The 2020 election made Maine Sen. Susan Collins a political legend.

National Democrats, who’d effectively let Collins walk to victory in 2014, wanted her seat in the worst way this time. The Democratic candidate, state House Speaker Sara Gideon, and her outside affiliates raised more money than could even be spent on a political campaign in Maine. Democrats’ heavy-handed assault seemed to be working: Collins did not lead in a single public poll for the entirety of 2020. While not celebrating prematurely, Democrats had reason to be cautiously optimistic that they might finally catch their white whale.

“Sara was leading every private poll that she had,” too, former Rep. Tom Allen, who lost to Collins in 2008 and is a friend of Gideon’s, told me.

Collins’ team didn’t know what was coming, either. “I don’t think anybody had a firm bead on what the result was going to be,” Lance Dutson, a Maine Republican strategist who worked on Collins’ 2008, 2014, and 2020 campaigns, told me. “There was definitely some concern.”

Among those watching the returns on election night with Collins was Bill Green, a household name in Maine local broadcasting who had dropped his long-standing apolitical image to endorse Collins in a campaign ad. Both sides of the race agreed that Green’s ad had a significant impact on the contest, but Green himself wasn’t sure it would be enough.

“I started the night thinking she was going to lose,” Green told me. “Very early in that evening, the returns from a town called Etna came in. It was like 520 to 170, and I thought, ‘that’s not 60–40, that’s 3-to-1.’ ” More towns in Collins’ base, the small-town, northern parts of Maine, came in with similarly lopsided margins. An hour after thinking she would lose, Green felt comfortable. I asked him if Collins showed any roller coaster of emotions as she watched the returns next to him.

“No,” he said. “She’s calm. She’s the same.”

Collins beat Gideon by 9 points among the same Maine electorate that selected Joe Biden over then-President Donald Trump by 9 points. It was a night of many surprises nationally in a year of trash polling. But no outcome left as many jaws on the floor as the Maine Senate race. That included Gideon’s.

“She was stunned. She was stunned,” Allen told me. Gideon didn’t respond to inquiries for this article and, since the release of her prerecorded concession speech, has all but disappeared from political life.

Collins’ dramatic upset gave her an aura of invincibility. She was already known to be a difficult opponent. In 2008, for example—admittedly in an era when ticket-splitting was more common—Collins defeated Allen by 23 points even as Barack Obama carried Maine by 17. But when she sent the full brunt and largesse of the national Democratic Party packing, she showed a new sort of grit. Her fellow Senate Republicans bowed before her. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton declared her “the greatest that’s ever been.” Texas Sen. John Cornyn shared a meme of Collins sitting on a throne of skulls.

Six years later, Collins again is in a competitive election—albeit against a very different kind of opponent—in a bad political environment for Republicans. National Democrats, again, have their sights trained on flipping her seat. Collins has led in only a few polls this year. Here we go again.

How, then, does Susan Collins do it? How, in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1988, has she been able to survive the ever-closing-in walls of nationalized politics and polarization, where the quality of individual senators matters less to voters than which party controls the Senate? And, despite it being perhaps the worst political environment for Republicans that she’s ever run in, can she do it again?

***

If you’ve tried to watch a YouTube video in Maine over the past few months, you have probably been asked to thank Susan Collins.

The millions of dollars in ads run by a dark money group tied to Senate Republican leaders follow a similar structure. You like water? Collins secured millions to protect Maine’s water. Hospitals? Millions to expand them. You hate diabetes? She has a long and thorough career securing money for diabetes research. The ads, for a while, encouraged viewers to “call and thank Senator Collins” and “tell her you appreciate all she is doing for Maine.” Perhaps recognizing that it was a bit tin-eared to encourage voters to call and thank their public servants for doing their jobs, the more recent ads now encourage viewers to “call and tell” Collins to keep fighting for these interests.

