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Sen. Susan Collins is heading into the final stretch of Maine’s Senate race with a hard charge against Chuck Schumer and Democrats, saying the campaign has been flooded with misleading attack ads aimed at her and other Republicans. With Election Day just around the corner, she is pushing back aggressively while also making the case that her own record still gives her the edge in a race that looks dead even.
Collins said the tone of the contest has gone well past ordinary political trash talk. She described the ads targeting her as filled with “so many outright lies,” and argued that the messaging is not just about Maine but part of a broader Democratic strategy to drag Republican candidates through the mud.
The senator pointed to what she called a coordinated pattern, saying some of the attacks were nearly identical to spots aimed at other GOP lawmakers. One ad, she said, went after her over Jeffrey Epstein in a way that had no basis in reality, which made the whole thing feel less like campaign advertising and more like a recycled hit job.
That is why Collins kept returning to Schumer, accusing him of running the show from behind the curtain. In her telling, the ads fit neatly into “Chuck Schumer’s playbook,” a phrase she used to describe what she sees as a national Democratic effort to flatten local races into something uglier and more partisan.
The Maine race has plenty of tension already, with Collins facing Democratic challenger Troy Jackson in one of the most closely watched Senate battles in the country. A recent Fox News poll showed the race tied at 49%, which leaves very little room for error and makes every public swing matter a little more than usual.
Collins also framed the race as a fight over whether Maine wants a senator who works across the aisle or one who gets pulled into Washington’s nonstop partisan brawl. She made clear that she sees herself as a centrist who still believes in compromise, something she said has become rarer as more moderates leave the Senate.
According to Collins, that shrinking group of dealmakers is exactly why she is still in the fight. She said too many lawmakers have either walked away or stopped running, and she wants to stay in the arena because the chamber needs people willing to find common ground instead of just throwing punches.
Her comments also took direct aim at the idea that she simply follows Donald Trump. Collins rejected the familiar claim that she votes with the former president 95% of the time, calling it a distorted number built on a narrow slice of votes and saying her actual record tells a different story.
She said her broader voting record shows more independence than the shorthand statistics suggest, including dozens of votes against Trump-backed policies. That argument is central to how she has long sold herself to Maine voters, especially in a state that has never been eager to fit neatly into either party’s loudest box.
Jackson, for his part, has signaled confidence of his own, saying he sees a real path to victory. Still, Collins sounded like a candidate who believes the last few days before voting could work in her favor, especially if voters are focusing on how the campaign feels rather than the noise coming from national operatives.
She said the response she gets on the road has kept her upbeat, especially in communities across the state where personal politics still matter more than cable TV outrage. For Collins, that energy appears to be the final thing she wants voters to notice, right alongside the contrast she is trying to draw between a noisy national attack machine and a Senate veteran who says she is still rooted in Maine.
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