LEWISTON, Maine — Fernand Asselin didn’t want to talk about politics at first.
But he opened up after polishing off a pair of red snappers during a busy lunch hour at Simones’ Hot Dog Stand. Just hours earlier, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin had stopped at the retail politics mainstay amid a throng of supporters and reporters.
“I’m not for her 100%,” said Asselin, an 81-year-old retired Auburn firefighter, who agreed with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson’s core argument that Collins votes too often with President Donald Trump. “But I know I don’t want to see anyone else but her in the Senate. The left has gone way overboard.”
Asselin said Collins needs strong turnout to blunt a progressive movement that has embraced Jackson and Democrats nationally. He described them as too extreme and bordering on communist.
The visit was part of Collins’ reelection bus tour, 13 days before Election Day. It brought into focus the anger, enthusiasm and apathy that the tight race may hinge on. Several Simones’ patrons expressed disgust with increasingly bitter campaign ads — or politics in general — whether on Capitol Hill or in Augusta.
When a reporter apologized for holding a loud interview over the chatter, sizzling burgers and clattering dishes, one patron paying his check said, “I’m glad I missed it.”
“It’s more volatile,” co-owner Linda Simones, whose family has run the shop since 1908, said of the political environment. “People before, if they knew your points of view, they would be a little more accepting.”
Simones and her husband, Jimmy, are Republicans. Their daughter is a Collins staffer. She said the senator “works really hard for Mainers” and credited her and Manchin, a former Democrat who turned independent in his last year in the Senate for “working with both sides.”
Outside, Democratic protesters who had learned of the visit, which wasn’t announced publicly, held “Retire Collins” signs and cutouts of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s face. They accused the incumbent of corruption and said she paved the way for health care cuts, the overturning of federal abortion rights and deadly immigration enforcement.
“She is absolutely complicit,” said Michelle Barajas, a 56-year-old retired health care worker. “I’ve never been more angry. We have fewer rights than our grandmothers did? It’s baffling.”
Barajas added that it was “mind-blowing” the race appeared to be neck and neck.
Holly Sysko, a retired state worker from Lewiston who previously voted for Collins, said Jackson is a strong alternative. She alluded to his past opposition to abortion rights, which he has since said was wrong.
“There’s things he’s been challenged on, things he’s changed his mind on over the years … that shows you’re listening to people,” Sysko said.
When Collins and Manchin took questions from a crush of reporters, her red-shirted supporters chanted her name to drown out the protesters until Collins asked her team to quiet them so she could hear. She renewed her calls to ease tariffs on Canada and said a Senate Leadership Fund radio ad mocking Jackson’s family should come off the air.
Simones said patrons still get a kick out of the famous figures who stop by, though some visits have sparked frustration or even boycotts. She takes pride that almost all of the Democrats and Republicans in this year’s gubernatorial primaries came in.
She pointed to two signatures in her guest book as a sign of hope for bipartisanship: Donald Trump Jr. and Maine author Stephen King, a proud Democrat.
“Both ends of the spectrum,” she said. “Politics is part of our life, it’s not all of it.”