Collins’ reelection strategy is simple: maintain her well-regarded constituent services operation. In each and every campaign she’s run, “it’s always been about what she can do for Maine,” as Tom Allen put it. It is about using her leverage in Congress, both as a swing vote and, now, as the top appropriator in the Senate, to bring money back home, not only in the months before reelection, but every minute of every term. Instead of doing big rallies, she’s doing ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings on projects for which she has claimed credit. She’s visiting medical research centers she’s helped fund. Her website puts on vivid display, in map and list form, the specific earmarks she has landed.

“She quantifies her work to the voters as her primary reelection strategy,” Dutson said.

It works because it’s not just that she’s cutting checks and helicopter-dumping cash across the Maine countryside. She’s forming long-term relationships with nonpartisan interests and groups—firefighters, diabetics, healthcare researchers, Alzheimer’s research advocacy groups—that lock into her coalition. “That’s something that I don’t think you can put together in an 18-month campaign, or even in one term in the Senate,” former Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, who served with Collins on the Appropriations Committee, told me. “It almost transfers from generation to generation in a career like Susan has had.”

Democrats will concede the point here.

“She spent 30 years building relationships that matter with voters,” David Farmer, a Maine Democratic strategist and columnist, told me. He mentioned one of the YouTube ads about how Collins had led efforts to increase funding for diabetes research. “You know, it’s not like the Democratic side is pro-diabetes,” Farmer said. “But she has shown up for those groups and worked hard in that regard on these constituent service issues that have mattered. And that’s real. You can’t take that away from what she’s done.”

And it’s just in the past year that the real money started rolling in.

In 2020, Collins emphasized during her campaign that she was in line to be the next chair of the Appropriations Committee, a title she assumed at the beginning of 2025. While congressional appropriators’ authority has been harmed by the Trump administration’s disregard for congressional spending mandates, there’s still plenty of earmark money for members to spread around. And for the chair, it’s orders of magnitude more money.

“What you really get as appropriations chair is hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks,” a fellow congressional appropriator told me, “not what everybody else gets.” In Collins’ case, for the current fiscal year, the sum total—as she proudly boasted in a press release—was “$428,643,000” for 158 projects “across each of Maine’s 16 counties.” Maine’s smallness, too, ensures that she can fulfill her home state’s dreams while also being magnanimous with her colleagues. Another appropriator, South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, noted that she’s still been “pretty judicious” in spreading the pot around the committee, noting that “there have been appropriations chairmen in the past that have perhaps been more overt in the interest for their own state.”

“It’s a fine line,” he said.

Collins is not just touting the money she’s already brought in for Maine. She is unsubtly telling Maine voters that this gravy train has only just left the station. As she regularly notes, she is the “first Maine senator to chair the Senate Appropriations Committee in 92 years,” describing the moment of her chairmanship as “truly a once-in-a-century opportunity for our state.”

The project Collins chose to champion in her first television advertisement in May was the Eastport breakwater, a pier in Eastport, Maine, that collapsed in 2014. In the ad, Eastport’s Port Authority director celebrates Collins for her role in helping to secure federal grant money that allowed the breakwater to be rebuilt.

A couple of weeks after the ad came out, I spoke with Brian Schuth, the city manager of Eastport—a nonpartisan, unelected position. While he’s only been in the job a couple of years, he spoke to how these grants to small-town or rural areas, particularly in Collins’ political base to the north, are the only way that such projects can be undertaken. He noted that the federal contribution to rebuild the breakwater, which creates the inner harbor that allows fishermen and lobstermen to work, was $6 million.

“My total taxation in Eastport is $4 million,” he said. He also described work Collins’ office had done to help the city’s small airport build a new terminal and runway. (“As a matter of fact,” he noted, “that’s how Susan and the other congressional people can get here for the Fourth of July parade.”)

“The total amount that she may bring to our corner of Maine,” Schuth said, “may not be huge, but we’re not huge.”

Eastport is small and remote, like much of northern Maine. Eastport is in Washington County, which is bigger in area than Delaware but has a total population of only 31,200. Collins is originally from Caribou (population 7,300) in Aroostook County, the largest county in the state by area, with nearly all of its 67,000-person population hugging Route 1 along the state’s eastern border. These are all towns and areas that, with their small tax bases, have limited means for public investment—whether that’s for a major pier, an executive airport, or a fire station. It makes the state, overall, dependent on federal dollars, a net “taker” state.

