When Does Senator Susan Collins Run for Office Again
Susan Collins Hasn't Changed Much, only Maine Has
Democrats are aroused with her. Republicans run across her every bit disloyal to the president. Her one-time-fashioned politics? "I don't know if people respond equally well to that anymore," said her G.O.P. predecessor in the Senate.
BANGOR, Maine — Senator Susan Collins of Maine seemed to have a claiming on her hands.
A Republican running for re-election in a difficult twelvemonth for her party, Ms. Collins was opposed past a well-funded Democrat with a political base in vote-rich Southern Maine who was hoping to capitalize on the unpopularity of the Republican in the White House. Just in that 2008 race, fifty-fifty as the Yard.O.P. presidential nominee lost Maine past 17 percentage points, Ms. Collins won re-election by over 20 points, carrying every canton in the state.
That was and then.
Twelve years afterward what Ms. Collins thought was the about difficult re-ballot of her career, she is facing eerily like circumstances — but this fourth dimension she's in the fight of her political life. And it is what has changed since 2008 in Maine, the Republican Party and politics broadly that could cease her career.
The four-term senator has alienated Democrats here and beyond past voting to confirm Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. She has become a national punchline amongst liberals for what they encounter equally her toothless tut-tutting of President Trump, whom she is invariably "concerned" about. And she'due south been out-raised $63 meg to $25 million past her Democratic opponent, Sara Gideon, the speaker of the State Business firm.
Ms. Collins's biggest problem this year, however, may not be Ms. Gideon or the out-of-land donors eager to transport her a bulletin, merely rather the shifting ground nether her feet.
She is confronting a state, sharply cleaved by region and class, that would accept been politically unrecognizable to her predecessors; an increasingly alien political party overtaken by a president who demands unflinching loyalty; and, peradventure about daunting of all, a polarized political culture that elevates tribalism and national problems over the bipartisanship and pork-barreling that she has e'er pursued.
"I don't know if people reply equally well to that anymore," conceded former Senator William S. Cohen of Maine, a moderate Republican whom Ms. Collins succeeded in the Senate subsequently working for him every bit a young staff fellow member. "Therein lies the challenge of existence somebody in the centre."
Ms. Collins is the simply Republican senator on the election this year who has not endorsed Mr. Trump.
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In an interview on her campaign motorcoach, she acknowledged momentarily considering running this year equally an independent — "information technology crossed my listen," she said — only was quick to note that she couldn't easily abandon "the New England make of Republicanism."
Information technology's a dying breed. Ms. Collins is the only remaining Republican fellow member of Congress from New England.
As endangered, though, are whatsoever senators who can win re-election when their party's nominee is soundly defeated in the country. Mr. Trump is expected to be competitive merely in Maine's 2nd Congressional District, which he won in 2016, and even there polls suggest that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, has an edge.
In 1984, when Ronald Reagan won a 49-state landslide, Democrats all the same netted two Senate seats. And even as recently as 2008, Republicans like Ms. Collins were winning re-election in blue states while Democratic senators were cruising in crimson ones like S Dakota and West Virginia.
Past 2016, though, the results of every Senate race mirrored the land'south preference in the presidential race.
Now Ms. Collins is no more probable to outrun Mr. Trump by twenty points, as she did John McCain in 2008, than Maine is to embrace crab over lobster as its crustacean of choice.
Her argument, though, is that there are exceptions to this era of polarization, and that well-known lawmakers in lightly populated states can overcome the partisan tide. Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin 3 of W Virginia, for example, both won as Democrats in Republican-leaning states just two years ago.
"There's a lot of parallels," Ms. Collins said. "I withal believe that most voters want problems solved and that they're put off past this us-against-them tribalism."
Listening to Ms. Collins kick off her statewide motorcoach tour in Bangor was similar stepping into a political time motorcar.
She drew adulation after trumpeting her tape as the near bipartisan senator, noted that she had never missed a floor vote and bragged about the federal dollars she had delivered for new breakwaters in pocket-size communities.
Then she delivered the finale: "With your help, when I'm re-elected, a year later I become the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee," she appear.
The pitch resonated with some supporters, but even they were cocky-enlightened about the dated nature of Ms. Collins'southward appeal.
"I approximate I'm a dinosaur in that I appreciate her centrist views and as well I appreciate that she's been doing this a long fourth dimension and has ranking positions on a lot of of import committees," said Janna Jensen of nearby Brewer. "I don't know how many people value that."
A New York Times-Siena College survey terminal month pointed to the limitations of localism — and that was before the decease of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg elevated the Supreme Court and bug similar abortion rights.
Fifty percent of Mainers said national problems, similar which party controls the Senate, were most important to their Senate vote, while 41 percent said local matters, such as who tin can practice more for Maine, were paramount.
A Rhode Isle native, equally Ms. Collins delights in noting, Ms. Gideon has fabricated health care the centerpiece of her campaign, even more Ms. Collins'due south vote on Justice Kavanaugh.
During her time in the Legislature, the Democrat pushed to expand Medicaid in the state, clashing with former Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican, on the issue.
