The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
Susan Collins blamed her loss in Tuesday’s election on voter disdain for President Donald Trump. Voters, she complained, wanted angry rhetoric, not the results she had so long delivered.
She was partly right. Voters across the country swept Republicans out of power, from the U.S. Senate to governor’s offices to state legislatures. Voters were fed up with high prices, a confusing and costly war in Iran and a president who seems more intent on burnishing his image and enriching himself than improving life for average Americans.
Yes, Collins was swept up in that blue wave.
But, there is more to her defeat after 30 years in the U.S. Senate than that simple explanation.
Many journalists harkened back to Collins’ reelection victory in 2020, noting that polls predicted a loss to former Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, yet Collins won that election by nearly 9 percentage points.
That’s the wrong number to focus on. Collins won 51% of the vote in a four-way race. Progressive independent Lisa Savage won 5%, likely taking many of those votes from Gideon. Erratic independent Max Linn, rest his soul, was less of a factor, earning 1.6% of the vote.
To win a two-way race this year, Collins needed to meet or exceed that result, a tall order at a time when populous parts of Maine had become more Democratic and the Republican president was extremely unpopular.
To make matters worse for Collins, her reputation as a moderate was frayed during Trump’s second term in the White House.
Collins built her reputation as a moderate at a time when there were other reasonable lawmakers, from both parties, to work with in the Senate. She was often a member of the “gangs” who negotiated bipartisan agreements. She did this on judicial nominations, ending government shutdowns, immigration (which Trump torpedoed), and most recently the massive infrastructure and jobs act passed during the Biden administration to help boost the economy during the pandemic.
As Washington, and the country, became more polarized and scoring political victories became more important than passing useful legislation, these opportunities to negotiate compromises became less frequent, and then disappeared. Trump, especially in his second term, had little interest in bipartisan work, and increasingly simply went around Congress.
This was especially true with funding. Collins had worked diligently to become the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, becoming the first Mainer to hold the post in nearly a century. But, almost immediately, Trump usurped her power by refusing to release federal funds that had already been approved by Congress. Federal agencies, which had been funded by Congress, were shuttered and gutted.
Yes, Collins successfully got some funding restored for Maine projects and agencies. But, that felt inadequate to what Trump was doing nationally.
Why, many Mainers wondered, wasn’t the senator who voted to convict Trump for his “abuse of power and betrayal of his oath” on Jan. 6, 2021, doing more to stop him? Instead, she voted for most of his cabinet nominees, supported his voter suppression legislation and voted for more money for ICE at a time when it was terrorizing communities and detaining immigrants without criminal records, many of whom were in America legally.
To fully understand how the ground shifted — or maybe even fell away — under Collins, consider this. In July 2017, passengers at the Bangor airport cheered Collins as she entered the terminal. They thanked the senator for her vote to save the Affordable Care Act. She was one of three Republicans to vote against a GOP plan to gut the landmark healthcare bill that extended health insurance to millions of Americans.
A year later, Collins and her office were targeted by threatening phone calls and mailings as she considered Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. She voted in favor of Kavanaugh, despite allegations that he sexually assaulted several women and concerns that he did not support the Roe v. Wade decision that had made abortion a constitutional right.
Women, especially the brave survivors of sexual abuse, who have spoken out felt betrayed by Collins. That only deepened when Kavanaugh joined the conservative majority of the court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Collins, who put in long hours researching legislation and policy and never missed a vote, often said she approached all presidents and their nominees the same way. She looked at their qualifications and gave presidents deference to make their own personnel decisions.
This standard failed during the Trump years, especially his second administration when he nominated people who had no expertise in, and were often hostile to, the agencies they were tapped to oversee.
Collins was an institutionalist when Trump was tearing down the very institutions of government, sometimes literally as in his destruction of the East Wing of the White House and the Reflecting Pool.
So, yes, Collins was swept away by a blue wave that was propelled by anger at Trump. But, her tenure also ended because the Senate she helped build was torn down by Trump and fellow Republicans.
