Hints about 2026 from 2020 & 2022
How do the 2020 U.S. Senate and 2022 gubernatorial elections compare?
Now that I’ve fully mapped both the 2020 U.S. Senate race between Susan Collins and Sara Gideon and the 2022 gubernatorial election between Paul LePage and Janet Mills, it’s time to compare the two directly. The unsuccessful candidates in both races got about 42% of the vote statewide, but independent and third-party candidates played a greater role in the U.S. Senate race, making that look closer.
These interactive maps and charts are best viewed on a browser.
Before going much farther, it should be noted that the 2020 U.S. Senate race saw much higher turnout, since it was held in a presidential election year. Here’s how that looks in terms of vote totals.
The difference is pretty significant - almost 150,000 more people voted in the Senate race than the gubernatorial election. The 2026 U.S. Senate race will be held in a midterm election year, so the turnout ought to be closer to the 2022 gubernatorial race, but we shall see.
The easiest way to compare the two elections is just to look at the two maps. Here’s the 2020 U.S. Senate race, when Collins defeated Gideon:
Meanwhile, here’s the 2022 gubernatorial election, wherein Mills bested Paul LePage:
It’s striking to see how much better Mills did than Gideon all over the state, but especially in western and northern Maine. Mills also carried all of the big cities handily, like Auburn, Lewiston, Bangor, and Augusta, while Collins carried them all in her win, albeit by a smaller margin. What if we compare those numbers side by side, though? In the map below, red towns are where Collins outperformed Mills; blue towns are the reverse.
This, generally, tracks with the overall Maine political map, but note that Mills’ good performance in northern Maine was overshadowed by Collins’ performance, while in western Maine Mills did better than Collins. She only did slightly better than Collins in the major cities outside of Portland, though - apart from Bangor, at least.
Collins did do better than Janet Mills in some key areas outside of the major cities, however. She did better than Mills in most of Kennebec County and a good part Lincoln County, both of which are key areas in a statewide race. All of this shows that many of the usual geographical metrics that we apply might not pan out in a hypothetical statewide contest between Mills and Collins for the U.S. Senate. For one, not only have they never run against each other before, neither has ever faced a challenger who actually got close - even if Sara Gideon was well-funded, at least.
It’s not just about these two particular candidates, either. Maine has rarely had very competitive statewide races where both major-party candidates are widely viewed as centrists by a majority of the electorate. LePage was a conservative who was assisted by both the division amongst progressives and by Democrats nominating lackluster candidates. Ever since she first got elected, Collins has never faced a centrist Democrat. That’s why, in 2002, 2008, and 2014 she carried every single county. That’s right, Sara Gideon was the first Democrat to carry a county against Collins since Joe Brennan.
So, sure, theoretically, a well-funded moderate - like Janet Mills - could do better than Gideon against Collins, but could she really prevail? Keep in mind, it will be a midterm election, so turnout will be lower. It’s a general assumption that lower-turnout elections favor Republicans, and Collins has been able to outperform her party’s nominee in presidential election years. Moreover, Mills is going to spend the next year fighting over how to balance the state budget - hardly the ideal launching ground for anyone’s campaign. Collins has proven she can win in any environment, against any opponent - unlike Mills.
That’s why the Cook Political Report and the Crystal Ball recently rated the Maine U.S. Senate seat as Leaning Republican1 and why Chris Cilliza, formerly of CNN, wrote that the Democrats’ hopes of taking back the U.S. Senate hinged on Collins retiring. That seems like slim hopes at the moment: Collins is sitting on around $2.5 million in cash, she just became chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and she’s already announced plans to run. While Cilliza may well be right about the national outlook, if he is, Democrats are not in good shape, to say the least.
Jim is also a weekly columnist for the Portland Press Herald, Maine’s largest daily newspaper. Follow him on X or on Facebook.
It’s a generous rating to Democrats to rank it as Leans Republican; the only reason it’s in that category is because it’s their only option.