Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and oyster farmer Graham Platner are locked in a dead heat in their race for Maine‘s senate seat, as Platner hits Collins on her abortion record while attempting to circumvent attention from his stack of personal controversies.
The latest poll from the New York Times, the Portland Press Herald, and Siena College has Democrat Platner slightly leading incumbent Collins by 2 percentage points, which is less than the poll’s margin of error. The close race could come down to the votes of Maine women, who have comprised the majority of past Senate race electorates in the state, the outlet reported.
While Platner maintains 49% of the support from the likely voters polled by the outlet, compared to Collins’s 47%, he has begun to hit Collins harder on the issue of abortion and her 2018 vote to confirm Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, who helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022. Last Monday, Platner secured the endorsement of Planned Parenthood, an organization that has supported Collins in the past, while hammering Collins on her deciding Kavanaugh vote.
“The idea that confirming Brett Kavanaugh would not have an impact on the future of reproductive rights, that was not something that came out of nowhere,” Platner said at the Planned Parenthood event. “There were many people who called it out for what it was, and Susan Collins chose to go the other way.”
Platner, himself, supports a federal-level guarantee of women’s abortion access and has campaigned on this point, telling the endorsement event crowd the federal government needs to “make sure we are not one bad judge away from seeing rights stripped away from 26 million Americans.”
Collins, however, has stood by her vote for Kavanaugh while maintaining her stance as a pro-choice Republican.
“I do not regret that vote. I do disagree with Justice Kavanaugh’s vote. I would point out that in that decision several Supreme Court Justices whom I supported voted the other way,” Collins, who has voted for several liberal justices, said.
“When I look at a justice, I look at their qualifications, their integrity, their background, their experience in reaching a decision,” Collins added. “Obviously, I’m disappointed in that decision, which turned abortion issues back to the states. It has not had an impact on the state of Maine in that Maine actually expanded its law.”
Abortion is legal in Maine up to the point of fetal viability. In the new poll, less than 0.5% of respondents said that abortion was the most important issue related to their vote in the state, as most respondents focused on the economy. Just over half of the respondents in the poll were women, and it had more Democratic and Independent respondents than Republicans.
The scandal-ridden Platner has also faced blowback, as he was recently confronted with allegations about his aggressive treatment of a woman with whom he was in a relationship. Platner has denied the allegations that surfaced ahead of the primary, but 76% of voters in the poll said they had heard about his various controversies, including those allegations and the fact that he has a tattoo resembling Nazi imagery.
COLLINS SAYS ‘I DO NOT REGRET’ CONFIRMING KAVANAUGH DESPITE ROE V. WADE REVERSAL
Cook Political Report lists the Senate race as a toss-up race, having shifted it from “Leans Republican” in October 2025.
Collins has held her GOP Senate seat for nearly three decades, while Maine has voted Democratic in the past nine presidential elections.
