Senator Susan Collins desperately needed to change the subject. As she stepped around cow manure at the annual Fryeburg Fair, a reporter was asking her about President Trump’s musing that he might campaign in Maine during the closing weeks of the election—an invitation that Collins, trying once again to save her seat, almost certainly had not extended to a man with an approval rating of 32 percent in the state. A campaign staffer tried to cut off the questioning, but the nearly 74-year-old Collins has not won five Senate elections through luck alone, and she quickly found a way out of the tricky Trump talk. “I do have some important news today,” she declared to the assembled scribblers.

Collins went on to announce that she had persuaded the Trump administration to speed up the release of $38 million in home heating assistance for Maine. Nevermind that her office had already publicized the news earlier that day, or that none of the journalists with Collins reported for local publications. This was either Collins at her senatorial savviest, or a stodgy politician reaching for a tattered playbook.

As temperatures plunge, the cost of heating oil is as potent a political issue in Maine as the price of gas is everywhere else. Collins has built her reelection campaign on the idea that she alone, as the chair of the Senate’s powerful appropriations committee and the lone Republican elected to Congress in all of New England, can deliver for Maine. She has boasted of bringing home billions for her sparsely populated state over the years. At a debate this month, Collins crowed that she had secured an exemption for road salt—another crucial supply during Maine’s perennial winter freeze—from the tariffs that Trump has slapped on Canadian goods. (“We can’t eat road salt,” her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, retorted.)

This strategy has worked for Collins before. In 2020, she defied polls forecasting her defeat and won reelection by nearly nine points over a well-funded Democratic opponent even as Joe Biden carried Maine that year by a similar margin. The contours of that campaign were largely the same as the one Collins is currently waging: Democrats tried to tie her to an unpopular Trump, denounced her claims to be independent, and assailed her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a potential death knell for Roe v. Wade. Collins prevailed by leaning on her bipartisan record and the federal aid she had secured for her state.

Six years later, Democrats have reason to believe that a message that fell short in 2020 will resonate more deeply now. Both Collins and Trump have lower approval ratings in the state than they did then, and the decisive vote Collins gave to Kavanaugh proved consequential when he sided with a majority on the Supreme Court in overturning Roe. (Collins, who supports abortion rights, has said she relied on Kavanaugh’s statements that he considered the 1973 ruling to be settled legal precedent. Earlier this year, however, she told reporters that she did not regret her vote.) Democrats have added ammunition against Collins following a ProPublica report that, in late 2024, the FBI was on the verge of launching a bribery investigation into federal contracts she had helped land for her campaign donors (one of whom had pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions). The probe ended after Trump took office and the Department of Justice slashed its public-corruption units. Collins has denied wrongdoing.

On paper, Maine should be the easiest state for Democrats to flip during a year in which, polls suggest, voters are intent on punishing the GOP. It is the only state that Kamala Harris carried in 2024—she won by seven points—where a Republican incumbent senator is on the ballot. Yet Democrats have not been able to put Collins away. Polls show a close race; Jackson is leading narrowly in some surveys, and Collins is ahead in others. She is faring no worse—and in some cases better—than Republican incumbents running in more conservative states such as Ohio, Alaska, and Kansas.

Collins is benefiting, too, from a Democratic campaign that has at times verged on the shambolic. Party leaders initially tried to recruit Governor Janet Mills to challenge Collins, despite the fact that Mills would have been, if elected, a 79-year-old Senate freshman. Mills entered the race but withdrew when polls showed her getting crushed in the primary by Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer. Platner shot quickly to national stardom, surviving the revelation that he had a tattoo resembling an infamous Nazi emblem, but he was forced to withdraw following allegations of sexual assault (which he denied).

[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats ]

Democrats then nominated Jackson, another Bernie Sanders acolyte who had finished third in the party primary for governor earlier this year. Jackson and Collins hail from the same rural county in northern Maine, and he still sounds like he grew up a few miles from the Canadian border. Jackson followed his father into logging before entering politics; he’s served in the state legislature for most of the past two decades, rising to become the leader of the Maine Senate. He lacks both Platner’s strengths and weaknesses—less obviously flawed but also less polished and charismatic. “Troy does not have the energy or the engagement that Graham did,” Wendy Frayer, a 53-year-old social worker from Auburn, Maine, told me at a Jackson rally. “He probably lost some votes.”

