Live 2026 Election Results Updates: Midterm Senate Elections in Mississippi and Alaska Remain Too Close to Call

This is the story of the election of Ms. Collins, chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee and a force in the Senate for three decades.

“I was caught in the Trump tsunami that swept away many incumbent Republican senators who served their state well for many years and who truly care about our country,” she said.

The five-term Republican senator has long seemed invulnerable to the ordinary laws of politics because of her singular brand of politics as a New England centrist, with a gift for constituent service and an ability to redirect federal dollars back home. In 2008, she triumphed in Maine as Barack Obama floundered and other Republicans fell. In 2020, it looked like her numbers might be up as polls put her against a well-funded state lawmaker, but she again won handily.

Democrats greeted with regret.

But the year 2026 turned out to be an entirely different case as Ms. Collins was brought down by a combination of factors, most of which were attributable to President Trump and the war with Iran. Fuel prices have soared in a state dependent on heating oil. The punitive tariffs the president imposed on neighboring Canada. An immigration crackdown that culminated in a fatal shooting by federal agents in a Maine community. And always felt like she wasn’t doing enough to stand up to the president, even when she was one of the few Republicans to occasionally break with him.

“Everyone is ignoring the fact that I voted to convict him in the second impeachment trial,” Ms. Collins said. “What bigger break could there be? It’s never enough. I want results and they want angry rhetoric.”

In addition to dissatisfaction with not sufficiently distancing themselves from the president, some voters harbored resentment over his vote in 2018 to confirm Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, given his later role in overturning Roe v. Wade.

The upcoming result was evident in chatting with voters on Tuesday as they left Bangor’s central polling station – Ms Collins’ home turf. Several of them said they had repeatedly marked their ballot for “our senator,” as his ubiquitous yard signs proclaimed, but would not do so this time.

“This time,” said Deborah Hanson of Bangor, “I have to try something new. Susan Collins voted with Trump on so many things.”

“For me, it’s a close thing,” said Bob Kelly, another longtime Bangor voter. “But I can’t support anyone who supports Trump.”

By rejecting Ms. Collins, Maine voters gave up enormous influence over federal spending by putting the woman at the helm of the influential committee that controls federal spending. It is unusual, but not uncommon, for voters to reject top leaders.

Washington state voters abandoned Democratic Rep. Tom Foley when he was speaker of the House of Representatives in 1994. Sen. Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, lost his reelection bid to Sen. John Thune, now the majority leader, in South Dakota in 2004.

Ms. Collins leaned heavily on her spending role as she campaigned across the state, visiting fire stations, community projects and infrastructure improvements for which she had secured funding, noting that if she was no longer in office, that money could dry up.

“I wanted to make sure people knew what their choice was,” she said.

The man who defeated her, Mr. Jackson, will be a junior member of the Senate with little ability to direct to the state the kind of financial aid that Ms. Collins helped secure.

“What she’s been able to do over the last six years is extraordinary,” said Steve Abbott, her campaign manager and longtime senior aide. “Every town you go to, you see a project that was funded and work that needed to be done. It’s an opportunity that the state missed.”

Until the end, Ms Collins and her team had hoped they could pull off victory as they watched from a hotel suite in Bangor. They were cheered by the “rock star” reception they received across the state, an outpouring they said was better than in some of his winning races in the past.

“We went all over the state and I have to tell you the crowd was huge, the welcome was warm and the response couldn’t have been better,” Ms. Collins said, addressing and thanking supporters in Bangor before the results were known.

But the results obtained in the Democratic stronghold of Portland surpassed it.

The race was chaotic, and Ms. Collins and her advisers like to note that they had to run against three opponents: Gov. Janet Mills, who initially seemed like the likely challenger before dropping out; oyster farmer Graham Platner, who won the Democratic primary but dropped out amid sexual abuse allegations; and Mr. Jackson, who had lost the state’s Democratic primary for governor but was later chosen to replace Mr. Platner on the ballot.

Democrats have been frustrated for years both with Ms. Collins herself and with their inability to defeat her. They poured huge amounts of money into the campaign, trying to highlight his ties to Mr. Trump and his votes for his policies. Ms. Collins hit back, highlighting her own differences with the president over the Iran war, tariffs, immigration crackdowns and safety net cuts.

Over the course of her career, Ms. Collins has been at the center of many major legislative negotiations on such difficult issues as gun safety, health care and, following the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol, a bill overhauling how electoral votes were counted. His absence in the Senate will be felt in major legislative battles. She has not missed a single vote during her tenure in the Senate.

Her political career was inspired in part by Margaret Chase Smith, the Maine Republican who served in the Senate from 1949 to 1972. Ms. Collins once met Ms. Smith, who had delivered a famous denunciation of Joseph McCarthy, and noted that some voters had encouraged her to have a Smith-like moment of conscience when it came to Mr. Trump.

“I would say that, like Margaret Chase Smith, I have endured many tough votes and stood up for what I believe in,” she said. “But I think the better comparison is that we each lost our last Senate race.

“I’ve now had my Margaret Chase Smith moment.”