First elected in 1996, Susan Collins has represented Maine in the Senate for around three decades, the longest tenure of any Republican woman in the chamber.
Her position is at risk as prediction market-implied odds of Democratic challenger Troy Jackson unseating the incumbent stand at 64%. Meanwhile, Collins has a 36% chance of winning the race as of Thursday afternoon and securing a sixth term, according to Kalshi’s event contract on the Maine’s Senate election.
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The race between Collins and Jackson could help determine which party wins the Senate majority and how both parties navigate the last two years of President Donald Trump’s presidency, according to the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal.
“A Jackson victory, along with one by Mr. El-Sayed in Michigan, will advance the left’s growing strength in the Democratic Party,” said WSJ’s editorial board on Tuesday. “More Democratic socialists will run in primaries. And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez might take it as a signal to run for President rather than against Mr. Schumer for Senate in New York.”
A reelection win for Collins, however, would suggest that an independent-minded Republican still resonates with constituents of the Democratic-leaning state, per WSJ’s editorial board.
Polls point to a close race
The Marist University poll, published on Tuesday, one week before Election Day, found the Democratic challenger two percentage points ahead of the Republican incumbent, 49% to 47%. The two-point lead is within the poll’s margin of error of 6.6 percentage points, The Hill reported.
Jackson, a former Maine Senate president, is also leading by 2.4 points in a forecast from election analyst Nate Silver that was released on Wednesday. Jackson's edge in the Marist poll and Silver's forecast follow a Fox News Poll, conducted between Oct. 16 and Oct. 20, that found a tie between the two Maine candidates at 49%.
Personal attacks in the final stretch
Republican advertisements have attacked Jackson by focusing on his decades-long relationship with his partner, “whom Sen. Susan Collins and GOP allies have said is his second cousin,” CNN reported earlier this week.
One ad from the top Republican super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, that aired on Maine radio as a country song contains the lyrics, “If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours too.”
Collins campaign spokeswoman Blake Kernen said the incumbent senator believes the race has featured too many personal attacks. “She called for this ad to be taken down the day it went up,” Kernen said in a statement.
Collins told Politico in a September 2026 interview, “I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.”
Compared to other races
The Maine Senate contest is one of the tightest races by prediction market-implied odds. The gap between Jackson’s 64% and Collins’ 36% is smaller than the Senate races for Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and South Carolina.
The Democratic candidate in each of those races is favored to win, giving the party a 68% chance of controlling the Senate, and a 66% probability of sweeping both chambers of Congress.
The takeaway:
Kalshi markets now predict:
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