The Women of Maine Versus Susan Collins
ALFRED, Maine—Earlier this spring, Heidi Sampson, a Maine state house representative, and I were both rushing between town meetings, that iconic form of New England government where communities assemble to vote on hundreds of issues ranging from Independence Day fireworks to costly infrastructure projects.
Sampson, a registered Republican who thinks of herself as a conservative libertarian, told me I could expect to hear her constituents, many of whom are elderly, press her on VA benefits and Medicare coverage and access to libraries and food pantries—increasingly common concerns in a state with a poverty rate of 12 percent. But during breaks for bean suppers and chats in Grange Hall parking lots, what I kept hearing were informal referendums on the job performance of Susan Collins, Maine’s senior senator.
Sampson, who is a longtime supporter of Collins, said she wasn’t surprised. “I get phone calls from upset people. I get emails from people. Constituents will come right up and complain about Susan to my face,” she told me. “People get really emotional.”
For most of her nearly 24-year Senate career, Collins has been a quiet, head-down, never-miss-a-vote lawmaker known for an unwaveringly moderate approach that balances ardent fiscal conservatism with a liberal-pleasing reputation for supporting women’s reproductive rights. Then came the polarizing Trump presidency, and suddenly Collins found herself at the consequential center of bitter political battles—on issues ranging from the proposed repeal of Obamacare, which she resisted, to tax cuts and the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, which she supported. She is far from the only lawmaker to have cast deciding votes; however, Collins’ reputation has taken a conspicuously harsh hit. In 2015, after winning reelection with about 70 percent of the vote, she was considered one of America’s most beloved senators. Today, she is the most reviled, derided for her increasingly lock-step party line votes and for the often belabored manner in which she has justified herself. She’s been lampooned by Saturday Night Live; The New Yorker recently satirized her for taking hours of deep reflection before deciding to order whatever Mitch McConnell is having for lunch.
But it is in Maine, where “Bye-Bye Susan” bumper stickers have become common, that the opposition represents an existential threat as she pursues a fifth term. Last year, during the presidential impeachment process, Collins’ refusal to attend several town hall forums begat another bumper sticker asking: “Where’s Susan?” Prior to the state’s shelter-in-place order, protesters gathered almost weekly outside her six state offices, taking issue with everything from her decision to side with Trump on family separation to her embrace of corporate tax cuts. Residents have made a pastime out of sharing videos of gotcha-conversations with Collins at fundraisers and in airports. In February, Colby College issued a poll showing Collins with a 42 percent approval rating in the state. Among women under the age of 50, her approval is only 25 percent. Her Democratic challenger Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon has a slight edge in recent polls, and the Cook Political Report now lists the race as a toss-up.
Heidi Sampson, like Collins, is in her 60s. She says she finds all this attention on the senator mystifying—less a reflection on her than on the electorate itself. “It’s like we’ve all been reduced to ambush parties and ginned up hysteria,” she told me between town meetings. “And that’s ironic to me because that’s the exact image women our age have always had to fight against.”
But in a state with the nation’s highest percentage of both female registered voters and women who turn out to vote (about 77 percent and 65 percent respectively, according to the Center for American Women and Politics), Collins’ plummeting support among women represents an especially dire threat to her reelection prospects. The Kavanaugh vote has energized outside groups such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which recently rolled out a six-figure ad campaign denouncing Collins for turning her back on Mainers. But many women voters I spoke to in towns around the state say that while the Kavanaugh vote angered them, they perceive a larger trend—that Collins has abandoned her native Maine in favor of standing with her GOP peers and funding from corporate donors.
In an email exchange with the senator and her staff, Collins assured me that she is still very much “a centrist who believes in getting things done through compromise, collegiality, and bipartisanship.” She also stressed that there was still an important role for moderates like her, even in this highly polarized political environment.
