Maine’s 2026 Senate race is actually pretty simple.
Susan Collins has been in the Senate since 1997.
Troy Jackson wants her out.
Jackson is also a fifth-generation logger, which means whoever made the political cartoon with him holding a chainsaw did not exactly have to work very hard for the metaphor.
But the chainsaw part is probably the least interesting thing about this race.
The real question is whether Maine voters still believe Susan Collins is independent enough to deserve another term, or whether almost 30 years in Washington is already enough.
I think that is the argument Jackson has to make.
Not that Collins is secretly the most extreme Republican in America. She isn’t.
Not that she votes with Republicans every single time. She doesn’t.
His better argument is much simpler.
She has been there for almost three decades.
At some point, you become part of the thing you keep saying you are trying to fix.
That is harder to dismiss.
Collins has always built her political identity around being moderate and independent. Sometimes that claim is fair. She has broken with Republicans on major votes, and that matters.
For example, she voted against Trump’s large tax and spending bill after criticizing the Medicaid cuts and the possible impact on rural hospitals.
So if Jackson tries to pretend Collins simply votes yes whenever Republicans tell her to, that argument can fall apart pretty quickly.
Facts are annoying that way.
But this is where it gets more complicated.
Collins also voted for Brett Kavanaugh.
She supported the 2017 Republican tax bill that lowered the corporate tax rate.
She remains a Republican senator and helps determine which party controls the Senate.
All of those things are also true.
This is why I think the usual campaign argument of “Susan Collins is basically MAGA” is too lazy.
She isn’t.
But saying she is independent does not automatically mean her votes have no consequences either.
Both things can be true.
Then You Have Troy Jackson
Jackson is almost the opposite political product.
He did not come out of some Washington pipeline where you work for a senator, become a consultant, join a think tank and eventually discover that your true calling was public service.
He was a logger.
He protested Canadian labor being brought across the border because he believed it was hurting Maine workers.
Then he went into politics.
Eventually he became president of the Maine Senate.
That background gives him something Democrats often try very hard to manufacture.
A working-class identity that does not require a campaign biography video showing the candidate wearing brand-new work boots.
Jackson’s message is basically that government has spent too much time protecting corporations and wealthy people while workers get whatever is left.
I think that message can work.
Whether every policy he supports will work is another matter.
He supports Medicare for All, stronger unions, higher wages and dismantling ICE.
Republicans are going to attack all of that.
Obviously.
They will probably portray him as Bernie Sanders with a chainsaw.
And to be fair, Jackson is giving them plenty of material.
But Maine voters have also elected him repeatedly in territory that has become much more Republican.
That matters too.
You can disagree with his politics without pretending he has no idea how to talk to working-class voters.
Collins Has One Big Advantage
Experience.
You do not stay in the U.S. Senate for nearly 30 years by accident.
Collins knows how Washington works.
She has seniority.
She has relationships.
She can point to moments where she broke with her party.
There is real value in that.
But come to think of it, that is also the obvious weakness.
If Washington is broken, how long can someone stay inside Washington before voters are allowed to ask what exactly they have been fixing?
Twenty years?
Thirty?
Forty?
I don’t know.
There is probably no magic number.
But eventually longevity stops looking like experience and starts looking like ownership.
That is where Jackson can hurt her.
Not with the cartoon chainsaw.
With time.
Still, Jackson has his own problem.
It is easy to say the system is broken.
Every challenger says that.
The harder part is convincing voters that your solution will not simply replace one set of problems with another.
Medicare for All sounds good to many people.
Dismantling ICE sounds terrible to many others.
Higher wages sound good.
Higher costs do not.
Politics gets messy very quickly once slogans become policy.
Which is why I think this race is actually more interesting than the usual Republican versus Democrat nonsense.
Collins is asking Maine voters to trust the person they already know.
Jackson is asking them to believe that knowing someone for nearly 30 years might actually be the reason to replace them.
And yes, the whole thing is being represented by a logger cutting down a giant tree while Susan Collins hangs political apples from the branches.
Fine.
Apparently this is where American political communication is now.
I cannot even complain too much. I am writing about it because of the chainsaw. Hahaha.
But underneath the joke is a legitimate choice.
Do you keep the senator who knows Washington because she has spent almost three decades there?
Or do you send the logger who says Washington is exactly the thing that needs cutting down?
If you were voting in Maine, which one would sound like the safer choice to you?