Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins drew a clear line between her record and that of Donald Trump during a televised debate Tuesday against Democratic contender Troy Jackson, a posture reflecting the political landscape of a state that has gone against Trump in three consecutive elections.
Speaking during the debate, Collins noted that her voting record placed her in agreement with President Biden's positions more than 90 percent of the time across his presidency — a figure she characterised as consistent with her own longstanding pattern, even as it places her well outside the voting behaviour of most of her Republican colleagues. She also pointed to her record of crossing party lines more frequently than any other senator in the chamber.
Jackson, 58, a former state legislator, entered the Democratic race after replacing Graham Platner as the party's nominee, and the debate gave him his first opportunity to address a wide electorate in a Senate campaign the party views as one it needs to win. Platner, who had held a harbour master post before entering the race, withdrew in July after sexual assault allegations were made against him — claims he denied — a development that left Democrats with limited time to field a replacement for a candidate whose populist and progressive platform had been drawing notable support.
During the campaign, Jackson has pointed to Collins's voting record — aligned with the president on 96 percent of occasions — as evidence of where her loyalties lay. In his opening remarks, Jackson returned on multiple occasions to Collins's 2018 Senate vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, drawing a connection between that vote and the court's subsequent decision to strike down the federal abortion protections that had stood under Roe v. Wade for roughly five decades. Jackson told those gathered that the evening was ultimately about where a person had stood at a moment of consequence, and noted that, eight years before that night, women from Maine had travelled to Washington to ask Collins not to cast that vote, though she proceeded to do so.
Collins has stated she stands behind her vote to confirm Kavanaugh without reservation.
Collins, who has held a Senate seat since 1996 and turned 73, has built her political identity around positioning herself as a centrist at odds with harder-line directions within her own party. Maine has backed the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992, a pattern that held across all three of Trump's White House bids.
On a range of policy questions — among them the conflict with Iran, against which she stated she had cast votes for resolution on nine separate occasions, describing the engagement as poorly considered — Collins drew distinctions between her positions and those of Trump. When moderator Gregg Lagerquist raised the possibility of Trump making a campaign stop in Maine, Collins replied that she did not expect that to happen, noting that Trump had been talking about visiting many different states.
Collins noted that no communication had come from the president's office, and described herself as unlikely to be among his preferred allies in the Senate — a gap she linked to disagreements over policies that bear directly on Maine, among them rural healthcare access and the levying of tariffs on Canada, a country that shares a boundary with the state and which she described as fundamentally different from China in terms of trade relations.
Survey data place the two contenders within a few points of each other.
