Democrats turned ‘You can’t eat road salt’ into a slogan against Collins
The first televised debate supplied the exchange that became a slogan used in Democratic campaign material. Collins cited, as an example of her willingness to defy Donald Trump on tariffs from Canada, her work getting road salt exempted. “You can’t eat road salt,” Jackson replied tersely. Democrats used the moment in a broader attack on Collins’s credentials as a champion of the state.
Organized labor played a visible role in the campaign. Cynthia Phinney, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in Maine, said the federation made 65,000 canvassing calls on Jackson’s behalf during the race. Jackson’s supporters say he now stands as a potential antidote to an elite Senate. “The Senate has been an elite group of millionaires, and Troy comes from a working-class background,” Phinney said. “Having a working-class person and a union member in the United States Senate is an historic change,” she added. “People are ready to demand change that they haven’t got from their elected officials. It’s a moment in history.”
At the Democrats’ watch party, hopes for Jackson’s success seemed restrained even as polls closed and the count got under way. Early returns showed Jackson with a small lead, but within catching distance, even as previous Republican electoral bastions once thought impregnable fell to the gathering Democratic wave. The turn came late in the evening, when — with about 60% of the ballots counted — returns showed Jackson with a convincing lead. Within minutes, MS Now reported that Collins had called to concede; wild cheers and chants of “Troy, Troy” filled the ballroom at Portland’s Holiday Inn.
Jackson used his victory speech to emphasize his trade union background and to credit grassroots discontent for his win. “You understood what it would mean to send one of your own to the United States Senate,” he told the crowd. “Donald Trump and the billionaires need to understand one thing very clear – something about your new senator. I don’t owe them a damn thing.” And: “When they threaten your healthcare, your livelihood or your freedoms, I am going to stand up to them. You know where I’ll stand. You know how I’ll vote. And when you’ve got a question about it, you’ll be able to ask me yourself. I’m not acting like I’m the best thing that ever happened to the US Senate or anything like that.”
The speech promised an accessibility that critics said Collins never provided, despite her claims of independent-mindedness and her protestations that she frequently voted against Donald Trump. Trump himself did not travel to Maine to campaign for Collins, though he gave stump speeches for multiple other Republican Senate candidates, and there was clear skepticism about her self-described image as a free-thinking critic of the president. Trump had failed to carry Maine in any of his three presidential campaigns.
Collins, the Republican U.S. senator from Maine for three decades, had long been treated as a fixture of the state’s politics, and in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote it had seemed obvious that her tenure was vulnerable to Jackson, the Democrats’ explicitly working-class candidate, as voters prepared to unleash pent-up anger with Donald Trump’s presidency. Yet she had survived seemingly credible electoral challenges before and appeared primed, despite opinion polls showing a close race, to win a sixth Senate term having once pledged to serve only two. Her claim that her Washington connections brought federal funds and contracts home to Maine carried weight with many constituents.
Jackson, meanwhile, seemed a less-than-polished prospect for a state that had previously sent such august figures as Ed Muskie, George Mitchell and Bill Cohen to the Senate before they went on to become international statesmen. His candidacy had been founded on the withdrawal of the party’s original nominee, Graham Platner, whose progressive populist platform generated real excitement before serious sexual misconduct allegations emerged. Platner denied the allegations but withdrew from the race, and Jackson, a former logger, had just 101 days to campaign after being nominated as his replacement.
Jackson, who as a state legislator once opposed abortion rights, won the backing of pro-choice campaigners by stressing Collins’s 2018 vote for conservative Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who subsequently voted for the court’s ruling that overturned the historic Roe v Wade decision, which had previously guaranteed abortion rights nationally. Jackson placards reading “abortion is on the ballot” were widespread.
Todd Cox, 63, a technology professional who had previously voted for Collins, said “concern for the direction the country is going in” drove him to back Jackson this week. “We definitely haven’t become kinder and gentler under this administration,” Cox said. “There’s a lot of bullying that goes on. It goes back to affordability. It’s the war in Iran – that shouldn’t be happening. It’s the disregard for the rule of law. It just seems like they’re thumbing their nose at it.”
Collins’s case for reelection rested in part on the proposition that a senator’s job is to bring money home to the state. Elizabeth Wise, 59, a registered nurse who worked as a vote canvasser for Jackson, disagreed. Speaking at a canvass event in Yarmouth, Wise said: “She’s very good at letting us all know what she has done. But she has really been manipulating Maine voters into thinking that she is a moderate. She makes big deals for the very wealthy in the billionaire class and corporate America on the backs of very small deals that she brings home to Maine.” Wise said it is a senator’s job to bring money back to their state, and said other senators bring a lot more money back to their states than Collins brings to Maine.
On the eve of the election, Doug Emerson, an activist who doubted local voters would abandon Collins, parked a car outside the senator’s office in Portland, Maine’s biggest city, decorated with Trump policy miscues he believed she had been complicit in, hoping to raise awareness. By the time Collins conceded, that doubt had been settled at the polls: a 30-year incumbent was out, and the challenger who had campaigned for 101 days had won the seat.