It’s a sentiment that echoes what she told a Los Angeles Times reporter last month. The reporter tracked down Collins at a dogsled competition in her native Caribou, Maine. Collins told him she was baffled by the response of her constituents; she insisted she hasn’t changed: “I am doing exactly the same thing I’ve always done,” she said then. “I’ve always cast votes with an eye to how they affect the state of Maine and our country.”
Understanding the roots of Collins freefall is key to understanding not only her predicament but the mood of the electorate—in Maine and the nation as a whole—heading into November. It’s a simple question with complex answers: Is it Collins who has changed or is it the voters?
For years, Maine was the crown of Yankee Republicanism. The state produced socially progressive, pragmatic, secular moderates like Senators Margaret Chase Smith and Bill Cohen, who also served as secretary of defense under Democrat Bill Clinton. Susan Collins began her career as a Cohen staffer. When she first ran for office in 1996, she carried that mantle. She was elected on a platform that included strong opposition to the death penalty, and support for both reproductive rights and congressional term limits (she vowed she’d serve no more than two, then return to Maine and let someone else take her place).
When I moved to Maine in 2001, Collins was up for her first reelection bid. After voting to acquit Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial and opposing bans on so-called partial birth abortions, she won handily and continued as junior senator to Olympia Snowe, also a Republican celebrated for her bipartisanship (Time magazine named Snowe one of America’s best senators for her centrist views and disavowal of party politics). In 2012, Angus King, the independent two-term governor with a reputation for fiscal moderation and rebuilding Maine’s social systems, won the seat vacated by Snowe. Since then, King and Collins have aligned in their voting more than two-thirds of the time—a rarity in any state with senators who don’t share a party affiliation.
But, in Maine, that’s the kind of record folks expect. The state has one of the highest percentages of independent voters—about 38 percent, according to the Secretary of State’s office. And even voters affiliated with a party regularly split tickets in the ballot booth. In 2008, Collins won all 16 counties in the state. That same year, Barack Obama took all but one. Both succeeded by distancing themselves from the policies of George W. Bush. In 2014, Collins was reelected with nearly 70 percent of the vote; two years later, Hillary Clinton picked up three out of four electoral votes, while Trump collected just one. (Maine is also one of two states that splits electoral votes by congressional district.)
During her tenure on Capitol Hill, Susan Collins has made a name for herself as a tenacious overachiever. She’s never missed a Senate vote (something only 11 other senators can claim). She serves on several high-ranking committees, including Intelligence, Appropriations, and Aging, which she also chairs. Although currently the most senior Republican female senator, she also prides herself on voting against her party more than any other senator, in either party.
But some observers of her career say those number don’t really add up—or at least they haven’t in over a decade. They say she’s rarely, if ever, opposed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell since the 2009 stimulus debate (Collins famously stepped across party lines to vote for the resulting recovery act, but only after gutting it of several key provisions, including funding for schools and pandemic flu preparations).
Others say her conversion has been more gradual. They point to her initial (and vocal) opposition to the candidacy of Donald Trump as proof that if there has been a transformation it has occurred more recently. In August 2016, Collins penned a scorching op-ed in the Washington Post denouncing him as unsuitable and stating that she would not vote for him. Once Trump was elected, she continued to oppose him. She partnered with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in an attempt to block Betsy DeVos’s nomination as education secretary, an embarrassing challenge to the new president on one of his most important cabinet choices. And then, in September 2017 she resisted Trump’s highest legislative priority—overturning Obamacare—by announcing she would not support a repeal plan. Pundits on the far right accused her of being a closet Democrat. But many in her home state cheered the independent-minded senator they’d long known and loved.
That enthusiasm began to erode in December that year, when Collins voted in favor of a tax reform bill that not only included the biggest cut to the corporate tax rate but also included a substantial cut for wealthy Americans. Then, in 2018, came the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, widely viewed as a pro-life ally with a history of writing in favor of stricter governmental regulation of abortion (including a 2017 court of appeals dissent in which he argued the government should favor fetal life and refrain from facilitating abortion). Collins, who, one year earlier, had received Planned Parenthood’s Barry Goldwater award, an annual honor given to a Republican for his or her work on reproductive health and rights, did not indicate which way she was leaning on the nomination. But pressure, from both conservatives and liberals, mounted quickly.
