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The rules
The elections desk · the 2026 midterms

The Count

All the outlet's midterm coverage lives here: Senate, House, governors and the race rooms. Every call carries a printed number, months early, and gets graded against the certified result.

Election day
3 Nov 2026
Countdown
 
Senate control
R 82%
Record
53 locked / 0 graded
Senate roomMaine · Senate · Class 2 · 3 Nov 2026Toss-up R

The Maine room

Why this seat

The last Republican holding a Senate seat in a state the other party carries nationally. Every outside forecast of this seat since 2014 has been wrong in the same direction.

State of the field

Collins seeking re-election. Maine runs ranked-choice generals, so a first-round lead is not a result and the desk does not treat it as one.

The test

Collins survives if her personal vote keeps running ahead of the party line by the double digits it has before. She loses if the race nationalises and the ranked-choice second round consolidates against her.

The seat, by the modelSame coefficients as every other seat
Model terms for this seat
2024 certified marginD+6.9
2024 margin × 0.78+5.4
Midterm drag+5.6
Incumbent3.0
Expected marginD+8.0
Seat uncertainty (1σ)±5.5

Model call

89%

Democratic hold

The last Republican holding a seat in a state the other party carried nationally; every cycle has been called wrong here.

Nothing written on this page feeds that number. The method.

Candidate ledgerNot open yet

No candidate ledger is published for this seat. A ledger requires a completed first-party source pass — every candidate's own published policy pages, read on the same day, under identical headings and an identical word budget. Until that pass is done, printing a partial board would rate the campaigns that publish against the ones that have not, which is the asymmetry the Standard exists to prevent.

See a finished ledger — Georgia
Other rooms
Every open room →