Whether Jackson can reassemble, and possibly expand, Platner’s coalition is a key question in the closing weeks. But when I spoke with both Democrats and Republicans in Maine recently, they each argued that the race will turn less on voters’ views about Jackson than on their opinions of Collins. “Troy Jackson is a nonfactor,” one Democrat who’s not working on the campaign told me after being granted anonymity to speak bluntly about the party’s candidate. “The question is: Will the trends catch up with her this year?”

Collins is, at this point in her career, a pretty sporadic campaigner. She does not regularly hold large rallies or town halls, and during a six-day stretch in mid-October that I spent in Maine, her staff notified reporters of only a single public appearance aside from a televised debate with Jackson. (The rivals held four debates over two weeks, so voters have gotten to hear plenty from both candidates.)

The Fryeburg Fair, however, is always a fun stop for Collins, as well as an ideal place for her campaign to demonstrate that her connection to Maine’s voters remains strong. The annual festival is the state’s biggest, drawing upwards of 20,000 people a day and transforming a small town near the New Hampshire border into “Maine’s second-largest city,” according to a fair official who served as Collins’s guide for the day. Fryeburg sits in a rural county that voted overwhelmingly for Collins in 2020, and during a two-hour stroll through the fairgrounds, people flocked to her. “Please win,” one man told Collins as he introduced her to his family. (She offered campaign stickers to the kids.) “I’m doing my best,” the senator replied with a smile. Collins gamely posed for photos with all who sought them, including a pair of teenage boys wearing shirts that read I ❤️ Boobies, which they had purchased from a nearby T-shirt vendor. (One of them did remove his hat for the photo out of respect.) Collins also tolerated the reporters who were trailing her, although as she made her way through a fragrant, high-traffic stretch near the livestock barn, she chided one of them: “Don’t make me walk in shit.”

I was struck by how many people not only recognized Collins but seemed to be familiar with her accomplishments—an indication of both her standing and the imprint of millions of dollars that she and her allies are spending on TV ads. Multiple Collins supporters brought up, unprompted, the record-setting 10,000th consecutive Senate vote without an absence that she cast in June. “Character is huge, and Susan Collins has a great character record,” Chet Charette, the deputy fire chief in Fryeburg, told me. Charette is backing Collins even though he wants to see term limits for members of Congress, which she opposes. (During her first campaign, in 1996, Collins pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate.) “She’s a lot more cognizant than a lot of them are,” Charette said.

By virtue of her lonely position in the middle of a polarized political climate, Collins must also rely on votes from people whom she frequently disappoints. Outside the Portland TV studio that hosted one of her debates, a boisterous crowd of Collins supporters cheered her arrival. When I asked Marc Fournier, a 55-year-old from nearby Westbrook, why he was backing Collins, he began with a disclaimer: “Susan Collins is not my favorite person.” He explained that he was displeased Collins had opposed some key Trump priorities. “She’s giving votes away,” Fournier complained. But he added: “Just because I disagree with her doesn’t mean I’m not going to vote for her.”

As Collins was concluding her visit to the Fryeburg Fair, a man who gave his name as Jim greeted her with a notably less friendly message. He told Collins he had supported her for years, but she had lost his vote when she backed Kavanaugh and helped Trump “stack” the Supreme Court. “You don’t stand up when it’s important,” Jim said. “I do,” Collins protested.

[Read: The guard that won’t be changing]

A key explanation for Collins’s political resilience is that in deep-blue New England, plenty of Democratic voters pride themselves on rewarding GOP moderation. In 2024, Vermonters elected Phil Scott, a Republican, to a fifth term as governor by a 50-point margin even as they backed Kamala Harris for president and Sanders’s return to the Senate. New Hampshire has elected Republican governors for the past decade.

