Susan Collins should be concerned
Her Senate survival is in grave danger.
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CAMDEN, Me. — Here in Maine, Susan Collins yard signs are rare. Over the course of three days, driving about 150 miles, I saw just one featuring her simple, patented appeal: “Susan Collins: Our Senator.”
But don’t assume the dearth of pro-Collins signage means she’s doomed for defeat this November.
Yes, Collins is especially vulnerable to a potential 2026 blue wave election. Yes, the five-term senator who promised during her first campaign that she would retire after two terms is pushing her luck by seeking a sixth one. Yes, she’s taking heat in America’s bluest rural state for, among other votes, confirming Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Yes, she’s receiving increased scrutiny because some of her donors are connected to the Epstein scandal.
But the Democrats — who must defeat Collins to have any chance of flipping control of the Senate — should not underestimate her.
Can the most endangered incumbent senator this cycle overcome an inhospitable political environment to win a sixth term?
Senate unicorn
First elected in 1996, Collins is Maine’s longest-serving member of Congress. Of the mere 25 Republican women ever appointed or elected to the Senate, none has served longer than Collins’s nearly 30 years. For 16 of those years, alongside former Sen. Olympia Snowe, Collins formed half of a small group of same-state, female senator pairs — and the only Republican female pair in Senate history.
If nothing else, Collins is an electoral survivor. She won twice during two Republican wave elections, 2002 and 2014, as might be expected. But she also won in her three presidential-year cycles, all of which elected Democratic presidents both in Maine and nationally: 1996, 2008, and 2020.
Six years ago, forecasters thought she was doomed for defeat in the 2020 pandemic election that swept Joe Biden into office. Outspent more than two-to-one by tough and talented Democratic Maine State House Speaker Sara Gideon — and despite Biden comfortably carrying Maine by nine points — Collins won her fifth term, and by a solid, eight-point margin.
A protégé of former Sen. William Cohen, whom she succeeded in 1996, Collins currently chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee — only the third woman, and sole Republican woman, to hold that position.
Love her or hate her, Susan Collins is a political and electoral unicorn. But what makes her truly unique is how her ideology and policy positions manage to infuriate almost everyone.
Ideological irritant
Liberals and Democrats fume that Collins masks her partisan identity with moderate talk and performative hang-wringing. She makes a public show of expressing her “concerns” about some controversial policy or appointment made by President Trump — then inevitably casts her votes along party lines.
Before she withdrew in late April from the Democratic Senate primary, Maine Gov. Janet Mills pilloried Collins with a scathing “concerned” meme ad.
Disgraced former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner repeatedly chided Collins for supporting Trump 95 percent of the time. Indeed, an analysis of CQ Roll Call data conducted by Portland’s WMTW confirmed that Collins’s Senate floor votes aligned 95 percent with Trump’s 2025 positions. And yet, only Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski supported Trump at lower rates among Republicans than Collins. (Collins’s support for Trump was slightly lower during his first term at a mere 90 percent.)
Meanwhile, hardcore MAGAs fume that she’s a Republican-in-Name-Only sellout because she refuses to back Trump without exception, as almost all of her Senate Republican colleagues do. To Trump loyalists, Collins can never be forgiven for joining six other Republican senators to vote for Trump’s impeachment after he instigating the January 6 domestic terrorist attack on the US Capitol. Trump often chides her publicly for disloyalty.
Some of her supporters defend Collins precisely because she has so many detractors.
At a church yard sale along Route 1 in Wiscasset Saturday, I met Collins supporters Sean and Pam, a married couple from Albion, a small, rural Maine town of about 2,000 people 25 miles northeast of Augusta, the state capital. Neither identifies with the state’s MAGA Republican wing. I asked them what they like about Collins, and what they thought about her prospects for winning a sixth term.
“We appreciate that she shows up for every single vote. She will always be there even if it’s a tough vote,” Sean, a 61-year-old schoolteacher, told me. “In a day and age when we hear people talking about bipartisanship, she’s one of the few senators or congresspeople who will actually vote on an issue that the Republican Party doesn’t want — she’ll vote with the Democrats on occasion. We feel that she gets vilified for that, takes grief for that [but] we admire her conviction.”
Pam echoed her husband’s statement, calling Collins “humble,” “the real deal,” and a politician the couple trusts.
Two days later I met Connie, a 73-year-old lawyer from Eliot, in the southwestern corner of the state along the New Hampshire border, at a blueberry picking excursion on Beech Hill Preserve in Rockport. (The scene was so quintessentially Maine it seems contrived, but I have the photos — and blueberries — to prove it.)
I asked Connie, a self-described progressive, the same two questions I posed to the Albion couple. She considers Collins self-serving.
“She doesn’t think for herself or for Maine, she only thinks about Trump,” Connie told me. “She’s a faker and why would anybody vote for her? And people believe her. Hello?”
Connie also thinks Collins, who is her same age, is “too old” and that America needs age limits (not term limits) to retire the gerontocracy and make room for a younger generation of politicians.
