A majority of voters in Maine agree with Sen. Susan Collins’s decision to support delaying a pick for the Supreme Court, but they don’t seem to want her as their senator any longer.
Collins, a Republican, is polling 4 percentage points behind her opponent, Democrat Sara Gideon, according to the latest Colby College poll. In the same poll, 58% said that they would prefer Collins to wait to vote on a nominee for the Supreme Court until the next president is confirmed.
The day after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Collins announced that she believed the Senate should hold off on the confirmation process, opposing the vast majority of her fellow Republicans. She did not, however, say how she would vote if put on the spot.
The senator’s position on the matter does not appear to have changed her standing drastically in the 2020 election. In a New York Times / Siena College poll conducted between Sept. 11 and Sept. 16, Collins was polling 5 points behind Gideon.
The Colby College poll was conducted between Sept. 17 and Sept. 23. News of Ginsburg’s death did not break until the evening of Sept. 18.
The team at Colby College told the Washington Examiner that about half of the respondents had already been polled before the question about the late justice was added to the survey. The survey as a whole included 888 respondents and had a margin of error of 3.9 points. Due to the reduced sample size, the question on Ginsburg had a larger margin of error at 4.7 points.
[Related: Susan Collins faces fight of her career against Democratic challenger in Maine Senate race]
The researchers also reported that the demographics between the two groups, those polled before and those polled after the question was added, were quite similar, meaning it is unlikely the results on the Ginsburg question were dramatically skewed.
For this reason, the public may not fully understand how Collins’s Supreme Court opinion has swayed or not swayed the mind of voters until the race’s next poll is released.
Gideon has maintained a steady lead of a few points over Collins since February. By contrast, in 2014, Collins polled above her Democratic opponent by a shockingly wide margin of sometimes 19, 32, or even 40 points.
