James Bennet‘s Economist leader, “As goes Maine, so goes the Senate,” handicaps that much-watched race. More interesting to me, though, is this observation:

[Collins] is among the last of a vanishing breed who share their state with a senator from a different party, in her case Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. So-called split delegations were once common. At least 20 states, and as many as 27, had split delegations from 1969 through to 1994, and as recently as 2013 there were 18 such odd couples, who generally learned to collaborate in their state’s interest and sometimes even the country’s. Now there are just four, the fewest since direct election of senators began in 1913—and that includes Vermont, where the split is between Peter Welch, a Democrat, and Bernie Sanders, who, as an independent, is a Democrat but only more so.

Rather clearly, one should count faux independents as part of the party with which they caucus. So that leaves three split delegations. Out of 50.

Bennet observes,

This is a harder-to-fix result and cause of polarisation than the gerrymandering of House seats. Instead of politicians picking their voters by sorting them into congenial districts, Americans are sorting themselves into states by party and, as all politics has become national, splitting their votes less often.

Indeed. Of course, to the extent that states, qua states, have interests, it would seem only natural that they would tend to coalesce around a single party. But 40% or more didn’t do so in my adult lifetime.

Ms Collins has bucked the trend through assiduous constituent service, bringing federal projects to the state and setting the all-time record for most votes cast—more than 10,000—without missing a roll call.

The hardest part of being a senator like her is picking her own path through all those votes, demonstrating enough independence to appeal to centrists and even some Democrats without alienating her Republican base. An analysis by the Bangor Daily News in August found that Ms Collins over her career had cast the decisive vote against her own party infrequently, yet more often than any other senator of either party, including to convict Donald Trump after the attack on the Capitol in 2021. For 13 years she has ranked first among Republican senators in the annual “bipartisan index” kept by the Lugar Centre, a non-profit, and Georgetown University’s public-policy school.

This is the nature of being a relative centrist. By carefully siding with her party leadership when she can and breaking with them when she must, she pleases nobody in the political commentariat. Certainly not the writers or commenters here. But she has managed to please enough Mainers to keep her job all these years.

Bennet spends the next several paragraphs handicapping the race between Collins and her Democratic adversary, Troy Jackson. He concludes,

Despite trailing in the polls in 2020, as she is now, Ms Collins won that race by more than eight points even as Mr Trump lost Maine by more than nine. It will take a mighty Democratic wave to put an end to Maine’s split delegation, and with it one of the last moderating Republican influences in the Senate. On the other hand, a wave that big might also split delegations anew in such Republican states as Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Texas and Alaska, creating a new moderating force within the Democratic Party—and, with it, more motivation for the hard work of bipartisanship in the Senate. One can hope.

Bipartanship requires, well, both parties to be willing to compromise. Going back to at least the start of the Obama administration, Republicans simply have not been game. Indeed, they’ve punished leaders and backbenchers alike who dared to work with Democrats.

Regardless, even if Collins loses, there’s a really good chance that the number of split delegations increases. And I concur that would be a good thing.