Susan Collins Is Beatable No Matter Who Replaces Platner

Sen. Susan Collins. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

I LIVE WITH A DOOMSAYER HUSBAND who thinks of Maine Sen. Susan Collins as a political Harry Houdini, an escape artist who can slither to a win no matter who or what she’s up against. I could not disagree more.

He admits he has Eeyore syndrome, and maybe he’s just trying to gird himself for disappointment, but that doesn’t stop me from sputtering and ranting about why he’s wrong. I could spout it off in my sleep at this point, an endless highlight reel of all the reasons Collins could and should lose.

For a start: Donald Trump has lost Maine all three times he ran for president, and no other GOP senator faces re-election this year in a state won by Kamala Harris. Also: Collins’s ratings of late have ranged from bad to worse. A year ago, she was at 12 percent favorability in one poll, 38 percent approval in another. A poll this past May found her at 40 percent favorable, 58 percent unfavorable among Maine adults. Trump bested her with an even more abysmal 62 percent unfavorable rating.

It won’t be easy for her to separate herself from him. She voted with Trump 90 percent of the time in his first term and 95 percent of the time in 2025, his comeback year. Nor will she be saved by her contradictory, sometimes confusing Capitol Hill maneuvers.

If you think the war in Iran was a horrific idea, for instance, you won’t like that she repeatedly voted no on Senate resolutions to curb Trump’s war powers and reassert the constitutional congressional power to declare war, then switched to yes in May and late June.

Support our independent political journalism by signing up for a free or paid subscription.

Collins also voted a year ago to send Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to the Senate floor, then voted against it on the floor. That’s even though it included her five-year, $50 billion fund for rural health systems, which is, in any case, a wholly inadequate Band-Aid that will barely offset the law’s deep Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts or help up to 14 million people expected to lose coverage (and their ability to pay for care) as a result.

Then there are Trump’s nominees for top jobs. Collins has voted for almost all of them, accepting their careful present-tense evasions then acting shocked when those purported commitments turn out to be misdirection or outright lies. Each of these votes by itself is a strong argument against her re-election:

She voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary. Why on earth would she do that? He is an anti-science, anti-vaccine menace to public health, as he has shown every day he has been in office, and no one should have believed the lies he told to get the job.

She voted to confirm Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary. Again, why? And it didn’t spare Collins’s state. Noem unleashed an immigration enforcement surge in Maine, complete with trademark cute name (“Operation Catch of the Day”), families and communities on edge, and questionable or improper detentions with no due process.

She voted to confirm now-former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who swore there would be “one tier of justice for all” and no partisanship or weaponization at her Justice Department. We’ve all seen how that’s gone. Exactly as anyone paying attention would have expected.

She voted to confirm Linda McMahon as education secretary, even though McMahon made clear she was a cheerleader for dismantling the department, as promised by Trump and Project 2025, the 900-page right-wing policy blueprint assembled by the Heritage Foundation and Trump associates and allies. The new secretary embarked on that “momentous final mission” the day she was sworn in.

And speaking of Project 2025, Collins voted to confirm one of its architects, Russell Vought, as director of the Office of Management and Budget. So far, he’s overseen implementation of more than half the project’s “severely unpopular” agenda. That includes asserting control of independent agencies and trying to end federal worker unions, as well as gutting the Education Department, the civil service, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in jobs, research, academia, and beyond.

Last but far from least, the nominally pro-choice Collins voted to confirm all three of Trump’s first-term Supreme Court nominees. She voted in 2017 to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch after he said Roe v. Wade was “the law of the land” and deserving of the same respect as any other precedent. She also voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, after he told her Roe was “settled law.”

Except that it wasn’t, nor were precedents sacred to this Court, which veered further right after Trump’s third nominee. Just days before the 2020 election, Collins voted no on nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who had signed a 2006 newspaper ad calling to overturn Roe’s “barbaric legacy.” But by then it was too late to save Roe and national access to legal abortion.

These are only a fraction of the arguments available to whichever Maine Democrat ends up replacing Graham Platner at the state party’s July 25 convention. We haven’t even mentioned Trump’s rampant corruption as congressional Republicans stand by and watch, or try not to, and prices rising instead of falling amid Trump’s assaults on the immigrant workforce, clean energy projects, trade treaties and U.S. alliances, all on top of his careless, pointless war that’s destabilized the Middle East and the global economy.

Like all candidates, the many contenders for Maine’s Democratic Senate nomination each have their strengths and weaknesses. But as the title of our household’s most memorable children’s book puts it, nobody is perfick. And even an imperfect nominee will be well positioned to prove, finally, that Collins is no Houdini.

Leave a comment

Share