After a long career voting across the aisle, why did Susan Collins gamble her legacy on Trump?
Susan Collins in Washington, D.C., on February 5. Photo: Rod Lamkey Jr./SIPA USA/AP Images Last fall, Erik Mercer, a Maine social worker and psychotherapist, saw one of his senators, the Republican Susan Collins, while he was waiting for a plane in Washington, D.C.
In 2015, polling firm Morning Consult found Collins to have, at 78 percent, the highest approval ratings of any Republican senator, second only to Bernie Sanders in the whole body. But this January, the same survey found her approval at 42 percent and her disapproval at 52; she is now the most unpopular American senator, beating out even her caucus leader, Mitch McConnell.
In ’96, Collins was sharply critical of Joe Brennan, her opponent for Cohen’s seat, noting that he “voted a straight party line” — with Democrats — “93 percent of the time” and arguing “I don’t think either party has all the answers, and I think we need someone who is going to take an independent approach.”
Her choice to run again, against a backdrop of impeachment, ever-more partisan politics, and her own insistence that she is still the reasonable, freethinking politician she has always claimed to be, prompts questions about what has changed: Is it Susan Collins herself? Her party? Or is it simply that the Trump era has revealed something about Collins, that the moderation on which she built her Senate career was never quite as defining as she made it out to...
Collins’s neutered vote for witnesses in the impeachment trial — which came only after it was clear there weren’t enough Republican votes to risk any actual witnesses being called — didn’t seem to enrage the most powerful of Republicans.
In addition to Bill Cohen, other state leaders, including Democratic senators Ed Muskie and George Mitchell and former Republican governor John “Jock” McKernan, were regarded as moderates, well liked both inside and outside their parties. Their forerunner was Margaret Chase Smith, who was elected to her husband’s congressional seat after his death and then to the Senate in 1948, becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress.
Collins’s family has run a lumber and hardware business based in Caribou for five generations, and it wasn’t just her mother who was mayor of her hometown; her father, Donald, was too, before he served five terms as a Republican in the state legislature. At her father’s funeral in 2018, Katz told me, he noticed that Collins, one of six siblings, did not give a eulogy. “It was clear to me that she didn’t want it to be about the passing of a U.S.
Guarasci remembered her as a talented, driven student who “had this old-fashioned belief in public service; she saw it as a noble activity, the highest duty one can have.” Drawn to of the family trade — politics — she would go on to work in McKernan’s gubernatorial administration during a controversial overhaul of Maine’s worker-compensation laws. Appointed by George H.W.
Don Flannery, the head of the Maine Potato Growers Association, who is a registered Republican , described his relationship with Collins as great, in part, because “she came from potato country, and grew up picking potatoes by hand, so she knew a lot about the industry.
Collins hates to be caught unprepared. Mary Small, a former Maine state senator who first met Collins in state government in the 1980s, later worked for a nonprofit that required her to meet with her as a senator. “You had to tell her everything you were going to be talking about,” said Small. “And woe if you didn’t give her the stuff you were going to be talking about, because she wanted to be able to converse intelligently about it all.
But having all that County character can be a double-edged sword, especially if part of the suspicion about you is that you’re not being straightforward or available.
But communication between the two has slowed as King has gotten more outspoken on issues he and Collins disagree on, and the nature of their interactions with Mainers couldn’t be more different. The weekend before the impeachment vote, King held an emotional, 300-person town hall in Brunswick, joining constituents in the recitation of Abraham Lincoln quotations. Collins stayed in D.C. and worked.
“You need to look at how the landscape of the Senate has changed,” said Susan Young, editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. “She became well known nationally in an era of the gangs: the Gang of 14, the gangs formed over the avoidance of the nuclear option or the stimulus package. She was one of the people at the center of those debates, negotiating ways to resolve thorny issues. But now we’re in the era of Mitch McConnell, and he’s not interested in compromise.
Democrats who came to imagine Collins as a true ally perhaps didn’t pay close enough attention to her established friendships with the Bush family, with Karl Rove. Maybe it’s hard to remember, in an age in which the new, hard-right Republican Party has cast its elders in a flattering but distorting light, that differences — both ideological and tribal — are by degree. And that independence within that party has always had its limitations.
Collins has said that she has voted for the judicial appointments of all the presidents she’s served under . But the previous presidents Collins has worked under have not nominated the record number of young, unqualified, radical right-wing judges to lifetime appointments that Trump has, reshaping the federal judiciary for decades to come.
As the meeting started, Woerter recalled, Collins didn’t even address the storytellers. Instead, Woerter said, “she was very focused on her displeasure with the advocacy organization” and spoke only to the Planned Parenthood representatives, telling them that “she hadn’t appreciated the way people had treated her at an earlier event.
“She raised some concerns,” Clark told me, noting that Collins had been very satisfied with the outcome. And indeed, Collins’s ties with other women in the Senate, from both parties, have been strong; she was credited with spearheading the bipartisan group of women that hammered out a budget deal in 2013 when the rest of the Senate was deadlocked. When Collins got engaged in 2012, Hillary Clinton threw her a shower with a guest list that included all 17 women then serving in the Senate.
Within a few weeks, Collins’s campaign released a digital spot taking direct aim at the Lubec ad, calling it the product of “dark-money lies” put forth by “Sara Gideon’s extreme allies.” Soon came a longer ad, featuring shots of the tiny town of Lubec — population 1,300 — and ending with a woman holding Collins’s hands, thanking her tearfully for the $20 million breakwater built to protect the community’s fishermen.
Collins’s complaints — for instance, grumbling about rude treatment at the hands of college students in front of constituents there to tell her harrowing stories of trying to obtain abortion care — are in line with a broader sense of victimhood among the powerful, who have recently come in for sharp criticism, protest, and pushback: It reflects the panic that in being harshly judged, they are in fact being unjustly maligned, canceled, witch-hunted, lynched by ravening mobs of leftists.
But it’s hard to beat incumbents. “Pundits always want to predict that Maine is much more competitive than it is,” said Gilman. Gideon is young, smart, and has a lot of political backing and money behind her campaign. But she did not pick potatoes; she hasn’t driven her Honda to all 495 towns. And that could matter. “Running a campaign in the most rural state in America with someone who’s done it several times is always a benefit,” Gilman said. “I can’t think of a U.S. senator who was not successful in reelection in Maine.
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