The latest poll shows the incumbent Republican leading her opponent, local lawmaker Troy Jackson, whom the Democrats dropped in to replace Graham Platner.
Maine Senator Susan Collins famously trailed in every survey of her 2020 reelection race. But in the end, she defeated her opponent by 8.6 points. This year, Collins faces another uphill fight, but she’s not the underdog that she was six years ago.
The latest survey showing the incumbent Republican leading her Democratic opponent, local lawmaker Troy Jackson, is the high-quality New York Times/Siena poll. Despite a majority of Mainers identifying with the Democratic Party and their preference for a Democrat-led Congress, the poll found Collins ahead of Jackson with 49 to 46 percent support among likely voters.
It’s not that Collins is overwhelmingly popular (Mainers are split, 51 to 48 percent, on whether they view her favorably or unfavorably). Nor is Maine particularly warm to the GOP, the president, or his policies — particularly his trade war with neighboring Canada, of which two-thirds of Mainers disapprove. Rather, it seems that Democrats in the Pine Tree State blew it.
Mainers are more likely to see Jackson as the “extreme” candidate in the race. A majority of respondents believe that Collins “has good character.” Just 38 percent said the same of Jackson. His favorability rating is underwater by seven points. Neither candidate enjoyed an advantage on the central issue of this election cycle, “affordability,” and both were equally described as “an independent voice.” But by an eleven-point margin, Mainers said Collins was more likely to be “an effective senator” than her opponent.
In addition, Collins beat Jackson on who was more likely to bring “money and resources to Maine” by an overwhelming 24-point margin. And even on the all-important question of which candidate would be more likely to do “what’s best for ordinary Mainers,” Collins enjoyed a one-point lead. It doesn’t seem like Mainers have forgotten about Graham Platner, the self-described communist over whom the state’s Democrats swooned. Today, nearly two-thirds of this poll’s respondents view Platner unfavorably, including 54 percent of Democrats.
With the release of this poll, New York Times polling analyst Nate Cohn immediately went about talking his paper’s readers off the ledge. “There’s nothing more uncomfortable for a pollster than a result that looks different from that of other polls,” he wrote in the effort to address the question on every liberal reader’s mind: “Should we believe this poll?” Cohn preemptively dismisses the usual objections, such as whether the survey sampled too many Republicans or departed meaningfully from the average of polls of the race. Instead, Cohn invites his readers to contemplate the unthinkable: “People like her better and think she would be a better senator.”