Ever since the November election, various people have been making excuses for why Kamala Harris lost. They range from her lack of time to wage a general election campaign to her closeness to an unpopular former incumbent to the division within the Democratic Party as a whole. These are all clearly laid out and knocked aside at the end of the excellent book “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.

They settle on an alternate explanation: She never forcefully laid out her vision for the country or why she was running.

That’s almost it, but it’s not quite the core truth of the matter: Harris was, simply, a bad candidate. She ran a bad presidential campaign in 2020, and she ran a bad campaign in 2024. Yes, that wasn’t made any easier by the unique circumstances, but she still had every opportunity to win and just couldn’t do it.

That’s something to keep in mind as we take a look at how the 2026 elections might play out. Recent numbers revealed by the Pine Tree State Poll, a States of Opinion Project poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire, reflect that. Regardless of whether one considers this poll to be high quality, Sen. Susan Collins would undoubtedly rather have better numbers in it. They show that she may be politically vulnerable, but they don’t show that she’s toast.

At the moment, she doesn’t have any high-profile challengers from within her own party. If the two declared candidates manage to make the ballot, it’s hard to imagine their campaigns being anything but quixotic. So, once we get beyond the June primaries, her numbers with Republicans will come up if she’s officially the nominee.

While Republicans aren’t thrilled with Collins, it’s important to consider why: They’d probably mostly rather have someone more closely aligned with President Trump. There’s nobody like that in Maine who could win a general election, which is why she’s unlikely to face a real primary.

That person just simply doesn’t exist.

The question is not whether Collins is vulnerable, but whether Democrats have anyone available who could defeat her in a general election. At the moment, that’s an open question. Gov. Janet Mills is probably Democrats’ best choice, but she’s not exactly universally beloved. Her two gubernatorial campaigns initially looked like they might be competitive, but she ended up defeating both Shawn Moody and former Gov. Paul LePage handily. There are two interpretations of those results, and one is that they make her an appealing U.S. Senate candidate.

That’s an understandable argument. She’s the only potential candidate who’s run statewide before and won twice. She did that by seeming to be centrist, especially compared to the rest of her party, and by being from rural western Maine, rather than from Portland. She’s a skilled politician, as she’s proven time and time again, to the chagrin of Republicans in the Legislature. So, a promising candidate, right?

Well, maybe not quite so much. Did she do well in those gubernatorial races because she was good, or because her opponents were terrible? Renominating LePage in 2022 was a mistake; the public wasn’t interested in returning him to office.

When Moody ran in 2018, he wasn’t very politically experienced. He’d only ever run for office once before, as an independent in the 2010 gubernatorial race. While a personable, well-known businessman, he wasn’t politically savvy enough to separate himself from LePage in 2018 and make his own case — just like Kamala Harris couldn’t vis-a-vis Joe Biden in 2024.

So, while Mills is a strong candidate on paper, she hasn’t faced truly tough opponents in her statewide runs. Collins has faced a series of credible opponents, in both primaries and general elections, from Joe Brennan to Sara Gideon, on whom the Democrats wasted millions.

Collins would be the toughest opponent Mills has ever faced, and ousting an incumbent is always difficult. She’ll have to run a disciplined campaign while raising more money than she ever has before.

While Collins may look vulnerable now, turning bad poll numbers into real votes isn’t nearly as easy as it might appear. Voters have to be convinced not only that an incumbent is bad, but that the challenger is better. Mills may be the Democrats’ best option, but that doesn’t mean she can actually win. It matters who both candidates are, not just whether someone has bad poll numbers.

Like former President Joe Biden said, quoting his father, judge me by the alternative, not the almighty.

Jim Fossel, a conservative activist from Gardiner, worked for Sen. Susan Collins. He can be contacted at:
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Twitter: @jimfossel