Daily Show host Jordan Klepper was left pondering a quandary on Tuesday. Summing up the chances of Democrats to wrest control of the House and Senate in next Tuesday’s midterm elections, Klepper mused on just how Maine, a reliably blue state, has voted to keep GOP Senator Susan Collins in power since 1996. Wishing for someone who lives in Maine to help him figure out this conundrum, Klepper threw to an old friend in former Daily Show “resident expert” and current part-time Maine resident John Hodgman.
Appearing in his all-purpose know-it-all role for the first time since 2015, Hodgman presented himself in full Mainer mode, rain slicker, pipe, and pocket lobster roll included. To a warm greeting from the Daily Show audience, the sage Hodgman adopted a Down East (not to say stereotypical) Maine accent as he attempted to school Klepper’s “pasty New York scarecrow with a hobby beard” about Mainers and their cantankerous ways.
Noting that Collins’ Aroostook County roots have always been her “secret weapon,” the thoroughly Maine-ified Hodgman explained that Collins’ closest election call was saved when her 2020 opponent Sara Gideon was revealed to have been born in… Rhode Island (pause for ominous Maine thunder rumble), thus disqualifying her in many “contrarian” Mainers’ eyes from being a true Mainer.
But, as Hodgman stated, with 2026 Democratic contender Troy Jackson boasting Maine cred even perhaps more authentic than Collins’ (he was a logger in the Maine woods at 19), the incumbent Senator may have finally met her match. (That she’s enabled Donald Trump’s worst excesses through some 96 percent of her votes is also a factor.) Hodgman also cited Jackson’s summer job, “down in the Bangor sewers fighting evil clowns” as another point in his favor.
Hodgman himself played the native card pretty heavily, mocking Klepper even though Hodgman is only a part-time “from away” Mainer whose stated habits of “hikin’, fishin’, and grabbin’ pitchforks and chasin’ off destination weddings” aren’t sufficient to fend off locals’ taciturn disdain. After all, he told Klepper, if there’s one thing Mainers can’t stand, it’s out of staters who “come up to Maine, buy a house they only occupy a few months of the year, make the locals clean up your messes and fix your boats while you play a country squire all summer, then collect some folksy stories, turn it into a book for your own profit, and then you go home.” (John Hodgman’s book Vacationland: True Stories From Painful Beaches is now out in paperback, by the way.)
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