Electoral headwinds
When she last won reelection, in 2020, the 17-point net difference between Collins’s eight-point victory margin and Joe Biden’s nine-point win confirmed that at least one-sixth of Mainers are willing to split their tickets to vote for Collins. In fact, not only did she win all but two of the state’s 16 counties, she carried five that Biden simultaneously won: Hancock, Kennebec, Lincoln, Sagadahoc, and Waldo. Collins has crossover appeal few senators of either party in this partisan polarized era do.
To win a sixth term, Collins will need those cross-pressured independents and moderates to back her again. But will they show up in sufficient numbers for her this time?
Although she won three times during presidential cycles that elected Democrats, Collins’s two midterm cycle victories, in 2002 and 2014, happened in strong Republican years. In 2002, she defeated then-state senate majority leader and current First District US Rep. Chellie Pingree by 17 points. Twelve years later, Collins crushed former ACLU executive director Shenna Bellows by 37 points, carrying all 16 counties, including Cumberland and Knox — the last time any Republican statewide candidate won these two liberal, southern Maine strongholds.
But 2026 will be Collins’s first midterm cycle reelection bid during which Democrats enjoy a distinct edge in generic ballot and voter enthusiasm polls. And 2026 is also the only of her three midterm reelection bids where the GOP has unified control of the national government, a situation that historically generates a “thermostatic” backlash against the incumbent presidential party’s candidates.
Worse, Collins is running headlong into fellow Trump’s abysmal approval ratings, especially on the economy, a partisan liability we covered in detail at Public Notice. In a NYT/Siena poll taken in late July before Platner exited the race, Trump’s net approval-minus-disapproval rating in Maine was -24, with 60 percent disapproving — including 57 percent strongly disapproving.
Although far smaller than Trump’s deficit, Collins is burdened by a rare net disapproval problem of her own: the same NYT/Siena poll reported her at net -3 disapproval, with 48 percent of Mainers somewhat or strongly approving, but 51 percent somewhat or strongly disapproving. A late June poll by Fox News found an identical, 3-point deficit, with 47 percent of respondents approving and 50 percent disapproving her performance.
Will Susan survive?
Of the more than 2,000 senators in American history, only 42 have served six or more terms — and some were chosen by state legislatures before passage of the 17th Amendment required popular elections. If she wins again, Collins will join that elite group and extend her record as the chamber’s longest tenured female Republican. Democrats — in Maine or elsewhere — who think she’ll be an easy out this November are deluding themselves.
With Graham Platner gone, a statewide caucus of Democrats is almost certain to select Troy Jackson to be Collins’s general election opponent. Jackson is a plainspoken logger and former state senate president from a rural district — in effect, a more authentic version of Platner, but with deeper union ties and minus the personal baggage.
Jackson will be formidable: A Wedgewood poll conducted the first week of July — before Platner dropped out — showed Collins with a four-point edge over Platner but trailing Jackson by five points, 48 percent to 43 percent, in a hypothetical matchup. Platner’s implosion hurt, not helped, Collins’s reelection prospects.
The electoral time clock may have finally run out on Collins. Many voters are tired of the gerontocracy that has delivered old and infirm presidents and members of Congress, from Biden to Trump, Diane Feinstein to Mitch McConnell. And Collins’s ideological fence-straddling may also be wearing thin.
Meanwhile, and despite the Platner setback, state Democrats are energized to defeat Collins, and the recent ICE shooting in Biddeford provides extra incentive to mobilize the liberal base. Democrats have carried Maine in every presidential election from 1992 onward, and Rep. Pingree’s daughter, Hannah, appears to be a lock to succeed fellow Democrat Mills in the governor’s office. A statewide coalition to defeat Collins is easy to imagine.
Only November will reveal whether such a coalition, like a unicorn, is more imagined than real.
That’s it for today
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Two minor quibbles... Hannah Pingree is Chellie Pingree's daughter and it's Shenna Bellows, not Sheena.
The thing we Maine Dems have all noticed is that while Susan Collins DOES occasionally vote against her party, it is always when her nay vote will not make a difference in the result--thus the GOP gets it way and Susie gets to claim and retain her "moderate" status.
Susie makes her personal political ads about all the pork and bacon she brings to (mostly corporate) Maine honey sweet and lets her PACs (*cough, Pine Tree Results, cough*) run the dirt and sling the mud.
It is very strange that she is so tough to beat because she hasn't held a town hall or any sort of public forum in Maine for decades and we seldom see her here unless she is campaigning for reelection
Thanks for the piece. Blueberries are indeed a real thing here. Hope you enjoyed your stay. Having lived in Maine for the last 35 years I can feel Mainers’ readiness to go with Jackson, a known quantity himself. He has excellent name recognition in Maine, although he is not universally loved, even by Democrats. I also think that the recent ice shootings in Biddeford. will further drag her down given her abysmal response. I was just in Biddeford the other day, and people are still totally outraged, sad and ready to take it out on Susan Collins. the motivation is palpable. Finally one small correction, Hannah Pingree is Chelsie Pingree’s daughter not her sister.