Mainer here. Yes, we have lots of idiots here but I wouldn’t credit them for Collins’ victory. Maine is a weird and wonderful place - if you want a gun you can just go to the store and buy a gun, and if you want weed you can buy weed just as easily as you can buy a gun. I hope that kind of primes you for thinking a little outside the box about the state and understanding the people a little better
A significant portion of the electorate in Maine is really proud to be fluid in their affiliations, to the point where party loyalty hasn’t really existed in recent memory, so it was always going to be an uphill battle to vote her out by telling voters to go blue no matter who, for starters. Another significant portion of the electorate are conservative minded folks who are genuinely ignorant to the world outside of their little bubble.
Next up you have her record. “She votes with Trump X% of the time” is one of the things the Democrat campaign tried to run against her with, but that’s a disingenuous argument because she voted with Obama a significant percentage as well. Above both of those points, a representative is supposed to vote in favor of her constituents interests regardless of who is president and their party affiliation - while she may have shifted to the dark side in the past four years, her career record tracks for the most part in line with the interests of Maine. Overall, she’s been good for Maine during her career.
Lastly, and I say this as someone who wanted so so so badly for Collins to lose, the Democrats here ran a really poor campaign against her. First, the corporate Dems squashed the actual exciting progressive candidate, Kidman, in favor of center-left Gideon (Sweet was another progressive candidate with some great ideals but she has some...let’s say highly questionable beliefs as well). Pitting a centrist candidate against another basically comes down to who is more well-liked in the state because at the end of the day they are more or less the same candidate, and that is what handed Collins the election. On top of that, the campaign they ran didn’t focus much on Gideon’s policy, it was all negative attacks on Collins - because her policy wasn’t really too far off from Collins. Also, as hicky as it sounds, the Dems not having a native Mainer as their candidate didn’t help much either.
I’m disappointed that Collins won as much as anyone else, and this election was the Dems’ to lose and they blew it just as they blow so many other elections by trying to force corporate non-progressives down our throats.
I hope this provided a little insight into what happened here. I’ll admit that I’m very disappointed in my fellow Mainers and the polarization I’ve seen take over so many of my coworkers and neighbors over the past four years. I really hope there is some kind of mass deprogramming effort to bring these people back to reality because the people of this state have become very scarily divided and uncharacteristically un-neighborly as of late.