Yet that tendency among some Democrats in the region to vote for the “good Republican” extends less and less to federal officeholders in the Trump era, and the force of political gravity that Collins must overcome is stronger this year than ever before. When it was my turn for a question in Fryeburg, I asked Collins what she would say to Mainers who are unhappy with the direction of the country and who might use this election to vote for change. “Well, first of all, I contest the premise of your question,” Collins replied, pointing to her “enormously favorable” reception among the fairgoers. At that moment, a man started loudly heckling her. “You can’t eat road salt, can ya?!” he shouted. “There are always a few exceptions,” Collins observed with a tight smile, before going on with a lengthy defense of her record delivering for Maine. She did not seem especially concerned that her critics have grown significantly in number over the years or that, in a few weeks’ time, they could marshal the votes to end her long career.

Updated on October 16 at 9:55 a.m. ET

Nancy Lacore found out she was fired as the chief of the Navy Reserve almost a year to the day after she got the job. On a Friday morning in August 2025, Admiral James Kilby, then the acting chief of naval operations, called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon. She went alone, and when she asked how Kilby was doing, his reply—“Not good”—told her all she needed to know. By the time Kilby delivered the news, he had tears in his eyes, Lacore says. He told her that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had directed him to relieve her of command effective immediately. No reason was given. “I kind of fell forward a little bit on the table,” Lacore told me. “It just knocked the wind out of me for a second.”

Lacore is among the dozens of military leaders that Hegseth has sacked or ousted over the past year and a half, many of them women and people of color. She’s since taken a different path: Lacore recounted her story to me after a campaign event outside Charleston, South Carolina, where she is asking voters to send her back to Washington—this time as a member of Congress. When Lacore left the Pentagon on that summer Friday, she never returned, her 35-year military career effectively over. (The Pentagon declined to comment.) By January, she had launched a bid as a Democrat for the House in South Carolina’s Low Country.

South Carolina’s First District is a reach for Democrats, but it is one of more than a dozen races across the country where the party is testing how deep into GOP territory it can advance in November. President Trump carried the district by 13 points in 2024. Democrats flipped the seat in 2018, during their blue midterm wave in Trump’s first term. But Republicans won it back two years later and then redrew the district’s lines to cement their advantage. Now the unpopularity of both Trump and the outgoing incumbent, Representative Nancy Mace, has put the seat in play again for Democrats. (Mace ran for governor—she lost badly in the primary—instead of for reelection to the House.)

Democrats see Lacore’s long military record, moderate policy positions, and steady demeanor as an ideal fit for a constituency that is more country-club Republican than MAGA, and which seems to have grown exhausted by the headline-grabbing Mace. Indeed, most of the political operatives I spoke with said Lacore would probably be in an even better position if Mace were her opponent; instead, she is facing Jenny Costa Honeycutt, a Republican Charleston County council member who is distancing herself from Mace by pledging to steer clear of “clickbait politics.”

Lacore is a former Republican who left the party during Trump’s first presidential run. Like many other Democratic candidates this year, she has placed affordability at the center of her platform. She talks about her experience as a mother of six kids as much as her decades in the Navy, and the challenges she faced juggling a large family in which both she and her husband were service members, and overseas deployments seem to resonate in a district with a large military presence. During a veterans’ forum I attended, Lacore’s call to end the Iran war drew hearty applause.

Although Lacore mentions her firing by Hegseth on the campaign trail, she’s not trying to portray herself as a “resistance” hero. (Such candidacies have not fared particularly well.) She pitches herself as a supporter of border security and law enforcement; one of her daughters, she notes, is a police officer. When I asked Lacore where she parted ways with the national Democratic Party, she took the opportunity to distance herself from the far left: “I am not a socialist,” she replied.

“They can’t really hang a lot of the woke stuff on her or try to make her out to be some sort of weirdo,” Ed Sutton, a Democratic state senator in the area, told me.

Without a long political record to scrutinize, Republicans have harped on Lacore’s thin ties to the district; she bought a home in the Charleston area only last year, having planned to retire there at the end of her four-year term as Navy Reserve chief (which Hegseth cut short). During a debate last Wednesday, Honeycutt took every opportunity to remind viewers that Lacore had been, until recently, an out-of-towner.

