Maine might boot Susan Collins. It could hurt state’s wallet for years

Maine might send Sen. Susan Collins packing after this year’s midterm elections. That decision could come back to bite the Pine Tree state’s balance sheet for years to come.

Collins, New England’s lone federally elected Republican, is in the fight of her political life against the Democratic progressive upstart candidate Graham Platner. Platner, an oyster farmer and military veteran, has seized on anger directed at President Donald Trump and anti-establishment animus to rocket to the Democratic nomination — forcing Democratic Gov. Janet Mills to abandon her own Senate campaign within a matter of months. His yard signs dot the state’s backroads and neighborhoods, and he leads in almost every head-to-head poll against Collins. 

The race, like most midterm contests, is shaping up to be a referendum on the president, who is underwater nationally in nearly every poll. And Collins, who has repeatedly beaten the odds in stunning fashion for the GOP even as New England has shifted solidly blue, is clearly running against the tide as voters mull whether to allow Trump a Senate majority for his final two years in the White House.

Senate control is objectively important. Democrats winning the Senate would likely prevent Trump from appointing a fourth and possibly fifth justice to the Supreme Court. It would also open the door for bicameral investigations into the president should Democrats also prevail in the House. Democrats’ chances of taking control of the Senate remain slim. A May 13 report from BCA Research projected Republicans retain a narrower majority in the chamber.

But Maine voters are presented with a special quandary when they go to the polls to decide Collins’ fate: Do they really want to clip the wings of their golden goose to loosen Trump’s grip on Washington? 

Collins, 73, who is running for a sixth term, is at the height of her power in the Senate — a body where seniority reigns supreme over all else. The moderate Mainer chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, a highly coveted post that makes her the gatekeeper of the federal purse and grants her the ability to ship billions of dollars home while holding immense leverage over the administration. 

“It’s a classic political question over the years,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, who represents the state’s southern 1st Congressional District. She said it will be “hard to predict” whether voters will choose the certainty of seniority or “the politics of the day.”

In a phone interview with CNBC, Collins made the case for her reelection by arguing she’s positioned to deliver more for Maine, where others cannot. And she didn’t pull her punches when it came to pointing out what the state would lose if she were to fall. 

“Maine would lose a lot,” Collins said. “Even if by some miracle Graham Platner could get appointed as a freshman to the Appropriations Committee, it would take him years to accumulate the seniority, experience, knowledge and power needed to become a subcommittee chair.”

“Look how long it took for me to become chair of the full committee,” she said.

It took Collins, who was first elected in 1997, until 2025 to assume the Appropriations gavel. The last senator from Maine to wield it before her was Frederick Hale, who rose to the post in 1932. Hale, a Republican, served 24 years in the chamber.

Collins has little in common with Hale, who once reportedly beat a newspaper editor with a whip for publishing an inflammatory article about his mother. She’s a staunch moderate Republican and the first GOP woman to ever chair the committee. But she has delivered in a job that is known in Washington to pay dividends. 

In the years since 2021, when congressionally directed spending — or earmarks — was restored, Collins’ office says she has reaped nearly $1.5 billion for Maine. Nearly $429 million of that was appropriated in the 2026 fiscal year alone. While some lawmakers quietly ask for earmarks, Collins is loud and proud about hers.

“It had been 92 years since a Maine senator had been the chair of the Appropriations Committee, and so I realized that I had a once-in-a-century opportunity to make a real difference for the state of Maine as well as for our country,” Collins said. “I’ve been able to secure almost $1.5 billion in congressionally directed spending projects for more than 650 projects all across the state in all 16 counties.”

Collins spoke about rehabilitating fire stations that are “woefully out of date and oftentimes not healthy environments for the firefighters.” She also got $9.6 million to construct a roundabout in the town of Cumberland, nearly $5 million for a rural health facility expansion in Calais and $6 million for wastewater treatment improvements in Biddeford, to name a few.

Platner’s campaign does not dispute that Collins has brought home the bacon. But in a statement from his campaign, he argued the funds haven’t made a big difference for everyday Mainers. The Platner campaign, which did not make him available for an interview, also pointed to campaign donations Collins has taken over the years.