Collins’ message is that with her, and her seniority, they have an opportunity to take like never before.

***

But it’s not just that Susan Collins is good at bringing money to Maine. She’s also great at taking—and getting—credit for bringing money to Maine.

Brian Schuth told me that when he’s putting in an earmark request, he has been advised to take it to Collins’ office first among the Maine delegation “because she’s got the most seniority and she’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee.” Straightforward enough.

Another source in Maine politics, though, told me of a better strategy. This source was advising a Maine foundation on how to request an earmark. When the group said they planned to go to Collins first, the source recommended they start with Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree, also an appropriator, in the House. “I told the board chair” that whatever Pingree could get in the House, “Susan will up that by a million dollars. Whatever the congresswoman could get, Susan would put another million dollars when it came through the Senate. And that’s exactly what she did.”

“She’s very attuned to figuring out how she can be seen as the champion for particular projects in Maine,” the source said, noting that it’s “not a bad thing.” It does highlight how central I can do more for Maine is to her campaigns, though.

Senators get higher earmark allocations, so for bigger requests, Pingree and Collins—who, decades after Collins defeated Pingree in her first reelection race in 2002, have a good working relationship—might tag-team with each other to secure the funding. But, as another longtime observer of Collins in Maine politics put it to me, Collins “has a remarkable way of using ‘I’ more than ‘we’ in statements.”

In other words, Collins is more than just the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee: She’s a politician. And she guards her reputation closely.

“In my view, she’s the most intensely competitive person in the Senate,” former Sen. Roy Blunt told me. “She’s competitive about the work, and she’s also competitive about the politics. In both places, that allows her to get things done.”

There are other ways to put it.

“She holds a grudge like nobody’s business,” David Farmer, the Maine Democratic strategist and columnist, told me. “So if you cross her,” he said, “there’s a price to be paid.”

“If somebody endorses against her, somebody works against her, or someone says something that’s unkind, someone writes an editorial that disagrees with her, a reporter writes a story that is negatively inclined against her,” he said, “they hear about it.” He mentioned that she had tried to get him fired on two distinct occasions.

That means that Collins’ position atop the Appropriations Committee, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks that come with it, is both a carrot and a stick.

“There’s a price to be paid for people who may be thinking about different issues,” Farmer said, “but maybe you’ve got an appropriations request in and you don’t want to risk burning that bridge.”

“I’ve covered a lot of politicians over 40 years now,” journalist Steve Collins, who’s been covering Maine for a decade, told me, “and her office is the most persnickety that I have ever run across.” He describes it as them “calling and having lots of little questions and points about pretty much everything that gets written about her.” He said he found it a little “odd” and “extreme,” but didn’t think she held grudges, necessarily.

“I’ve said some pretty horrible things about her,” he said about writing columns critical of her, “and she’s always nice enough when I talk to her.” It’s similar, he said, to how Susan Collins’ staffers talk about working for her. “She’s very exacting.”

It was a more diplomatic interpretation of the way Farmer put it: “She is a hard-ass. And she’s a hard-ass on her staff. And they’re hard-asses.”

“But,” Farmer said, “they’re very good.”

***

Time is a flat circle in Susan Collins’ campaigns. Whenever she has been up for reelection, her opponents have tried to persuade Mainers that she’s not a “moderate.”

“You don’t get to call yourself a moderate if you voted against the minimum wage,” Chellie Pingree told Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman in 2002. “You don’t get to call yourself a moderate if you voted for the biggest tax cut for the rich.”

In 2008, then-Sen. Sherrod Brown did a campaign stop on Tom Allen’s behalf. The Bangor Daily News quoted Brown talking about how Susan Collins voted with George W. Bush 81 percent of the time: “Then, when she comes back to Bangor, she brags about the other 19 percent of the time.”

Her 2014 opponent, Shenna Bellows, made the same argument in 2014. She lost by 37 points. Gideon tried a variation, arguing that Collins had changed from the person she was when first elected. It didn’t work—at least, well enough. Flash-forward to 2026, pick any day of the week, and now it’s Graham Platner’s turn. “We are going to beat someone who, for years, has tried to trick us all into thinking that she’s a moderate,” Graham Platner said on the trail in early June.

