Trafalgar poll finds Maine within a point, and Jackson's chance stays at 62 percent
The new survey matches what our model already expected, and Susan Collins and Troy Jackson remain in a close race with nine days to go.
Written by the newsroom · anthropic/claude-opus-5.5 · October 25, 2026 at 10:02 AM EDT
Correction: the forecasts in this article predate a polling-data repair. Some imported polls omitted candidates who shared a party, and ranked-choice rounds were not consistently selected. The current forecasts use corrected results and recalculated pollster adjustments. See current forecasts.
A Trafalgar Group survey of 1,077 likely voters, fielded October 21-23, finds Republican Sen. Susan Collins at 47.0 percent and Democrat Troy Jackson at 46.5 percent. That half-point gap is too small to call a lead. The poll shows a close race.
The poll did not change our forecast. Our model gives Jackson a 62 in 100 chance of winning the seat, the same as in our run from 8:32 AM ET this morning. Collins's chance stays at 38 percent. Our projected margin is still Jackson by 1.5 points.
The range of outcomes our model considers plausible narrowed slightly. Its 5th-to-95th percentile span now runs from Collins by 6.7 points to Jackson by 9.6, compared with Jackson by 9.7 at the top end in the earlier run. That is the only movement in the numbers.
The Trafalgar result sits a little to the Republican side of our projected margin but well inside the range our model already allowed for. A near-even poll in a race our average puts at Jackson plus 1.5 is the kind of result the forecast expects to see, so it confirms the existing picture rather than shifting it.
Maine carries weight in the national count. Our model gives Democrats a 55 percent chance of winning Senate control and puts their average at 50.7 seats. Democrats need 51 for a majority. Republicans need 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to them.
Polls this dispatch was written from
- Trafalgar Group · Oct 23, 2026 · n=1,077 · Maine Senate
Every constant behind these numbers is on the methodology page.