Lacore’s Democratic-primary opponents pursued the same line of attack, but the appeal of that critique with so many transplants and retirees populating the stretch from Charleston to Hilton Head Island is questionable. The local population has grown so rapidly in recent years that concerns about overdevelopment have become a potent political issue. Lacore has criticized Honeycutt for her work representing developers in the area. “There are more people in my town now who are not from here than there are people who are natives,” Will Haynie, the mayor of Mount Pleasant, a Charleston suburb, told me. Many newcomers to the area are, like Lacore, military service members. “That is not a disqualifier,” he said.

Haynie, a Republican, endorsed Lacore early in her campaign. He had backed Mace when she first ran for the seat, in 2020, but he’s become disenchanted with the Trump administration and told me he was looking for a Democrat who would fight for the area’s needs and help restore the balance of power between Congress and the presidency. “I was looking for a Democrat that I could trust, a Democrat who’s a proven leader, and a Democrat who I think would be very independent,” Haynie said. “I didn’t just do this as a political stunt.”

During her veterans’ event, Lacore leveled nearly as much criticism at Mace as at Honeycutt, saying the district had long been “ignored” by Mace. Voters there spoke of their representative with open disgust and noted approvingly that Lacore struck them as everything Mace was not. “The longer she was involved in politics, the crazier she got,” Gary Gould, a 73-year-old retired consultant, told me of Mace. Lacore, by contrast, “dripped character and credibility,” he said. “It seems like she knows her way around Washington without being tainted by being a politician.”

Honeycutt’s campaign did not make her available for an interview. Mace, however, responded to an inquiry almost immediately. She defended her popularity in the area, noting that she had brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the district and won her most recent race, in 2024, easily—her margin of 16 points outperformed Trump. (That election, however, came before she launched a high-profile crusade against the first openly transgender person elected to the House, Representative Sarah McBride; before she allegedly berated airport security officers; and before the publication of stories in which colleagues and associates described her as “unstable” and “unhinged.”) Mace took issue with both Lacore’s and Honeycutt’s messaging about her. “If somebody wants to call me clickbait politics,” Mace told me, or say that she’s “ignoring the district, I’d hate to see what they think their definition of serving it is, and I would hate to see how they would navigate attacks by the establishment on their record.”

[Read: The GOP’s culture-war Hail Mary]

Mace has raised concerns about the GOP’s standing in South Carolina’s Senate race, in which nervous Republican groups have begun spending on behalf of Senator Darline Graham—sister of the late Lindsey Graham. But Mace is supporting Honeycutt and believes she’ll defeat Lacore. “I think she’ll win handily,” Mace said. “She has been in the community a very long time.”

Lacore’s other liability could be some lingering resentment from a contentious primary. She won with the help of significant outside spending from Democratic groups such as the Bench, which has backed some of the party’s most prominent recruits, including James Talarico in Texas, Josh Turek in Iowa, and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Lacore’s top rival in the primary, Mac Deford, has yet to endorse her candidacy, and when I spoke with him at a gathering of Democrats in Charleston, he told me he had not yet seen her campaign aggressively enough among people “who traditionally do not vote for Democrats.” (A Lacore spokesperson responded: “I would invite Mac to come to the many events we’re doing in every corner of the district where a bipartisan coalition of voters is showing their support.”)

Lacore has significantly outraised Honeycutt, and the Democrats’ main House super PAC has reserved ad money for a late push on her behalf. Republicans remain confident that they’ll retain the seat, though their allies are spending as if it might be at risk. A spokesperson for the GOP’s House campaign committee told me Democrats are wasting money on a “solidly Republican” seat. (The Cook Political Report today moved the race in the Democrats’ direction, changing its forecast from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”)

Democrats last week circulated a poll showing Lacore narrowly ahead of Honeycutt, but they aren’t quite predicting victory, either. “Anybody who tells you it’s not a tough district doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” John Moffett, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist, told me. But, he said, “if there’s a candidate that can win this race right now, it’s Nancy Lacore.” Judging from the polling nationwide, the ingredients are in place for a blue wave. In South Carolina, both parties are wondering if it will be big enough to carry Lacore to Congress.