When accusations of sexual assault and harassment against Kavanaugh were made by Christine Blasey Ford, the pressure on Collins to reject his nomination became intense. Sexual assault survivors flew to Washington to share their stories and opposition to his candidacy. Collins’s offices were inundated with phone calls and letters and throngs of protesters, who crowded hallways and vestibules. Her spokespeople said that the calls, letters, and protests were equally mixed with Kavanaugh supporters and detractors. I covered several Portland protests and sit-ins in September and October of that year and saw only dissent for the nominee.
Anna Zmistowski, a political science major at the University of Maine in Orono and president of the campus’s College Republicans, was an intern for Collins at the time. She says it was “absolute insanity” for two months. “It was brutal. I was called all kind of names and told to go do all kinds of things,” Zmistowski told me last month.
It also brought unexpected financial challenges. In the weeks leading up to the Kavanaugh confirmation, several nonprofit organizations in the state banded together to launch a crowd-funded campaign to fuel any potential Collins challenger. The campaign stipulated that any money raised would only be allocated if the sitting senator voted in favor of Kavanaugh. They quickly raised almost $4 million, even though Democrats had yet to choose a candidate to oppose her.
Republicans like Heidi Sampson and long-time state house member Mary Small, also a supporter of Collins, saw the act as nothing short of a failed attempt to bribe Collins. Collins detractors like Marie Follayttar, director of Mainers for Accountable Leadership, which helped spearhead the crowdsourcing, say they had no choice.
“We tried every possible nonviolent tactic to get Collins to listen, but nothing worked,” says Follayttar. “So we created an electoral crisis to send the message that Mainers won’t back her if she turns her back on us.”
On October 5, 2018, Collins took to the Senate floor with a 45-minute speech announcing her support for Kavanaugh and delivering a harsh rebuke of what she called “a confirmation process that has become so dysfunctional, it looks more like a caricature of a gutter-level political campaign than a solemn occasion.” This stand aligned her with some of Trump’s most reflexive defenders in the senate, such as Joni Ernst and Shelley Moore Capito, while Murkowski, with whom she had once been allied in opposition to DeVos, remained conspicuously silent about her views of Kavanaugh, choosing to vote “present” rather than in favor of nominee.
There’s little question Collins’ polling numbers have never recovered since her Kavanaugh vote. As late as January of 2018, her approval rating was 61 percent. A year later, it had dropped to 53 percent. And it has kept falling.
But has Collins turned her back on her supporters? Has she actually transformed from a reliable check on Trump, as she seemed to be in the early days of his administration, to a dependable ally who offers token criticism but votes with him on all key issues? Or have voters become so rigid in their opposition to Trump that they can no longer abide her support for anything that might be considered helpful to the leader of her party?
Dan Shea, author of the most recent Colby College poll, says Collins’ case for independence wasn’t helped by her vote to acquit Trump at his impeachment trial in February. Nor was her assertion that the president “had learned his lesson” from the ordeal (a day after she made that statement, Trump told reporters, not the for the first time, his conduct was “perfect”). Nor was her refusal to answer questions about whether or not she voted for Trump in this month’s Republican primary.
“Every decision she makes seems to align her more closely with the Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell movement,” says Shea. “Here in Maine, that’s become the anvil around her neck.”
Shea also points to figures like congressional voting records maintained by ProPublica. In 2009, Collins voted against her party 31 percent of the time. In 2019, that figure had dropped to around 11 percent. And while some of those votes included opposition to two federal judges otherwise supported by her party, many others were on issues considered insubstantial by congressional watchers—like a motion to override the veto of a joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval of the proposed export of defense articles to Great Britain.