Is Susan Collins a moderate? Her success certainly depends on convincing voters that she is. But if you would like to set a social media thread ablaze with ferocious debate, this question will never let you down.

That’s because, as strongly as people feel like there is an objective answer, it’s a subjective question. Yes, she is one of the, if not the, most bipartisan senators in the body year in and year out. Yes, she also votes with her party the vast majority of the time—just less than most of the others do, and sometimes on high-profile occasions. She has voted for some signature pieces of Republican legislation, controversial nominations, and impeachments of Republican presidents—and voted against other signature pieces of Republican legislation, controversial nominations, and impeachments of that same Republican president. The closest thing to an objective answer we have is the verdict from Maine swing voters, who so far have decided every six years that, whatever she is, she’s worth sending back to the Senate.

But there’s more to moderation than votes, and there’s more to politics than policy positions right now. At a time when President Trump is pushing executive power past its legal limits—and, by the way, attempting to neuter the Senate along the way—something’s a little off when you only want to talk about money for new fire stations.

This isn’t new ground. In a 2008 Associated Press story, Allen’s campaign argued that Collins “has been dodging the big issues like Iraq, health care, and the economy while trumpeting her work on constituent services.” Allen still expresses these frustrations today.

“ ‘Bold’ is not an adjective that’s ever been applied to her,” Allen told me. “She’s a decent person. But I would say she’s very, very cautious. Timid, even. What she typically says about difficult issues is that she’s ‘concerned,’ she’s always ‘concerned.’ And then maybe she does something, maybe she doesn’t. She’s not Lisa Murkowski.”

It’s no surprise that this comparison would be top of mind for a Maine Democrat like Allen.

In 2018, Murkowski was the only Republican to vote against proceeding to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. I was in the chamber for that vote, and I will never forget it. You could only hear her offer a hushed “no” because the room had never been more silent.

A couple of months earlier, I had been in a press scrum with Collins when she reported that Kavanaugh had just told her, in a private meeting, that he believed Roe was “settled law.” Four years later, when Kavanaugh voted to unsettle Roe, Collins wrote in a statement that the Dobbs decision was “inconsistent” with what Kavanaugh had told her. One of the anchors of Collins’ moderate image is that she supports the right to an abortion. The 2026 election will be the first time she’s been on the ballot since the Supreme Court, with Kavanaugh as a swing vote, eliminated that right.

Moderation alone, though, won’t do it. Collins will also need every right-leaning vote she can get in the state—and this cycle, without Trump on the ballot, there’s no guarantee they’ll turn out.

So at the same time Collins has been running her usual campaign of skipping to and from ribbon-cuttings on fire stations and hospital wings, she’s reestablished some ties with the right. She’s formed an alliance with former Gov. Paul LePage, the cantankerous proto-MAGA former governor who is now running for the more GOP-friendly of Maine’s two House seats. The two have had a poor relationship in the past, but this year, they need each other. She has supported the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s strict voter verification and voter ID law which Democrats lambaste as a cloaked effort at disenfranchisement.

Collins has also leaned into the debate over trans issues. She’s supported an effort to put a question on the November ballot that would require public school sports, bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms to segregate by the sex assigned at birth. A benefit of such a question being on the ballot would be to ensure MAGA turnout in the fall; billionaire Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, who is not from Maine but prefers to have a Senate Republican majority, financed the effort. Bellows, now Maine’s secretary of state and a gubernatorial candidate, recently struck the question from the ballot due to invalid signatures, a decision that’s now in court.

And as far as Trump goes, though, it appears that they’ve agreed to stay out of each other’s way. His name barely ever comes out of her mouth. And someone seems, against all odds, to have successfully drilled it into Trump’s head that it would be best to leave alone this senator who once voted to convict him on impeachment charges if he wants to maintain control of the Senate.

