Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
The 2020 election made Maine Sen. Susan Collins a political legend.
National Democrats, who’d effectively let Collins walk to victory in 2014, wanted her seat in the worst way this time. The Democratic candidate, state House Speaker Sara Gideon, and her outside affiliates raised more money than could even be spent on a political campaign in Maine. Democrats’ heavy-handed assault seemed to be working: Collins did not lead in a single public poll for the entirety of 2020. While not celebrating prematurely, Democrats had reason to be cautiously optimistic that they might finally catch their white whale.
“Sara was leading every private poll that she had,” too, former Rep. Tom Allen, who lost to Collins in 2008 and is a friend of Gideon’s, told me.
Collins’ team didn’t know what was coming, either. “I don’t think anybody had a firm bead on what the result was going to be,” Lance Dutson, a Maine Republican strategist who worked on Collins’ 2008, 2014, and 2020 campaigns, told me. “There was definitely some concern.”