Collins insists she has not budged philosophically, but voters and prominent lobbying organizations see it differently—and they are acting on those perceptions.
The majority of the 1,008 respondents to the February Colby College poll felt that Collins was more interested in voting with political affiliations, rather than principles. It’s also a big reason why current Democratic state Speaker of the House Sara Gideon—a relative political newcomer who moved to the state in 2004—is ahead of Collins in both recent polls and fundraising efforts for the first quarter of this year, even though her party has yet to hold its primary.
Gideon has also received an endorsement from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy nonprofit that endorsed Collins in both her 2008 and 2014 campaigns. Tiernan Sittenfeld is the LCV’s senior vice president of government affairs. She points to the organization’s annual environmental scorecard for elected officials as a big reason why they backed Gideon this year. Back in 2007 and 2008, Collins scored a perfect 100 percent. A decade later, it was 21 percent, thanks to her vote to confirm David Bernhardt as Secretary of the Interior, and her endorsement of anti-environmental bills like one that sought to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
“A member of Congress is expected to make up her mind about what is in the best interest of her constituents. Again and again, during Trump’s presidency, Collins has shown she’s not willing to do that,” says Sittenfeld. “We have an extreme and radical president who has so little interest in what is good for places like Maine. We need a champion who will stand up to him.”
The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which last backed Collins in her 2002 re-election bid, also sided with Gideon this year, saying that Collins is no longer a champion of reproductive rights. Amy Cookson is the communications director for their New England office. She says that erosion is evinced by her approval of judges like Federalist Society member Kyle Duncan for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and her support of a tax bill that Cookson says say will upend the Affordable Care Act. They also point to Collins’s attempt to limit Medicaid users from accessing Planned Parenthood in an early draft of the CARES act.
Not long after the Planned Parenthood Action Fund announced its endorsement of Gideon, a Collins spokesperson shot back, telling WMTW-TV, Maine’s ABC affiliate, that Planned Parenthood had morphed into a group “run by far-left activists who would rather focus on partisan politics.”
That still doesn’t sit well with Cookson. “Maine women and Maine voters have remained consistent,” she told me last week. “Susan Collins is just not the leader she once was, particularly when it comes to reproductive health and rights. In the past, we counted on Senator Collins to put women’s health and wellbeing ahead of partisanship and political games, but we can no longer do so.”
Last month, several women gathered at “The Moose Drop In,” a popular gift shop in Millinocket, Maine, for their regular nightly “paint and sip.” Participants brought wine; store owner Tricia Cyr provided salty commentary and the artistic medium, which for that night’s session was garden gnomes. The regular event is a welcome relief for a town struggling to rebuild itself. Located about 150 miles north of the state capital, Millinocket (which has a current population of about 4,200) was once home to the nation’s largest paper mill. It closed in 2008, prompting a mass exodus of its highest paid employees. Those who remained watched as homes were foreclosed on and businesses shuttered. In 2018, Millinocket’s unemployment rate was around 9.6 percent—twice the national average. That number had dropped to about 6 percent prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but that was still twice the state’s overall rate of 3 percent.
When I visited, residents said they were hopeful the newly formed Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument might draw visitors. (Collins objected to Obama’s designation of the land as a national monument, contending that there was no consensus among Mainers about the designation and that he had overstepped his authority by bypassing Congress.) The women were optimistic that a recent federal grant applauded by Collins would allow the conversion of the derelict mill into a business park. But both ideas, they say, demand infrastructure and initial investment.
Once upon a time, say Cyr and her customers, Susan Collins was dedicated to saving places like Millinocket. Not anymore.
“She used to be a visible character who would visit our region and genuinely seem interested in what people thought,” says Cyr. “Honesty, I haven’t seen her here in years.”
Cyr, who recently turned 50, calls herself a “liberal, anti-abortion Republican.” She says she’s been a long-time supporter of Collins. She doesn’t know if she can vote for the senator any longer.
