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“Shut up, he explained.”
The above quote is an age-old joke from the early 20th century American humorist Ring Lardner, satirizing a tense conversation between an inquisitive child and their irritated father. Just last week, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson updated Lardner’s one-liner in a less comical fashion, as he rebutted his Republican opponent Susan Collins for suggesting that a heckler who interrupted their debate was a Jackson supporter.
“Oh, shut up.”
In a coarsened 21st century political and cultural environment, when governors and presidents routinely throw around the f-word in public to underscore the intensity and passion of their beliefs, this is fairly mild stuff. But Collins is fighting for her political life, and immediately seized upon Jackson’s dismissive insult to remind Maine voters of Jackson’s history of inappropriate aggression towards female colleagues during his time in the state legislature.
Jackson has been accused of bullying and intimidation toward his female colleagues, including a widely discussed episode where he threw a water bottle in anger toward a woman with whom he was arguing. This is an especially sensitive area of debate, as Jackson became his party’s nominee after his predecessor withdrew after facing charges of rape and other violent behavior toward women. Like most Republican candidates, Collins is facing a pronounced gender gap in this race, and she is losing young female voters by an even larger margin given her 2018 vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court.
Unlike their mothers and grandmothers, Gen Z and millennial women have no memory of most of Collins’ 30-year Senate career and are less likely to appreciate her ongoing efforts to distance himself from a president of her own party. Their demographic has become one of the most reliable components of the national Democratic coalition. Like their generational colleagues in other parts of the country, these young women rarely even consider the GOP as a relevant alternative in most elections.
Collins has spent the last three decades working with increasing fervor to distinguish herself from the national party brand. If Maine were an island, her chances of achieving that separation would be much greater. But the local and regional issues that have worked in her favor all these years are superseded by national matters such as Kavanaugh and tariffs and their common denominator, Donald Trump. The president’s trade war with Canada is causing his party’s candidates great difficulty across the country, but Maine’s close geographic proximity, cultural affinity, and economic codependency make this an even greater anchor for Collins to carry as she trudges toward Election Day.
There are a dozen other contested Senate races across the country that will play a part in determining which party controls that body for the next two years. Maine is smaller than almost all of them, but in the great population equalizer that is the United States Senate, Pine Tree State voters have just as much say in that nationwide verdict as the residents of Texas, Ohio, or Michigan (and on a per capita basis, even more).
Unlike campaigns for House seats, which are often caught up in national crosswinds, a Senate contest is more likely to be driven by the unique characteristics of the candidates and the states involved. Maine is an helpful reminder that national politics can influence the outcome of a close Senate race but is probably not the primary determinant of that outcome. That federalist attitude has allowed Collins to win five consecutive terms in her current office, but she has never faced such an overwhelming national political mood that works in her disfavor with the voters she needs most.
By the Wednesday morning after the election, Collins and Jackson may be footnotes in the larger national story of Senate control. But it’s possible that a group of young women in a sparsely populated rural outpost all but surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the St. Croix River, and the Bay of Fundy will have played an unexpectedly influential but entirely justifiable role in a decision that will affect the lives of almost 350 million of their fellow Americans.
It is not possible to discuss thirteen contested Senate seats in a single column. But each individual race could be determined by an equally incongruous and unpredictable set of criteria. Affordability and Iran will be part of these decisions, but local quirks, candidate idiosyncrasies and ill-timed outbursts may have an outsized impact too. This is what allows politics to be so frustrating, so exasperating, and so infuriating. And so fascinating.
