TOPSHAM, Maine — In 2014, Republican Sen. Susan Collins won 39% of Maine’s Democratic voters, according to exit polls In 2020, she won 13%— still enough to hold her seat in a state President Donald Trump lost that same year. This week, a Suffolk University poll put her support among Democrats at just 5%.

Outside early-voting sites last week, some of those Democratic-leaning voters who once backed Collins said they were now supporting the Democrat in the race, former state Sen. Troy Jackson.

Barbara Swartzlander, a Democrat, voted for Collins in 2020. This year, she cast her ballot for Jackson in Scarborough, one of several Portland suburbs where Collins vastly outperformed Trump in 2020.

Jackson “would bring some new energy,” Swartzlander told MS NOW. She said she was “a little displeased about the Roe v. Wade overturn” and blamed Collins for voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh joined the majority in the 2022 Dobbs decision ending the constitutional right to an abortion.

Scott Burns, a voter in his mid-70s, said he had backed Collins “many times,” including in 2020. But outside a polling site in Topsham, he said he would likely support Jackson this year because he didn’t think Collins had done enough to rein in the president.

“I don’t like what’s going on in the government, and I can’t see any way to continue to enable the president,” Burns said.

Collins, who is seeking a sixth term, is fighting for her political life amid broad frustration with Trump and the Republican Party — and with what some voters see as her unwillingness to oppose the president’s unpopular policies. That frustration threatens her hold on the crossover voters who have long kept her in office in a state that is reliably blue in presidential races.

Finding a Mainer who has voted for Collins at least once over her 30-year career isn’t difficult: In a recent Washington Post poll 70% of voters said they had. The question this year is how many of them will do it again.

Rick Crawford, a Topsham Democrat, said he had supported Collins in “most of the elections.”But this year, he said, “due to the situation with our president, I’m going the other way.”Collins has long maintained a reputation for staying above the political fray, touting the federal money she has brought to Maine as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and highlighting the moments when she has broken with Trump.

In two debates last week, Collins spoke about her opposition to the president on the war with Iran and the tariffs he placed on Canadian exports, and she will have one more chance to do so at the fourth and final debate Thursday night. Some of her past supporters are no longer buying it.

“She does what’s for her and not what’s for the people of Maine,” said Debbie Conley of Gorham, an independent voter who has cast a ballot for Collins before but is undecided this year. “I do like that she’s never missed a vote, but I think it’s time for a change.”

That doesn’t mean voters are enchanted with Jackson, a gruff, unpolished former logger from Maine’s northern reaches. Even voters who support Jackson described him to MS NOW as “lukewarm,” “not particularly” strong and “missing what it takes.”“There were just two choices,” Swartzlander acknowledged, explaining her vote.

Bev Uhlenhake, a lobbyist and former chair of the Maine Democratic Party, said that is typical of a Collins race.

“The thing about Susan Collins is that people don’t vote for her opponent. They vote for or against Susan Collins,” Uhlenhake told MS NOW.

As a Democratic operative in Maine, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, put bluntly, “Troy could win 90% of the vote, and it wouldn’t be about Troy. Ninety percent would be voting against Susan Collins.”But if Collins is bleeding support among Democratic-leaning suburbanites, her supporters say she remains popular in Maine’s conservative rural regions.

Dean Cray, a Republican former state representative from Palmyra, told MS NOW that Collins was “doing really, really well in our area,” though he warned that Trump’s unpopularity could depress turnout, even in Republican strongholds.

“I don’t think President Trump has helped us too much, especially with the prices of oil and fuel oil [where they are] right now, and the war and everything else that’s going on,” Cray said. “I don’t think he’s really helping the Republican ticket.”Collins does have one under-the-radar asset: Steve Abbott, her longtime chief of staff and current campaign manager.

A Republican strategist called Abbott the senator’s “secret weapon,” crediting him with much of the constituent-services operation Collins is widely praised for, particularly in rural parts of the state. Even Democrats give him his due: Abbott “is an incredibly smart Republican strategist,” a Maine-based Democratic operative told MS NOW, granted anonymity to share their candid views.

Collins’ campaign and her party are working hard to drive up Republican turnout in rural Maine, said Jack Ducharme, a Republican state representative from Madison, a Somerset County town of fewer than 5,000 people.

“The party’s been doing a whole lot of stuff across the state, really getting into the grassroots effort of getting voters out, going door to door, doing a lot of canvassing, and I think I think those efforts will pay off,” Ducharme told MS NOW.

“One of the things that’s always been difficult is to try and make sure Republicans get out to vote, particularly in areas where, for years and years and years, their votes have gone by the wayside because the Democrats just outnumber them in their town,” he continued. “In those areas where Republicans outnumber Democrats, we got to get those people out to vote.”But Dan Shea, a professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, said the national environment and Trump’s drag on the ticket may keep Collins from getting the rural turnout she needs.

“I think for a lot of rural Mainers, there is not a tremendous amount of enthusiasm to turn out. I would be surprised if Abbott could turn that thing around,” he told MS NOW.

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