Incumbent Sen. Susan Collins has reminded Republicans that the Maine Senate race is not over.
A New York Times/Siena/Portland Press Herald poll finds the Republican senator leading Democrat Troy Jackson 49% to 46% among likely voters. The result is the first survey since former Democratic candidate Graham Platner exited the race in July to show Collins ahead.
And prediction markets noticed.
Jackson is still favored on Kalshi, where more than $9.7 million has traded on the Maine Senate race. But his price has slipped to 66%, down from above 70% earlier this week. On Polymarket, where roughly $1.8 million has traded, Jackson is at 67%.
The move is not a wholesale reversal. Traders still see Jackson as the likely winner. But it acknowledges that the market may have gotten ahead of itself in treating Maine as a relatively comfortable Democratic pickup.
A poll that cuts against the trend
The Times/Siena result stands apart from the recent polling average.
Since Jackson became the Democratic nominee, available surveys had shown him ahead by roughly three to four points. The NYT called its result a “modest outlier,” but cautioned that dismissing it simply because it differs from the other polls would be a mistake.
The poll’s margin is narrow enough that neither candidate has a commanding advantage. Still, Collins’ three-point lead is a meaningful warning sign for Democrats who had begun to view the state as trending in their direction.
Kalshi’s price movement reflects that. Jackson’s probability did not collapse. It fell from the low 70s into the mid-60s, a repricing from “strong favorite” to “favored, but very much beatable.”
Collins has done this before
Maine is naturally difficult to model because Collins is not a conventional Republican candidate.
The state is more Democratic-leaning than the Senate battlegrounds in Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Alaska or Kansas. Yet Collins has repeatedly built a coalition that reaches beyond the modern GOP base, positioning herself as an institutional moderate and maintaining support among voters who often back Democrats in presidential contests.
She did something similar in 2008, winning reelection comfortably in an election cycle that produced a Democratic Senate supermajority. That was before the current level of partisan polarization. Still, it remains the political fact that makes her race fundamentally different from a standard red-state or blue-state Senate contest.
Jackson, the former Maine Senate president, is running as a progressive Democrat with a strong labor identity and a message centered on affordability, wages and rural economic security. His path is straightforward on paper: consolidate Democrats, win enough independents, and make the race a referendum on whether Collins has remained too aligned with a Republican Senate and President Donald Trump.
The new poll suggests Collins still has room to resist that argument.
Maine is a Senate control hinge
The stakes extend far beyond one seat.
Democrats need Maine if they want a credible path to Senate control. Losing here would force them to find not just two, but three wins in states Trump carried by double digits in 2024, such as Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, Texas or Kansas. That is possible only in the loosest sense of the word. It is not the path Democrats want.
That reality makes the Collins-Jackson race one of the most consequential Senate contests in the country.
Democrats may have encouraging polls in states like Michigan, New Hampshire and Texas. Still, Maine remains unusually valuable because it is a state they should be able to win in a favorable national environment. If they cannot defeat a Republican incumbent there, the Senate map becomes dramatically more demanding.
