Susan Collins

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On election night last week, I went to bed at 10 p.m. (I have a baby). Even by that time, the sky was looking blue, if you know what I mean.

I woke up again at around 3 a.m. and was up for an hour rocking the baby back to sleep — he’s teething — and I didn’t even mind that much because I just kept scrolling through Democratic win after Democratic win.

The biggest congrats of the night must go to Troy Jackson, who not only beat a 30 year incumbent, but who did it with a campaign lasting less than four months, a fraction of his opponent’s funding and, as he himself has pointed out, a funny accent.

(Hey, if a successful campaign can happen in under four months, maybe it’s time to legally set time limits on when campaigns can start advertising. Imagine the peace in our mailboxes.)

I have been waiting years for Sen. Susan Collins to lose. Years.

Specifically, I have been waiting eight years. Eight years since 2018 and her vote for Brett Kavanaugh which, along with her vote for Neil Gorsuch, led directly to the end of a nationwide right to abortion (as well as a ton of other terrible Supreme Court decisions, such as “anything the president does while President isn’t a crime ever.”)

I honestly thought Collins would die in office or retire on her own terms, and while I would have been satisfied to not have her in the Senate anymore under almost any circumstances, it’s so much nicer to have her definitively lose a race, to be rejected by Maine voters.

After the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, I wrote of Sen. Collins that I would “use my meager talents to make sure her legacy is remembered the way she deserves it to be remembered – as a failure.” I still intend to do that.

Don’t feel bad for Susan Collins. She can head to a comfortable retirement with a nicely padded bank account. The worst that will happen is she’ll be haunted by the ghosts of the American women who died because they couldn’t get abortion care in time.

After Tuesday’s Democratic shellacking — and at the time of writing — Paul LePage might be the only Republican in the entire country to have flipped a seat in the House of Representatives. If Paul LePage is your upside, things aren’t going well for you.

If LePage is my congressional delegate, I will quite obviously not be thrilled. LePage supports terrible policies and I just plain don’t like him. His campaign leaned into homophobia in its mailings (of which I received several), repeatedly reusing an image of his electoral rival, Matt Dunlap, with an LGBT Pride flag. That’s it. That’s the whole attack. That a guy held a Pride flag because I guess LePage and his voters think supporting gay people is an inherently negative thing.

On the other hand, I almost feel bad for LePage. (Almost.) First of all, he’s at risk of having me as a constituent, and we all know I’m extremely annoying. Second, he’s 78 years old and not a particularly vigorous 78, either. He’ll be the oldest freshman congressman in American history. He barely looked like he wanted to run his campaign in the first place.

You can say a lot about LePage’s governorship of Maine, but at least the man looked like he was having a good time.

As of Thursday morning, he was clinging on by fewer than 2,700 votes in a district that Trump won by nine points in 2024. LePage could be relaxing on a beach in Florida right now. Instead, he has to keep pretending to live in an apartment above a barbershop in Augusta.

Also. While a couple dozen congressional races remain uncalled, at the time of this column’s submission, the count is at least 237 Democrats to 147 Republicans in the House of Representatives. (218 seats are needed for control.)

Not only will Paul LePage be in a minority — surely a terrifying prospect for the man who once expressed fear of the menace of “D-Money, Smoothie and Shifty” — but it promises to be a tiny, reviled minority, bound inextricably to a president who pretty much every average person dislikes.

It’s like LePage found a magical cursed monkey’s paw at Marden’s, wished to be a congressman, and the paw may grant his wish in a terrible way.

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