She says it makes her nervous when she hears that Collins is being financed by billionaires like Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the investment firm Blackstone Group and also a major Trump donor. And she doesn’t like knowing that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, there’s been a notable increase on the senator’s reliance on corporate donations—from about 47 percent of her coffers in 2002 to over 61 percent today.
“I think Susan has forgotten where she came from,” says Cyr. “And I do believe she’s trying to do everything right for the people of Maine. But her ‘right’ and our ‘right’ aren’t the same thing anymore.”
The other Millinocket women I spoke to say they respect Collins’s identity as a powerful woman in politics and her history of principled voting and reasoned arguments, but that they have seen a demonstrable change in recent years—that she is more interested in voting with her party’s interests than she is in making the right choice.
Hope Eye, a 27-year-old friend of Cyr’s daughter, grew up just outside of Bangor. She describes herself as a leftist socialist. She voted for Collins in 2016 because she thought that a senator with the kind of experience and power that Collins had would be able to fight for the people of Maine. Then, in 2018, she and a friend gathered letters opposing Kavanaugh’s nomination and delivered them to the Collins’ office. She says she felt “shooed away” by the staff.
“I feel totally ignored by this elected official who is supposed to be accessible to me as a constituent,” she says.
Eye earned a masters degree in global policy at the University of Maine. She completed several high-profile internships in her field, has worked as a field organizer for major political campaigns, and taught adjunct courses at her alma mater in Orono. She says the only job she can find is as a scheduler in a medical office. It pays minimum wage, so she lives with her mom and is well aware that she lives at the poverty line.
Hers is an increasingly common position, according to the Maine Center for Economic Policy. A recent report by the organization found that a lack of full-time jobs with competitive salaries continues to send away young Mainers and detract others from moving here. That same report found that 36 percent of Maine workers between 16 and 64 years old do not work a full-time, year-round schedule, despite the fact that many of them want one.
Susan Collins doesn’t get that, says Eye. “I honestly don’t recall a single time when she has been an advocate for the working poor,” says Eye. “She likes to claim her humble roots, but she consistently lacks empathy for people like me.”
Eye said she also disapproves of Collins’s decision to accept money from corporations like pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, accused of artificially hiking the price of insulin, and the fact that Collins will attend wealthy fundraisers hosted by organizations like the Federalist Society, but the senator refuses constituent requests to host or appear at town hall meetings.
I heard similar complaints around the state. In the Atlantic coast town of Lubec, on the Canadian border, McGinley Jones and her husband Gale White are the owners and operators of Lubec Brewing Company, a small business with a payroll of nine employees. Both of them Democrats, Jones and White were also longtime Collins supporters, voting for her in every election up until 2014. But their enthusiasm waned during Collins’s last term. They say they used to be able to count on Collins to keep the government running—and to bring it back during a shutdown. They say she did little to prevent or end the record 35-day one that spanned from December 2018 to January 2019. During that time, Jones and White were unable to bottle their beer (the shutdown also prevented the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau from approving the necessary labels).
“The beer spoiled while we waited. I literally poured $10,000—all my quarterly profits-- down the drain,” says White. “I contacted Susan Collins’s office asking for help. They never replied.”
The couple has also lost their health insurance because they can no longer afford rising premiums. And they remain incensed that Collins voted in favor of a 2017 GOP tax bill, which they say benefitted big business and hurt craft establishments like theirs.
It irked Jones when Collins objected to coverage of her tax vote as “sexist.” She says she thought the senator’s endorsement of Kavanaugh was the last nail in the coffin. Now, she says, the “supernail” is Collins’ handling of the coronavirus and its impact on businesses like hers.
“Again and again, she’s had chances to do something for women and employers, but she’s vanished,” she says. “Collins is only interested in being one of the Trump boys now.”
