

We set out to sample reactions across X and the r/politics, r/Conservative, r/neoliberal and r/moderatepolitics subreddits between 12:30 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. Eastern on November 4. Reddit's listing pages, including the JSON feeds and old.reddit.com, were blocked to our tools, and X's explore pages refused automated access, so we could not read either platform's rankings directly. The tool we use to verify an X post against its live permalink failed on every link we tried.

What we can report comes from search-engine indexing of X posts, which shows the text as indexed but not the live post, engagement counts or replies. Indexed posts from news accounts carried the result within minutes: NEWS CENTER Maine wrote that Collins "has conceded the election, naming Democrat Troy Jackson the victor," per its post; AFP called it "yet another flip for the Democrats, media projections show," per AFP; the results account VoteHub relayed the concession "per CNN," per VoteHub. We found no indexed post from Collins's own account by 1:30 a.m. We are not quoting ordinary users, because we could not confirm any post's wording or its author's location.

None of this measures Maine opinion. The representative evidence in this story is the exit poll and the pre-election polls above, with their stated field dates and samples.

What remains unknown

The final margin and turnout. The 52.5–46.3 split is a partial count with no precinct share attached, and Maine's ranked-choice rules apply only if no candidate clears 50 percent.

Collins's plans. Her statement addressed the transition but not what she will do when her term ends in January.

The House delegation. The 2nd District result was outstanding, and with it whether Democrats hold both Maine seats.

The money. Final FEC totals, including late independent expenditures, will not be processed for weeks.

Sources and method

Reported between 12:30 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. Eastern on November 4, 2026. Pages we opened: Maine Public, the Bangor Daily News, WGME, Newsweek, ABC News's election night live blog, RTE's report of AFP's White House quotes, the FEC candidate and independent-expenditure pages, and Wikipedia's race summary (last updated before the general election). Axios, the Maine Morning Star, the Press Herald live blog, CNN and NBC News pages were blocked to our fetch tool. Reddit and X could not be opened or verified; social posts above are quoted as indexed by a search engine. Our standards for polls, sourcing and corrections are on our methodology page.

Differing perspectives

Was Susan Collins's defeat a verdict on her own record or on national Republican politics?

Each position is summarized as its supporters make it, with equal weight and in alphabetical order. A summary is not an endorsement; the evidence for each is weighed in the story above.

• A national wave that swept away an independent record

  Who holds it: Collins, her campaign, Senate Republican leaders and allied groups such as the Senate Leadership Fund

  Collins and her allies argue that she lost in a national environment no Republican in a Trump-losing state could survive, not because Maine rejected her work. They point to her 30 years of accomplishments for the state, her Appropriations chairmanship, her vote against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act over Medicaid cuts, and her breaks with the administration on tariffs and the Iran war. They say the exit poll finding that about six in ten voters thought she would do a better job securing federal funding shows voters valued her seniority even as they used the race to send a message about the president. In her concession she said it had been the honor of her life to serve Maine.

  In their words: Statement of Sen. Susan Collins, as posted in full by Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio ↗

• A verdict on Collins's votes

  Who holds it: Troy Jackson's campaign, Maine Democrats and allied groups such as Planned Parenthood Votes

  Jackson's camp argues that Maine voters judged Collins by what she did, not by her reputation. They point to her 2018 vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, her votes for Trump's cabinet nominees and her procedural vote that let the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reach the Senate floor, and say her later objections came after the damage was done. Jackson said he did not owe Donald Trump or the billionaires anything, unlike Senator Collins, and argued that working Mainers could not afford six more years of concern without action. On this view, the exit poll finding that about six in ten voters saw her as too supportive of Trump reflects her record, and the result is a mandate to end the Iran war and expand health coverage.

  In their words: Troy Jackson for Senate, post on X before the second debate ↗

• Both parties failed Maine voters

  Who holds it: Independent governor candidate Rick Bennett, a former state Republican chairman, and voters who backed independents

  Independents in Maine argue that the Senate race was a choice between two national machines, and that neither party has answered the state's problems with housing costs, property taxes and an aging workforce. Bennett, who left the Republican Party last year, said both parties had become obstacles to addressing major issues and ran for governor to offer a third path. On this view, Collins's loss and Jackson's win both reflect a two-party contest that spent more than $200 million on advertising while leaving voters who want practical, nonpartisan government with no Senate candidate to choose, and the 8 percent Bennett drew for governor is the measure of that frustration.

  In their words: Maine Public, reporting Rick Bennett's stated rationale for his independent candidacy ↗

• Candidate quality and Trump's absence from the ballot

  Who holds it: President Trump and White House officials speaking to AFP

  The White House argues that the midterm losses, including Maine, came down to candidate quality and to the president not being on the ballot. Trump wrote that if he had been on the ballot Republicans would have won in a landslide, and an official said that candidate quality matters and that the president did a better job promoting many of the candidates than they did themselves. On this view, Collins's loss says little about the president's standing, since he had not endorsed her and had told voters to pretend he was on the ballot, and Democratic voters will regret their choice once gas prices fall after the Iran conflict is resolved.

  In their words: President Donald Trump, Truth Social post of November 3, 2026 ↗