Politics
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A new poll shows Democrat Graham Platner with a narrow lead over Republican incumbent Susan Collins in Maine’s U.S. Senate race.
The details reveal a challenger with a stark education gap, a perceived character problem and a turnout dependency running against a senator who just can’t shake the shadow of President Donald Trump.
Here are our three main takeaways from the poll.
Platner has an education problem.
Platner leads Collins 49% to 47% among likely voters in the survey released early Monday by The New York Times, Portland Press Herald and Siena College, a margin well within the survey’s error margin of 4.8 points.
The challenger’s populist brand was tuned to build a coalition that crossed the college-degree line. Instead, Collins is winning non-college voters 58% to 37%. That’s a 21-point gap in a state where most voters don’t have a four-year degree.
Platner’s base looks less like the working-class movement he has touted and more like the same coalition of college-educated, Portland-area progressives that has struggled statewide before. Looking at this poll, he’s a fairly typical Democrat struggling to remake the electorate.
Trump is the main problem for Collins.
Collins needs to keep the race focused on what 61% of likely voters already believe: that she would do a better job than Platner at delivering federal money to Maine. Her position atop the Senate Appropriations Committee is the clearest contrast she has. It appears to be working.
But the Trump anchor is real. More than half of likely voters, including 57% of independents, say she would support the president too much. If the race becomes a pure referendum on Trump, her crossover appeal collapses and the race becomes unwinnable.
One set of numbers explains the whole race.
Platner’s path to victory runs through turnout. The poll’s likely electorate skews more Democratic than the 2024 presidential electorate. Collins would lead if the race resembled last cycle’s turnout. Platner is betting that midterm anti-Trump energy produces a more favorable electorate in November. The June primaries showed signs of that.
He also needs independents to hold, and that is complicated. He leads them by 6 percentage points, but nearly a third say his personal controversies, including sexually explicit text messages he sent to women while married, a since-covered tattoo of a Nazi symbol and old social media posts, give them pause. Those revelations haven’t disqualified him yet, but another significant one could.
The most important numbers in the poll may be the simplest: 54% of likely voters want Democrats to control the Senate, but only 49% back Platner. Collins is already winning a meaningful slice of voters whose partisan preferences run against her.
She must expand that group. Platner needs to collapse it to almost zero.