A concession just after midnight
Republican Senator Susan Collins called her Democratic challenger Troy Jackson on Tuesday night to concede the Maine Senate race, ending a 30-year career in the United States Senate and handing Democrats their seventh flipped Senate seat of the night. Collins’s campaign confirmed the call to USA Today just after midnight Eastern time on Wednesday — 12:29 a.m. in Washington, early Wednesday morning in Pakistan — through Jackson campaign spokesperson Maggie Amjad.
“It has been the honor of my life to serve the people of Maine in the United States Senate,” Collins wrote in conceding. “I called Troy Jackson tonight to congratulate him and to assure him that my staff and I will work to ensure a smooth transition.”
CNN and Fox News both projected Jackson as the winner. The Associated Press had not yet called the race at the time of the concession, and results remain unofficial until Maine certifies them — a distinction that matters in a state where counting can run on. NBC News results cited in Maine reporting put Jackson ahead by about 53 percent to 47 percent with more than 513,000 votes counted, and the Associated Press dashboard showed a similar Jackson lead with counting still under way. The margin will move as the count finishes; the outcome, with the incumbent conceding, will not.
Who Collins was — and why she kept winning
Collins, 73, was first elected in 1996 and was seeking a sixth term. She leaves as the longest-serving Republican woman in Senate history, a moderate who built her reputation on bipartisanship and on steering federal money to a small, rural state — and who kept winning in a state that has not voted for a Republican for president since 1988. She was the only Republican senator seeking re-election this year in a state Donald Trump lost in 2024, which made her seat one of the Democrats’ top targets from the start.
She had survived scares before — in 2020 she trailed in poll after poll and still won by about nine points. This time, the headwinds were different: a war in Iran that pushed up fuel and home heating oil prices, a serious matter in a largely rural state with harsh winters, and a trade war with Canada that weighed on tourism, lobstering and logging. Jackson’s campaign hammered Collins for enabling Trump’s agenda.
A 100-day campaign from the logging roads
Jackson, 58, is a fifth-generation logger from Allagash, a remote town in northern Maine where the paved road gives way to logging roads. He served in the Maine Senate from 2008 to 2014 and again from 2016 to 2024, including six years as its president, before leaving under term limits. He had spent this year running for governor, finishing third in the Democratic primary in June — and then, in July, Democrats turned to him to replace their Senate nominee, Graham Platner, a former Marine and oysterman who dropped out after facing allegations of sexual assault, which he denied.
Jackson therefore ran a Senate campaign of about 100 days. He leaned hard on his blue-collar roots, campaigned on universal health care and other populist policies, and drew support from high-profile progressives including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
What Maine changes
Maine is the seventh Republican-held Senate seat Democrats have flipped this election night, after North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Kansas and Iowa. Democrats had already secured control of the Senate on called races alone, as Informopedia reported earlier, with 52 seats on called races — 34 seats not up for election plus 18 won, including the two independents who caucus with Democrats. Maine takes that called-race tally to 53. Michigan and Alaska remain uncalled and can only add to the Democratic total, though neither changes who controls the chamber now.
Democrats have not won a Senate election in Maine since 1988. That is the scale of what happened here: not just another seat in a wave night, but the end of one of the Senate’s most durable careers, in a state that had kept returning the same senator even as it voted Democratic for president.
Why this matters beyond Maine
For readers outside the United States, the point is not the partisan scoreboard. A Senate that the White House does not control changes what an American president can do abroad: treaties, sanctions, war funding and senior appointments all pass through that chamber, and a Democratic majority has promised to focus on affordability, reversing Medicaid cuts and ending the war in Iran — the war whose fuel prices helped decide races like this one. Collins herself was often the Republican most willing to break with her party; her replacement is a populist Democrat who ran against the Trump agenda outright. The Senate that emerges from this election will not just be Democratic-controlled. On the evidence of Maine, it will be a different kind of Senate altogether — less inclined to compromise with the White House, and more inclined to confront it.
This is a developing story based on projections by CNN and Fox News, the concession confirmed to USA Today, and results reported by Reuters and the Associated Press. It will be updated as Maine’s count is completed and certified. Our voting-day guide explains what the midterms decide, and our first Senate flip of the night was Roy Cooper’s win in North Carolina.
