Before running for Senate in 2020, Sara Gideon’s toughest race came in the 2012 Democratic primary for a seat in the state House.
She won by 6 percentage points and eventually became speaker of the state House.
Eight years later, her challenge to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) went down in political flames, despite Gideon raising $75 million and the tailwinds from Joe Biden’s victory in Maine by 9 points.
In Maine, as history has shown repeatedly, it is very difficult to knock incumbents out of top offices. Rep. Jared Golden (D), who first won in 2018, is Maine’s only challenger to knock off an incumbent member of the U.S. House this century.
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The last time an incumbent Maine senator lost reelection was in 1978, when Republican Bill Cohen won the first of three terms. And it’s been 60 years since a Maine governor sought re-election and lost.
“Maine thinks they’ve chosen well to begin with,” Kevin Raye, a former state senator who lost three bids for the state’s northern 2nd Congressional District in 2002, 2012 and 2014, told NOTUS.
It’s a central dilemma for Maine Democrats now as they choose a replacement for Democratic Senate nominee, Graham Platner, who dropped out amid sexual assault allegations. Whoever is picked will face Collins, who’s won five Senate races in the previous three decades, and is the longest-serving senator in Maine history.
Based on the state’s electorate, Democrats would seem favored to defeat Collins in November. Democratic presidential nominees have won Maine in nine straight elections. Four of the last six governor’s races went to Democrats, and for 26 of the last 30 years Democrats have held both of Maine’s seats in the U.S. House.
Add in that recent polling shows President Donald Trump is approved by fewer than 4 in 10 Mainers, and it’s a politically toxic mess for Collins. And it comes in one of the nation’s most competitive races, one that will draw plenty of spending, as it could decide control of the Senate.
But that favorable Democratic environment is running up against the state’s political inclination to support incumbents, regardless of party.
“Maybe it’s because Maine people elect good people to start with, they don’t think they have to change them,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) told NOTUS, half-joking.
King narrowly won the 1994 gubernatorial election as an independent, when Collins was the Republican nominee, but in his 1998 reelection bid his closest competitor trailed by 40 points.
He came out of retirement in 2012 to run in an open Senate race, almost campaigning as a familiar incumbent. He won comfortably by about 20 points, similar to his margins of victory in 2018 and 2024.
Since Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, Maine has had just five senators — the same number as other small-population states Alaska and Hawaii, which are notorious for sending their senators to Washington for very long stretches in order to bring home federal bacon.
Ticket-splitting is a long tradition in Maine, even as it has disappeared from other states. From 1997 into 2013, Maine voted repeatedly to send Republicans Collins and Olympia Snowe to the Senate while also voting every two years to send two Democrats to the House.
Despite Trump’s poor showing in Maine in 2020, Gideon received fewer votes in her bid against Collins than he did in the presidential race.
King, who is not endorsing in this year’s Senate race, pointed to a unique factor in Maine’s state government.
Elected statewide offices are limited to governor and two senators. There’s no lieutenant governor. The Legislature votes for the state’s attorney general, secretary of state and auditor – positions that go to those who play the inside game in the state capital, Augusta, not through statewide elections.
“So there’s not much of a pathway for people to achieve some statewide name-recognition or experience,” King said.
Moreover, the Legislature is massive for such a small-population state: more than 150 seats in the state House, leaving representatives with a constituency of about 9,000, and 35 in the state Senate, with about 40,000 constituents.
“State senators are not well known outside of their districts,” said Raye, the former state senator.
Raye said Gideon, who served a couple terms as state House speaker, was an unknown entity across Maine. In that critical 2012 primary, Gideon won with only 534 votes, about what it takes to win student council president at an average-size high school.
Raye, a Republican who was chief of staff to Snowe in the 1990s, served four terms in Augusta, rising to state Senate president. Maine’s strict term limits forced him out in 2012, when he decided to challenge the incumbent House Democrat.
He lost by about 16 points, and two years later he lost the Republican nomination to Bruce Poliquin, who went on to win the state’s 2nd Congressional District, which had been left open when the incumbent ran for governor.
Troy Jackson served as state Senate president for three terms, but even in a few competitive races for his northern district he never won more than 12,000 votes.
When he ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary this year, he finished in third place. He’s now considered among the top tier of potential nominees to replace Platner.
The new standard-bearer will have to win over a collection of roughly 600 Maine Democrats who will hold a convention on July 25, with a deadline two days later to announce the new pick.
Golden, who is retiring in early January after four terms in Congress, will not endorse in any races this year. He said challengers need to offer a positive vision or Mainers will revert back to their comfortable previous choice.
“Do I want to keep this person in the job? The answer is maybe not,” Golden told NOTUS. “Their second question is: But do I want to give the job to this other person? And if they don’t know, then they’ll default to the incumbent.”
Golden had an opening in 2018 to defeat Poliquin because in 2016 the Republican had made statements suggesting he would not vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act and then did just that in 2017.
Golden’s ads hit on Poliquin’s votes, then pivoted to his own biography: serving in the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, working in the Senate for Collins and serving two terms in the state House. One ad ended with him saying he’s a “straight shooter” and firing a weapon.
Democrats thought Collins’ vote for Trump’s nominees in his first term, particularly her decisive vote for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, made her vulnerable in 2020. But after the campaign, many Maine Democrats felt the race focused too much on a Supreme Court vote that didn’t resonate with many middle-of-the road Mainers.
“You have to offer them a rationale for why you should have a job,” Golden said. “But so many people these days just campaign on why the other person shouldn’t have the job.”
Also, Mainers expect their members of Congress to be statesmen with something of national profile. Ed Muskie (D), a Maine senator from 1959 to 1980, was a serious presidential candidate in 1972 and served as secretary of state at the end of the Carter administration. George Mitchell, who succeeded Muskie, was Senate majority leader for six years before retiring in 1995.
Cohen, the former Republican senator, was confirmed as Bill Clinton’s final secretary of defense soon after retiring from the Senate in January 1997.
Collins, King and Snowe all have waded into tense bipartisan negotiations on a range of policy issues over the past several decades.
King said there’s something existential about how Maine voters feel like they know their leaders in ways that are impossible in large states. They like to say they live in a big small town.
“When I’m on the street in Maine, most people call me Angus, not senator,” he said. “They feel there’s a connection.”
Golden said voters will get past some ideological sins if the lawmaker publicly explains their position, something he did after his 2023 reversal to support a ban on assault weapons. He had a powerful case to make after a mass shooting had just left 18 people dead in his hometown, Lewiston, even in a pro-gun, rural district.
He went on to a narrow victory in 2024 as Trump won his district by 9 points.
“I didn’t shy away from having a daily, transparent conversation with my constituents, where I laid out, ‘Here’s what I was thinking when I opposed the assault weapons ban,’” Golden said.
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