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.