How Does Susan Collins Keep Winning?

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

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 o…