Late last year, Jones and White agreed to appear in a commercial produced by Maine Momentum, a nonprofit organization with an articulated mission of working to expand economic opportunity across the state of Maine. In the ad, the brewery owners lament corporate contributions to the Collins campaign and the lack of tax breaks for small businesses like theirs.
Jones said she expected the dozens of Internet trolls that besieged the brewery’s social media accounts. She didn’t expect that the Collins campaign would shoot back with an ad denouncing Jones and White as not being “real Mainers” and taking dark money. Jones, whose mother, in 1969, was the first Maine state representative to give birth while in office, said she definitely felt targeted by the campaign.
She says, given another chance to record a message for Collins, she knows exactly what she would say: “This is proof you no longer represent my interests. It’s time for you to go.”
Collins and her staff are known for their uncompromising management of her image. In 2015, I contacted them for a story I was writing about how the Veteran’s Administration was underserving women (a subject on which Collins has always been particularly strong). Her communications team arranged an interview; I included an extended quote in the story. And yet after it was published, a senior staffer admonished me, writing “I was surprised, based on our communication and cooperation in getting this across the finish line, by the quote that you used from the Senator in the piece. While she said it, and it’s accurate, it feels boiler plate and like something that anyone could have said.” The staffer then asked if I could replace the quote in question with a new one. I didn’t.
Early in the reporting in this story, I contacted Collins’s communications team to ask for an interview. Her senior communications director and I were in near daily contact for 10 days. Initially, she responded to queries by suggesting I contact a list of Collins supporters, including Heidi Sampson and Mary Small, both of whom appear in this story. When I sent, at the staff’s request, a list of interview questions, Collins responded to just two: one saying she thought the coronavirus was her constituent’s number one concern, and the other about why she chose to run again for reelection. Questions regarding her absence at constituent forums, her polling numbers, and her lack of popularity among women went unanswered.
I also asked about a recent virtual forum hosted by the Maine Small Business Coalition (MSBC). There, multiple small business owners—including some of the 300 who had signed an open letter to Maine elected officials expressing frustrations about the flaws in the Paycheck Protection Program—complained about what they saw as Collins’s lack of responsiveness to their concerns. Both Collins and her staff declined to answer those questions. (A spokesperson said in an email that it was because they viewed MSBC as an arm of the Maine People’s Alliance, a community action organization opposed to her reelection.)
That angered Erin Kiley, one of the participants in the forum. Kiley and her husband, own and operate an antique and vintage furniture store in Portland. They say they don’t qualify for the Paycheck Protection Program, so they’ve had to seek unemployment insurance. They’re worried about the 50 vendors they work with, most of whom don’t currently qualify for unemployment assistance.
“Instead of owning up to the shortcomings of the current relief package, Susan Collins is doubling down and applauding herself for a program that leaves out massive swaths of the Maine economy,” Kiley told me by phone.
Kiley, who is 37 and moved to Maine 10 years ago, says she thinks Collins hasn’t seemed like much of a moderate for as long as she’s lived here.
That perception, says Shea, the Colby College professor, is the real challenge Collins currently faces.
Maine voters pride themselves on being engaged and informed, says Shea. They are pragmatic, results-oriented, and always turn out in big numbers. Last month’s Bangor Daily News poll showed that, of all the statewide elected officials, only Collins had a negative approval rating. And although Donald Trump has never been popular here (Clinton won the state in 2016), his popularity has also fallen. In the most recent Colby College poll, only 34 percent of respondents said they would vote to reelect Donald Trump. If Collins is going to recover here, Shea says, she’s going to have to distance herself from men like Trump and McConnell.
“Her battle is going to be to bust away from that guilt by association,” says Shea.
And that, say voters like Hope Eye, means reconnecting with Maine voters.
“I want Collins to realize she is floundering with us. She really needs to make headway in coming back and being able to hear our problems,” says Eye. “If she can do that, then maybe I’ll think about voting for her again. Maybe.”