Troy Jackson, in just 101 days, bested the Republican, preventing her sixth Senate term: ‘You can’t eat road salt’

The political demise of Susan Collins – a fixture of Maine and Washington politics for three decades – recalls the famous line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises about how one of the novel’s characters experienced bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.

In the run-up to Tuesday’s stunning Democrat “blue wave” election triumph, it seemed obvious that Collins’s 30-year tenure as Maine’s Republican senator was vulnerable to the challenge of Troy Jackson, the Democrats’ explicitly working-class candidate as voters prepared to unleash pent-up anger with Donald Trump’s presidency.