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Three polls released Thursday split sharply on the question most likely to decide Maine’s U.S. Senate race: How many voters will cross over for Republican Sen. Susan Collins after voting Democratic in the 2024 presidential election?
A New York Times/Siena/Portland Press Herald poll had Collins winning 12% of Kamala Harris voters and leading Democrat Troy Jackson. But Jackson led in polls from UMass Lowell/YouGov, which had Collins at 8% of those voters, and UNH, which had her at just 4%.
Collins’ magic number looks to be about 1 in 10 Harris voters, according to a Bangor Daily News analysis of those polls and past election results. That’s not exact. It relies on a number of assumptions about the electorate that could shift when voters come out in November.
Despite fiercely partisan campaigns in 2020 and 2026, ticket-splitting has always carried Collins. She won comfortably in 2020 even as Joe Biden carried Maine by a similar margin, running far ahead of President Donald Trump everywhere and particularly in the Portland suburbs and in Aroostook County. Polls that year badly underestimated her crossover support.
She is now the only Republican senator seeking reelection in a state Harris carried, and signs have been mounting that the Democrats who once backed her are harder to reach in a polarized era. Jackson, the former Maine Senate president from Allagash, became the nominee after Graham Platner withdrew.
The BDN analysis starts from the RealClearPolitics polling average, which has Jackson ahead by a point. If Collins keeps nearly all Trump voters, that average implies she is winning a little less than 1 in 10 Harris voters in an electorate that leans like the one in 2024.
A small gain among those voters would flip the race to Collins. At the rate in the Times poll, she would win.
But if the electorate is as Democratic as it was in the 2020 presidential race and Collins’ crossover is stuck in the high single digits, Jackson wins. If it leans as Democratic as it did for Gov. Janet Mills’ comfortable reelection in 2022, Jackson wins more easily.
Holding Trump voters matters, too. UMass Lowell found Jackson winning 1 in 10, which is an outlier compared with any other recent survey. The Times found him winning very few.