Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine released a campaign ad this week that paints her as a bipartisan workhorse, hoping that it will convince enough voters in left-leaning Maine to cast their ballots for her in November and save her reelection.
However, the ad has to go back six years to the COVID-19 pandemic and 25 years to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to find bipartisan accomplishments that may possibly appeal to Mainers—a sign of just how difficult her reelection bid is.
“After a devastating attack on 9/11, Susan Collins led the way forward, enacting historic bipartisan reforms that made us safer,” a narrator says in the ad as somber yet triumphant music plays in the background.
The narrator goes on to say that Collins has never missed a “single vote,” saying she has cast “10,000 in a row.” She is “Maine’s first chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee in a century,” the narrator adds.
That is not just a boring message but a head-scratching one. The 2026 electorate is in a decidedly anti-incumbent mood. Many voters are mad that aging Congress members like Collins, who would be 80 years old at the end of another term, have stuck around for so long while not enacting meaningful change.
The fact of the matter is that since President Donald Trump has been in office, Collins has acquiesced to him when her vote was needed to push his policies and nominees forward. She voted with him roughly 95% of the time last year, according to data from VoteHub. On especially divisive issues, she regularly expresses phony “concern”—so much so that it’s become a meme.
Collins voted to confirm Trump’s disastrous Supreme Court nominees who went on to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and allowing states to heavily restrict reproductive care.
She also voted for Trump’s dangerous and unqualified Cabinet nominees, including anti-vaxx Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now-former Attorney General Pam Bondi, and now-former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Collins was a critical vote to advance Trump’s disastrous “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashed Medicaid and food stamp benefits for the poorest Americans in order to offset tax breaks that overwhelmingly favor the rich.
Collins is trying to have it both ways, backing Trump when she’s needed to ensure his policies advance and opposing him when she has the breathing room to build a phony “bipartisan” record. This duplicitous behavior has annoyed not just Democrats but also many Republican voters who view her as insufficiently loyal to their Dear Leader.
That makes her uniquely vulnerable this fall. And it’s why even with Democrats’ drama with their candidate selection, she is in for an uphill battle in November.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