As much as whatever individual policy event, though, Ms. Gideon's core message is that a vote for Ms. Collins is a vote to keep Republicans in control of the Senate.
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"As long as Susan Collins is elected again to the United states of america Senate, Mitch McConnell volition again likely exist the Senate bulk leader," Ms. Gideon told attendees at a supper near Lewiston last calendar month.
She repeated a version of that line in a cursory interview afterward, and grew slightly defensive when that was pointed out.
"I don't walk effectually talking nearly Mitch McConnell all the fourth dimension," she said, earlier retreating to a talking indicate most what Mainers focus on "when they sit down down at their kitchen tabular array."
Yet Ms. Gideon was more candid at the cease of the chat, when asked if she was happy with the Senate competition's becoming nationalized.
"We are where we are in this state," she said.
And Ms. Collins is where she is, in the dwindling eye between a party that loves Mr. Trump and ane that loathes him.
The most frequently heard criticism of her is that she has inverse, and has betrayed her moderate roots. Ms. Gideon has encouraged this sentiment and, when asked what she had in heed, cited Ms. Collins's support for the 2017 Republican tax cuts.
Yet Ms. Collins too supported George W. Bush'south similarly high-end taxation cuts, just as she backed his nominees to the Supreme Court.
What Maine voters often mean when they say Ms. Collins has changed, though, is that the Republican Party has changed — and by that they mean Mr. Trump.
"The party has moved right," said Carl Bucciantini, a retired instructor who came to hear Ms. Gideon. "It was conservative nether Reagan, conservative under the Bushes and at present it's simply crazy."
Ms. Collins continues to dodge the question of how she'll vote for president, but she said last month that she would probably avoid Mr. Trump if he campaigned in Maine.
In the same interview, conducted before the decease of Justice Ginsburg, Ms. Collins said she would oppose filling a Supreme Court vacancy in October. Since the senator reaffirmed that view after Justice Ginsburg's death, Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ms. Collins.
"I remember that Susan Collins is going to be injure very badly — her people aren't going to take this," the president predicted in September, before heckling her on Twitter last week for opposing the jerky court nomination.
Pressed equally to why she never fully bankrupt with Mr. Trump the aforementioned style that her heroine, former Maine Senator Margaret Hunt Smith, had confronted Joseph McCarthy, Ms. Collins recalled that she had helped torpedo the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and parted means with the president on problems like his effort to utilize military money for a edge wall.
"I accept had and so many Margaret Hunt Smith moments," she said.
The more than persuasive answer, though, came from a supporter at the charabanc tour introduction who loathes Mr. Trump but said Ms. Collins was caught in a political vise.
"She tin't," said the supporter, Kathy Anderson, when asked why Ms. Collins wouldn't condemn Mr. Trump. "Expect at the demographics here."
Prototype
Maine has always been carve up between its more affluent coastline and its bluish-collar interior. But the political and social gap has widened even further in recent years.
"A lot of the people downwardly here are more connected to Napa Valley than they are Penobscot Valley," said John Baldacci, a former Democratic governor of the land, who grew upward in Bangor and now works in Portland.
The influx of transplants along the Maine declension and the migration of working-class whites into the Republican Party nether Mr. Trump and Mr. LePage, who chosen himself "Trump before Trump," accept upended the land's politics.
Peradventure almost pregnant, and for Ms. Collins nearly threatening, Mr. LePage's consecutive plurality victories prompted Maine to enact ranked-choice voting. In this organisation, voters rank their preference on the ballot then that those who receive few first-place votes are eliminated and the eventual winner garners a bulk.
This means that the votes of those supporting a liberal independent candidate, Lisa Savage, tin ultimately go to Ms. Gideon if Ms. Savage's backers list Ms. Gideon every bit their 2nd choice.
Information technology's a significant shift in a state with a long tradition of independence.
Maine has elected ii unaffiliated governors in the last half-century and in 1992 handed Ross Perot more than 30 percent of the vote, his best showing of any state. Now, though, it has the same cherry-red-and-blueish divide every bit the rest of the land — and the old outlines of its political map have been redrawn.
Republicans used to run up some of their best margins in wealthy enclaves along the Atlantic, while Democrats consistently fared all-time in immigrant-heavy and wedlock-organized mill towns further inland.
Maps from the concluding two major elections, the 2016 presidential competition and the 2018 governor'southward race, reveal a near-unbroken stretch of Democratic blueish up the Atlantic Coast from Kittery to Bar Harbor.
At that place are effectively ii states — one working class and more pro-Trump, and the other more upscale and deeply contemptuous of the president — that Ms. Collins must span.
They can be seen in the Trump backyard signs sprouting up across inland Maine and the ubiquity of Biden signs virtually anywhere saltwater is in the air.
Back on Ms. Collins's coach, she concluded an interview by recalling that in 2008 she "only lost eight communities in the entire country."
Simply one time she stepped into the office of an oil heating visitor to address employees, she returned to the present.
"The country is and then polarized and Maine is, too, unfortunately," Ms. Collins said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/us/politics/susan-collins-maine-senate.html
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