For the first installment of MS NOW’s “The Voter Files,” we brought together two groups of Maine voters in the Lewiston and Auburn area who have supported federal candidates from both parties to discuss how they are planning to vote in the 2026 Senate race, or why they are still undecided.

For the first group, we heard from 10 working-class voters from Maine’s 2nd Congressional District who identified themselves as moderates or leaning toward Republicans, but sometimes defect. Five had voted for Donald Trump and three for Kamala Harris in 2024, while nine voted for Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden, who represents one of the most conservative House districts in the country.

The discussion took place on Sept. 15, and the group was composed of registered voters who told us they plan to vote in November in the congressional elections.

For the second group, we heard from 10 Lewiston and Auburn area women who identified as independents and voted for Republican Sen. Susan Collins in previous elections. Seven of these women voted for Harris in 2024. Collins is running in a tough re-election contest against Democrat Troy Jackson that is key to whether Republicans can maintain Senate control after November..

The discussions were designed to mirror how a campaign would conduct focus groups. We hired a non-partisan outside firm to help gather the right voters and I led the wide-ranging conversations covering personal experiences, political leanings and impressions of candidates that influenced the participants’ decision-making in the Senate race.

Alongside polling, the findings illuminate the tensions, information and reasoning process driving these likely voters as they head to the ballot box in just a few weeks. Though Auburn has been a bellwether in the past two presidential cycles —closely tracking Maine’s presidential and Collins’s 2020 Senate margin by within three-tenths of a point —these findings are not representative of the broader Maine election nor predictive of the upcoming Senate election’s outcome.

Perhaps unique to Maine, Susan Collins was viewed by those we spoke to as an independent Maine institution. Her 30 years in office and reputation for constituent services offset Trump’s national unpopularity, according to what we heard.

MS NOW’s elections team currently rates the Maine Senate race as a “toss-up,” and some of the latest polling has Collins and Jackson essentially deadlocked. But the 2020 Maine Senate race is a humbling reminder that polling alone often can’t predict an outcome. Collins consistently trailed Democrat Sara Gideon, in some polls by double-digits, before winning by nearly nine percentage points on election day.

Maine is one of the last holdouts that contains split-ticket voters who may lean Democratic at the top of the ticket yet still view Collins as an institutional necessity. These voters don’t always behave the way the numbers suggest.

Here’s what we found was on their minds.

Cost of living spike has fundamentally changed the way Americans live

No casual trips to town. No vacations or Christmas gifts for relatives. Cutting wood for heat and second jobs. The grim economic outlook of the Maine voters we spoke to is the lens through which they evaluate their electoral choices. The rising cost of living has changed how the people we talked to live day to day, but they see business as usual in their politicians. Winter is coming, in the most literal sense, for Mainers facing a 74 percent spike in the cost of heating oil and trying to figure out how to survive the season. 

A Maine institution: Collins

Perhaps unique to Maine, Collins was viewed by those we spoke to as an independent Maine institution. Her 30 years in office and reputation for constituent services offset Trump’s national unpopularity, according to what we heard. One voter said, “The lady shows up for work,” a notable act in an era of chaos.

Other voters cited Collins’ perceived deliverables as the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee chair: defense spending for local shipyards, resources for rural hospitals and Social Security funds for Maine teachers. The focus groups were conducted before the publication of the ProPublica story on the FBI during the Trump administration shutting down its probe into alleged illegal donations to a Collins’ 2020 campaign committee.

Unknown and undefined: Jackson

Since becoming the nominee in July, after Graham Platner dropped out, Jackson has struggled to define himself as a viable replacement for Collins. I found that Jackson has an increasingly shrinking window — a few weeks, and the clock is ticking —to define himself amid the GOP barrage of negative ads from outside groups. (The New York Times estimates that $27.1 million in pro-Democratic and $47.4 million in pro-Republican anonymous ad spending breaks down to around $80 for each of Maine’s less than 900,000 registered voters.)

So far, the emphasis of Jackson’s campaign has been on attacking Collins and emphasizing his working- class background, while offering few concrete policy ideas and proposals. The voters we heard from want to hear a vision and plan to make their lives better, and the vision vacuum they saw extends to the national Democratic Party.

Even our participants in the second group, most of whom voted for Harris, struggled to name what Democrats stood for in 2026. In the aftermath of Platner’s rise and fall, what they saw as incompetence on a state level extended to the Democrats more broadly. In other words, no affirmative vision makes these voters hesitate to leave Collins. 

If I were advising Jackson

As a relative unknown, Jackson needs to prove that he can come to the Senate and deliver as effectively as Collins. Instead of concentrating on ads tying her to Trump, Jackson has to get voters to question what they are getting from Collins’ perceived Washington clout on health care, the economy and heating costs. He needs to turn the incumbent’s greatest strength — her seniority — into a liability, by tying her five terms to what they see as the status quo.

The Democratic base cares about Trump. But Trump is not a defining factor for the ticket-splitters deciding between the comfort of Collins’s seniority versus Jackson’s inexperience in Washington D.C. His background as a logger will not win this election, but demonstrating to voters that he has a plan for health care and heating assistance once in Washington might.

If I were advising Collins

Incumbency and seniority may well propel Collins into her sixth term, but she needs to reassure the independent women who feel betrayed by her critical vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the 5-4 vote to overturn Roe V. Wade. According to the voters we spoke with, a sincere acknowledgement that she misjudged Kavanaugh’s reassurances that Roe was settled precedent might help win them back. For more on how these voters view Collins and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, watch this .

Methodology

We used an independent firm to recruit likely voters, who were paid an industry-standard fee for their participation. Over 90 minutes on Sept. 15, our questions explored participants’ specific life experiences, turning points and trade-offs between someone they know and someone they don’t.

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From MS Now.