I’m here to set something straight. 

Much of the commentary about Sen. Susan Collins’ 2020 victory is based on a flawed statistic that overstates her popularity in her last Senate campaign.

This interpretation may lead some to underestimate the chance that Democrat Troy Jackson can unseat the five-term incumbent this year. Collins didn’t wipe out challenger Sara Gideon in 2020 by nearly as much as people tend to suggest.

A typical example: a Fox News post this week that said Maine’s senior senator was trailing in the polls in 2020 but wound up “winning by nearly 9 points.”

Alex Seitz-Wald, a former senior national political reporter for NBC News who is now an editor at the Camden-based Midcoast Villager, put it a different way in a June 30 social media post: “Everyone knows Susan Collins won Maine +9 in 2020,” despite Joe Biden winning the state by the same margin.

They’re not wrong, but that 9-point margin they cite is misleading.

In 2020, Collins won reelection with 51% of the total vote. Her Democratic challenger got 42%. That’s where the 9-point difference comes from.

But to use these numbers is to neglect the broader reality. Two other candidates racked up 7% between them in 2020. The Green Party’s Lisa Savage got 5% and an oddball conservative named Max Linn, running as an independent, got 2%.

Looking at it like that, Collins squeaked out a win by a 51-49 margin, which was a far closer race than people remember.

Savage told me this month it looked to her like Collins won by a 2-point margin.

Sam Pfeifle, media coordinator for Savage’s campaign back then, described it as “legitimately true that 49% of Mainers voted for someone” other than Collins. But he agrees it’s not as simple as that.

He told me this month he wished Collins had failed to get more than half the vote so that a ranked-choice tabulation had been run in 2020, which would have clarified whom both the Linn and the Savage voters would have preferred in a second round.

Aiming to grab some Democratic votes, Pfeifle recalled, “We definitely used ‘Vote Blue Number 2’ as a slogan in ads and at a number of events, trying to both educate people on RCV and build a coalition.”

Meanwhile, Gideon’s campaign ignored the ranked-choice option. Pfeifle said the Democrat “treated us like we had leprosy” and pretended the contest was simply a head-to-head race with Collins.

It is hard to know how many of Savage’s votes would have gone to Gideon in the second round because, as Pfeifle put it, some were cast by “true outsiders who wouldn’t have otherwise participated” and some were probably “disaffected Collins voters who liked the cut of Lisa’s jib as a no-nonsense candidate.”

Linn’s voters almost certainly would not have chosen Gideon. Given how kooky a candidate Linn was — during a televised debate, for instance, he answered moderators’ questions by declaring “request denied” — there’s a good chance many of them wouldn’t have voted for anyone if he wasn’t on the ballot.

The bottom line is that Collins didn’t rack up a landslide win in 2020. If anything, the results from six years ago show with near certainty that nobody’s going to win this year’s two-person Senate race by a 9-point margin. I believe it’s going to be a nail-biter for Collins, at best.