Troy Jackson, in just 101 days, bested the Republican, preventing her sixth Senate term: ‘You can’t eat road salt’

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The political demise of Susan Collins – a fixture of Maine and Washington politics for three decades – recalls the famous line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises about how one of the novel’s characters experienced bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s stunning Democrat “blue wave” election triumph, it seemed obvious that Collins’s 30-year tenure as Maine’s Republican senator was vulnerable to the challenge of Troy Jackson, the Democrats’ explicitly working-class candidate as voters prepared to unleash pent-up anger with Donald Trump’s presidency.

Democratic nominee toppled the five-term GOP incumbent in one of the most hard-fought midterm contests

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The Democrat Troy Jackson has won Maine’s US Senate race, toppling five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins in one of the biggest upsets of the 2026 midterms.

Jackson, 58, unseated Collins – who has been in the Senate since 1997 – in a closely fought, and often rancorous, race characterized by mutual accusations of corruption and clashes over living costs in the predominantly rural state.

‘It’s the disregard for the rule of law. It just seems like they’re thumbing their nose at it’

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In the battleground state of Maine, Todd Cox, 63, has supported the state’s incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins not once, but twice, in previous elections. Not this time.

On Tuesday, Cox, a technology professional, cast his vote for Collins’s Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson – driven not by pressing local issues, but broader concern “for the direction the country is going in”, he said.