“I hope she wins—she’s a good person actually—but we have to win,” Trump said in a February interview on Fox News. “We have to keep the majority, otherwise all of the things we’ve done are going to go down the tubes.”

You may have noticed that I am several thousand words into this piece and have barely mentioned Graham Platner, Collins’ Democratic opponent. The last few weeks of news, with Platner’s history of sexting and volatile relationships, have left Democrats everywhere wondering what’s next to drop. Platner’s nomination could leave the question this piece seeks to answer—how does Susan Collins do it?—with a simple answer for 2026: By drawing a deeply damaged opponent.

But is Platner a deeply damaged opponent? He’s already demonstrated a Teflon-like quality in the face of earlier negative stories about his inappropriate Reddit posts and his Nazi tattoo. Just as the Collins team believes Maine’s resistance to national trends will carry her to a sixth term, Platner’s team is emphasizing the state’s independence to ward off a deluge of punishing stories: that these are national stories by national publications with their own agendas that will be greeted more skeptically by the free-thinking people of Maine. As some of Platner’s campaign signs read, “They Don’t Know Maine.”

***

The immediate aftermath of Susan Collins’ 2020 win had an air of finality to it. National Democrats had finally thrown the kitchen sink at Collins and not come particularly close.

“It felt like that was the last time anyone would bother trying to knock her off,” Lance Dutson, the former consultant for Collins, told me. “She had succeeded in so many allegedly difficult situations that there’s not too much more you could throw at her. But six years is an eternity in politics. So here we are again.”

We’re here again not just because Democrats can’t resist another shot. There are two legends surrounding her endurance that, by 2026, may have been outrun by the facts. The 2020 election results, while an unquestionably impressive political feat, did not demonstrate that Collins is invincible. And while many Mainers may believe they practice a form of political exceptionalism—that there’s a “long-standing sense of Maine voters as being insulated from the vicissitudes of Washington, D.C.,” as Dutson put it—it’s not clear that Maine is as divorced from our national politics as either candidate would have you believe.

Collins’ 51 percent vote share in 2020 was her worst Senate election performance—it was 17 percentage points less than what she received in 2014. Her 9-point margin over Sara Gideon, too, was more complicated than it appears. Lisa Savage, the Green-aligned independent candidate, earned 5 percent of the vote, and was instructing her supporters to rank Gideon second. The race never reached a second round of counting since Collins—barely—cleared 50 percent in the first. The final margin between those who did want Collins to be their senator for another six years and those who didn’t might have been a lot closer than 9 points.

And this time, Susan Collins will be running in what could be the worst national environment for Republicans since 2018, or even 2006.

But is Collins impervious to national trends, as the story goes? About that.

Everyone I spoke with in Maine for this story was uncommonly nice. Everyone shared phone numbers of people they felt I should talk to. Several offered to host me or take me out for a beer. Bill Green offered to take me out on his boat and show me a cool lighthouse. (Here’s the full list of interviewees for any story who have ever offered to take me on their boat or to show me a cool lighthouse: Bill Green.) I admired the way they spoke with pride about their state and its independent, contrarian, small-c conservative character, the way they like politicians who think for themselves, and their resistance to national political trends, and that this distinctive character could be responsible for Collins’ endurance.

And so I was dreading having to editorialize about this, but fortunately a pollster did it for me.

“Every state says that,” said Andy Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which runs the Pine Tree State Poll. “I think if you went to every state in the country and asked, ‘Are you guys more independent or do you just follow the party line?,’ ” he said, of course they’d call themselves independent. He noted that the number of “true” independents is quite limited, most people are locked into their sides, and ticket-splitting is almost completely gone from politics. Longtime incumbents, especially strong ones like Collins, are shielded from the full effects of the great national polarization.

Until they aren’t. As much as Collins may wish there were and Mainers may believe there is, there’s no force field around the state protecting it from this nationalized politics in the long run—and there’s no force field protecting Platner from a pile of bad stories in the short run. But Maine is a light-blue state, in a pro-Democrat national environment, in which Democrats everywhere are on fire about what’s happening to the country. It would be foolish to say Susan Collins can’t win again. But it also would be foolish to say she can’t lose.

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