BANGOR, Maine — Defying the odds has defined the career of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). That trend kept supporters buoyed throughout her election night party in Bangor on Tuesday, even as a blue tsunami started to crest across the country.
“There’s no doubt that at a national level, right now we’re somewhat disliked in a way,” Payton Warren, a College Republican at the University of Maine, told me in a packed function room. But Warren reminded me that Collins “gets a lot of split-ticket voters.”
By the time she conceded to Democrat Troy Jackson just after midnight, the room was nearly empty. Not even an independent figure such as Collins was spared from the backlash against President Donald Trump.
Maine was the real test of the power of Trump’s toxicity. A bad night nationally for Republicans was to be expected — and not just because of the president’s low approval ratings. The midterms are almost always rough on the party that holds the White House, and the challenge facing the GOP was only made harder by deplorable candidates such as Ken Paxton in Texas and weak ones such as Darline Graham in South Carolina.
But Collins was hardly an undeserving candidate. During her five terms in office, she had earned the trust of voters on both sides of the aisle by wielding considerable influence as Appropriations Committee chair while delivering excellent constituent services.
Georgetown University’s Lugar Center has consistently ranked Collins as the most bipartisan member of the Senate. At the national level, she stood out for her remarkable work ethic: In June, she became the first senator in American history to cast 10,000 consecutive votes without an absence. Her legacy in the state will endure in the fire stations, wastewater treatment centers, bridges and community facilities made possible by the federal dollars she secured.
“She looks really deeply at issues,” Ron Barber, a retired Republican, told me at the polls in Hermon, outside of Bangor, “and she votes accordingly, you know, for what she believes is best for the people — not for government, but for the people.”
But on Tuesday, Collins’s record couldn’t save her from frustrations about the president.
“I’m not a Trump fan at all,” Laurie Schencks, an independent, told me in Hermon. “And if [Democrats] can get control of the Senate, I think it would be much better for everybody.” Schencks, who has previously supported Collins, said she voted for Jackson to send a message to Washington. “He’s not going to do as good as Susan, but he needs, you know, to get in there and try.”
That attitude was common among the Jackson supporters I met. The national imperative was so important to many Maine voters that they were willing to risk a hit at home.
Before progressive darling Graham Platner dropped out of the race in July, Jackson couldn’t even crack the top two of the party’s primary for governor. That was after serving two decades in the Maine State House, including a stint as the Senate president. His flimsy policy platform included an estimated $32 trillion Medicare-for-all fantasy, maximalist slogans such as “abolish ICE” and outsize attention on Israel.
But a strong wind fills even small sails, and Jackson was the beneficiary of the storm that buffeted Collins. The national environment helped anti-Collins arguments gain traction, and it’s impossible to serve about three decades in the Senate without casting a few unpopular votes. Schencks, for example, told me she started to sour on Collins when she voted to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh, leading to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
More broadly, Collins’s critics argued that the letter next to her name made her complicit in unpopular Trump policies, such as his trade war with Canada. But Collins alone was never going to be able to put an end to tariffs she consistently rebuked as a “mistake.” Instead, she flexed her leverage to shield her constituents, securing carve-outs for sensitive Maine industries. Jackson will struggle to gain that kind of influence as a freshman senator — even with the benefit of decisive Democratic control of Congress.
Collins’s loss represents a greater one for the nation. She was an increasingly rare example of a public servant who put country over party. That wasn’t enough to protect her from the battle that has consumed the country under a president who has spent the past 10 years supplanting the Republican Party’s ideological roots with his whims.
The country’s first president warned of the kind of division that has been wrought under the 47th. In his farewell address, George Washington said that the “alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge” leads to its own kind of “frightful despotism.” In this scenario, a party leader turns member loyalty toward “the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”
Washington called on a “wise people” to resist the “continual mischiefs of the spirit of party.” Collins was long a beacon of true public service. If she can be felled by partisan warfare, then anyone can.
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