“The Susan Collins firewall”, 2 October 2026 (Photo via Washington Examiner — the original report)
As it ran on the front
On August 28, the Washington Examiner ran a small item built around one word: "bucks." Sen. Susan Collins, it noted, was bucking the usual incumbent instinct and agreeing to four debates against her Democratic opponent, former state senator Troy Jackson, who hadn't yet agreed to any. The piece treated it as a quirk of character. It did not ask why an incumbent running on a brand of quiet constituent service would suddenly want four public stages instead of none.
Three and a half weeks later, on September 22, the question answered itself. ProPublica published what it described as a "sprawling pay-to-play operation" centered on Collins. Jackson didn't wait for the ink to dry: "Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign," he said, and then, shorter, for the cameras: "the jig is up." Collins's office called the whole thing "categorically false."…
…(cont) Six days after that, on September 28, someone reached a different kind of answer. The statement addressed the paint. It did not address the ProPublica story, the debates, or any connection between the two, and no one asked it to.
Which brings the calendar to October 2, and the Washington Examiner again, this time with a headline calling the race a "firewall." The piece tracks national polling running badly for Republicans and presents Maine as the seat holding anyway. It runs the numbers.
A firewall, by definition, is the thing standing between you and what's already burning. The Examiner found the wall. It just forgot to mention what's on the other side of it, or why the senator behind it suddenly wanted the cameras on.
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“They call it a firewall, but a wall only means something if you say what's on fire behind it. The same week a federal office gets spray-painted and ProPublica calls it a pay-to-play operation, the polling story just skips both, like they never happened. You don't get to grade the horse race and leave out that one horse is burning.”
“The polling piece is about polling, that's a totally separate desk from the ProPublica stuff, which, I mean, her opponent calling it "the jig is up" isn't exactly a neutral source. And the four debates prove she's got nothing to hide, more debates than her opponent's even agreed to — wait, why'd she suddenly start agreeing to debates the same month that story broke, that's — that's not where I meant to go with that.”
As we’ve been tracking for months, the public polling has been trending in a poor-to-disastrous direction for Republicans heading into the midterm elections. In key Senate races, it’s been downright gruesome. Democrats need to net four seats to gain control of the upper chamber after November, which would effectively put an end to any…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
