Maine Has Finally Had Enough of Susan Collins

In one of the biggest upsets in even this blue tsunami, Susan Collins is out, after holding her Maine Senate seat for 30 years. On Tuesday night, she conceded her loss to Democrat Troy Jackson. Given its politics and demographics, Maine should long have been a gettable state for Democrats, but Collins was a singular politician. She brought plenty of financial investment back to her state and billed herself as a bold independent, doing what was best for Maine and Mainers, not for the Republican Party. Her loss is part of the midterms’ bigger story of voters turning against President Donald Trump. But it’s more immediately a story of voters turning against Susan Collins: of seeing her hubris, her artifice, and her cowardice, and finally saying no more.

If Collins wants to backtrack to a single moment that lost her this election, she should rewind the tape to Oct. 6, 2018: the day she voted, along with nearly every other Senate Republican, to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings had been arguably the most heated since those of Clarence Thomas. Kavanaugh stood accused of sexual assault by three different women. During his confirmation hearings, he was startlingly angry and reactive—displaying something quite unlike the kind of stoic rationality one expects of a Supreme Court justice. And, tellingly, he refused to answer straightforward questions on whether he would uphold Roe v. Wade and the decadeslong precedent that women have a constitutional right to decide whether to end a pregnancy. Anyone with the ability to understand words could comprehend what Kavanaugh was saying: He couldn’t come out and say he’d overturn Roe, because that would tank his nomination; instead, he was signaling that he would do so, while still giving himself, and those who supported his candidacy, some plausible deniability.

Collins ran with it.

She told reporters that she spoke with Kavanaugh privately for more than two hours and that he had assured her that Roe was “settled law.” This was a cop-out: Any Supreme Court decision is “settled law” until the court decides otherwise. Whether Roe was “settled” had no bearing on if Kavanaugh would eventually vote to unsettle it.

And, predictably, he did.

In 2022, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe and immediately stripping abortion rights from millions of American women. Kavanaugh was part of the majority who voted to overturn. Justice Samuel Alito, whom Collins also voted to confirm, wrote the opinion.

Perhaps most gallingly, Collins told the news media that she had no regrets over her vote to confirm Kavanaugh. By this election cycle, it became clear that voters were having some regrets about her.

Sure, Collins has occasionally bucked her Republican Party to vote with Democrats. In sum, though, she has cast decisive votes in opposition to her own party fewer times under Trump than she did under Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush. And on the votes that really mattered, she has fallen more in line with the GOP under Trump than under other presidents. That reality runs headlong into Collins’ narrative about herself, that she’s a bold moderate who is especially willing to stand up to the vastly unpopular Trump, whose net approval rating in Maine was –32 on Election Day and who lost the state to Kamala Harris in 2022. Most Mainers saw through that story and objected to Collins being too supportive of the president.

And it’s not as if Collins ran against one of the Democratic Party’s Bright Young Things and, in the face of youth and novelty, looked old and stodgy. Democrats absolutely fumbled the ball when it came to the Maine Senate race this cycle, first getting into an ugly factional fight between the more moderate institutionalists, who backed 78-year-old Janet Mills in the primary, and the DSA-adjacent progressive upstarts, who brought an oyster farmer named Graham Platner into the national spotlight—only to see the Platner campaign collapse into a spectacular heap after accusations of sexual assault. Scrambling to get a candidate on the ballot by the deadline, Democrats went with Troy Jackson, a 58-year-old former Republican turned Democratic majority leader of the Maine Senate, who had placed third when he ran in the Democratic primary for governor and, while generally well liked, is not exactly renowned for his charisma, political talents, or intellectual prowess. (“I’m going to hold my nose and vote for the dope,” one Maine voter told the New York Times. “I’m going to vote for Troy Jackson. The Senate’s full of idiots. At least he’s our idiot.”)

In many ways, the Collins–Jackson race was reflective of the country as a whole: With a handful of notable exceptions, voters were overwhelmingly casting their ballots not for the Democrats but against the Republicans, and particularly against the party figurehead. In Maine, it turns out, they were voting particularly against Susan Collins. In many ways, it’s a shame. The persona Collins adopted—that of a principled, pro-choice woman willing to do what was right no matter the party politics or the political cost—is sorely needed in our era of hyperpolarized politics. But that persona was a sham. Eventually, the veil of independence became so thin that Maine voters saw right through it. Collins, who cast a cowardly vote at the very moment the country needed her to stand up for our most fundamental rights, can blame only one person: the woman in the mirror.

Read more of Slate’s election coverage.