Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) walked into a trap at her Senate debate with Democratic challenger Troy Jackson on Tuesday, bragging about how she got road salt exempted from President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada, only for Jackson to point out that she’s just chipping around the edges at a policy broadly hurting Maine and that “we can’t eat road salt.”
The moment left MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace astounded — and she was quick to analyze it alongside correspondent John Heilemann.
“I was a staffer, and so I’m sure a staffer was involved,” said Wallace, noting that congressional staffers have had a bad couple of weeks with the Eric Schmitt incident. “This is a staffer who was told to go find something that Susan Collins was helpful with. And so someone said, I got one, I got one. They … went to AI [and asked] ‘Is there anything that we’ve made cheaper?’ And they found one. They found road salt.”
This was obviously going to backfire, said Wallace: “This is ripe for an SNL mockery. People are struggling to put gas in their car. Truckers are struggling to put diesel in their car. People are struggling to buy groceries. They were already more expensive in Maine. And you’re going to tell people the road salt is cheaper. What?”
Heilemann agreed, calling it basic campaign malpractice.
“She slipped … in terms of her political instincts,” he said.
Nor was it her only slip, said Heilemann, who noted that the defense of her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was also weak.
Despite all of this, he noted, the race remains highly close, at a moment when Democrats are polling better in red states like Alaska and Ohio. “It’s closer than it would be, I think, if Troy Jackson had been the nominee throughout, if he had run in the primary,” rather than replace scandal-plagued Graham Platner, he said. “He’s the Kamala Harris of this race. He had to come in late.”
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