Fox News Poll: New matchup, same result: Maine Senate race stays locked

Two points is basically a coin flip, and yet the framing of this poll is doing a lot of work. Voters are more worried about Susan Collins being tied to Trump than they are about Troy Jackson being an actual progressive activist who's spent years to the left of most of his own state party. That's not a neutral finding, that's a tell about how the question got asked and how it's being covered.

Collins has spent decades building a brand as the moderate who breaks with her party when it counts. She voted against Kavanaugh's confirmation... no wait, she voted for it after a widely covered speech, she broke with Trump on plenty of things, she's about as far from a MAGA rubber stamp as a Republican senator gets. Painting her as a Trump liability in a state Trump has actually competed in twice is a stretch that only works if the poll question leads people there.

Jackson, meanwhile, gets a pass because "progressive links" sounds softer than it is. This is a state senate president who has pushed hard-left priorities in Augusta for years. If Mainers actually sat with his record the way they're being prompted to sit with Collins and Trump, this race looks different.

Maine has elected Collins five times because voters there value independence over tribal loyalty. A two-point poll six months out from an election, weighted by a framing question like that, tells us more about the pollster's priors than it does about where this race ends up.