Susan Collins' Re-Election Prospects Dim

Time​ Magazine

09-07-2025

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When someone crosses Donald Trump, the retribution tends to come fast and fierce. But when Sen. Susan Collins of Maine voted last week against his One Big Beautiful Bill, a tax- and safety net-cuts behemoth, the President was atypically silent. That may be the biggest indicator of just how much danger Collins is in as she faces re-election in Maine in 2026.
Collins' opposition was not enough to kill the giant domestic bill that may be the lone legislative lift of the 119th Congress. She was the 50th nay, which forced Vice President J.D. Vance's to provide a tie breaking 51st vote. Collins is seldom the deciding factor; she did not sink Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court and voted for all but one of Trump's second-term Cabinet picks. Her protest votes are as strategic as they are symbolic; FiveThirtyEight found she voted with Trump 67% of the time during his first term. Plus, on an early test vote on this bill, she let it proceed as she continued, unsuccessfully, to negotiate for carve-outs for rural hospitals.
Collins is the lone Senator up for re-election next year in a state that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried in 2024. Democrats have yet to settle on a favored candidate to become the nominee although all eyes are on Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the tough-minded former prosecutor who stared down Trump at the White House and refused to comply with his administration's anti-transgender athlete orders. State Democrats have other options at the ready if the 77-year-old Mills passes and are primed either way to make Collins own the Trump record, especially her votes for his Supreme Court nominees in his first term. While she was re-elected after those votes, the Justices have since overturned a half-century of precedent on abortion rights in Roe.
Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, have seemingly endless patience with Collins and understand her savvy. Her tangles with Trump have been largely performative, not predictive. She is no John McCain, who with a single thumbs-down signal thwarted Trump's first-term effort to repeal Obamacare. Cynics say that Collins shows independence only when it doesn't really make a difference; no one on her side of the aisle really unloaded on her after the vote against the latest package. Most had her back, saying they understood her choice.
Collins, a powerful player and chair of the all-important Appropriations panel, is not terribly difficult to understand, politically speaking. She has never won re-election by less than 8 points despite her home state's fickle politics. The last time the state's majority vote went for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1988, also the last year a Democrat won a Senate race in the state.
But her net approval rating sank 12 percentage points—more than any other Senator's numbers—between the first and second quarters of this year, according to Morning Consult. Her disapproval number stood at 51%, up from a 44% average in the January-March window.
And she is definitely viewed less warmly than when she was at a comparable point ahead of her 2020 bid. In 2019, 52% of Mainers had a favorable impression of Collins, according to Morning Consult polling. Today, the number is 42%.
This suggests she's going to have a trickier time than when she was at the comparable point ahead of her last campaign. In 2019, ahead of her 2020 bid, her net positive numbers were 13 points. Today she's at a net negative of 9 points, according to the same pollsters. That means roughly 1-in-5 Maine voters have changed their minds about Collins in a state where her last victory was secured by less than 9 points.
As a practical matter, about 34,000 Mainers stand to lose health coverage as the bill was drafted. Her effort to secure $50 billion in earmarks for rural hospitals expected to be hit particularly hard by the legislation failed. Two solar projects in the state were put on hold even before the bill passed. Hospitals were already bracing for shifting services. Collins' no vote, in a rational world, made sense for her constituents.
But that may not help her. Among voters in Maine, a majority—including a majority of Republicans—says she does not deserve to be re-elected, according to polling from neighboring University of New Hampshire. A striking 71% of all Maine voters say this should be her last term, and 57% of Republicans agree, according to a survey taken in April. That's a simply brutal number.
Flipping ahead a few pages in the same UNH binder, things get even worse. Their survey finds Collins with a favorability number of just 12%, landing a 58% unfavorable number. Among Republicans, the gap is a 19% positive to a 43% negative.
The University of New Hampshire Survey Center found the bill was deeply unpopular, according to a June poll. A 58% majority did not want to see the bill pass, including 72% of independent voters.
Still, Democrats are realistic about what they face. While Collins has just $3 million in her account, she raised almost $31 million for her 2020 bid and won her 2014 campaign with less than $6 million in spending to notch 67% of the vote. Senate Republicans' campaign committee is, first and foremost, an incumbent-retention operation and will have her back.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are going to be defending tricky seats in Georgia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, and Colorado. They would need a net pick-up run of four seats to take a majority, and the path to that would require upsets in Trump-backing states like Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, and Texas, plus holding every seat that is currently blue.
So Collins is facing some pretty lousy poll numbers and is going to be dogged by her no vote that had no real upside. The vote against Trump is not going to be the salve that cures her dour numbers. She defied Republicans but is not going to get any love from Democrats. She's going to be hounded by a bill she did not support. Plus, the headwinds are historic—and that's before Trump decides whether he will launch his own revenge.
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