What the downfall of near three-decade senator Susan Collins says about Republican unpopularity

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

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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.