“What Senator Collins has brought in funding for projects in Maine pales in comparison to what she’s sent overseas in immoral wars, and what has lined the pockets of her billionaire donors,” a campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “She takes money from Big Pharma while rural hospitals close. She takes money from Lockheed Martin and votes for another endless war. She votes against a congressional stock trading ban while profiting off trading stocks.”

“No amount of spin will change the fact that after 30 years in Washington, Susan Collins has gotten rich while life has gotten worse for working Mainers — and Mainers feel it,” the spokesperson said.

Collins has also made her share of controversial votes over the years. She recently voted for the SAVE Act, a bill that opponents say would make it harder for people to vote in U.S. elections. She also voted to confirm the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who went on to support overturning the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade.

Mark Brewer, the chair of the political science department at the University of Maine, said the money Collins brings in matters.

“It’s huge in Maine, there’s just no way around that,” Brewer said in an interview. “This is going to be a bludgeon that Collins is going to use throughout this entire campaign. And there’s really no great response to it.”

“She covers the state, and regardless of what your partisanship is, that stuff matters, and everybody knows it matters,” he said.

Hanging over Collins’ reelection, however, is the omnipresence of Trump. Voters are recoiling from the second Trump administration, electing Democrats in a sweep in 2025 off-year elections and repeatedly offering low approval numbers in public polls. 

For Democrats running in every state, including Maine, fighting Trump is tantamount in any campaign. And Collins is — usually — a reliable Republican vote.

Collins, at times, has stoked Trump’s anger by voting against her own party. And she is known for questioning party orthodoxy before ultimately voting the party line. She did not vote for the president’s 2025 signature tax and spending policy measure known as One Big Beautiful Bill. She voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. More recently, she’s voted with Democrats against Trump’s war with Iran, a shift after weeks of voting for the war. 

“Republicans, when in doubt, vote the exact opposite of Senator Susan Collins. Generally speaking, you can’t go wrong,” Trump said in July last year on his platform Truth Social. “Thank you for your attention to this matter and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

In the interview, Collins said she approaches her touch-and-go relationship with the Trump White House in the same way she approaches past administrations. 

“I’ve worked with five presidents, and I’ve not agreed with any of the five on every issue, and it’s no different with this president,” Collins said. “I have a record of accomplishment, regardless of who is in the White House, and I always try to develop a relationship to work with Cabinet members.”

Collins also said most voters don’t see another important part of her job: Jawboning members of the Trump administration to reverse their decisions when they pull funding for a key project or do something else that hurts the state. One such example was “Operation Catch of the Day,” a short-lived immigration crackdown in Maine that was quickly abandoned amid pushback. 

“The enhanced operation stopped, and it appears to have stopped because Collins put a call in,” Brewer said. 

Because she is a vulnerable Republican in an election year, the White House has accommodated Collins at times when they were unwilling to accommodate other blue or purple states, despite her rocky relationship with the president.

Collins warned that if she were voted out, that leverage would be gone from not just Maine, but from the whole New England region. 

“In the current delegation, I am the only member who has the ability to do that,” Collins said. 

She recounted one less headline-grabbing instance in which the Trump administration cut funding for the Maine Sea Grant, a research and business support program for the state’s famed fishery run by the University of Maine. The program is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is housed under the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick. 

“I am on the way home from the annual fishermen’s forum … I get a text that the administration has terminated the Sea Grant Program for the state of Maine,” Collins said. “So I instantly got on the phone with the Secretary of Commerce, Secretary Lutnick, and I explained to him how incredibly important this program is to our fishing industry, our lobstermen and -women, and to the University of Maine researchers and our coastal communities.”

“Long story short, we got it reinstated,” she said. 

Whether any of that is enough to help Collins resist the tide, however, remains to be seen. Senators have held on in elections amid their states’ shifting political tides in the past, but usually their luck eventually runs out — as evidenced by the ouster of former Democratic Sens. Jon Tester, of Montana, and Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, in 2024.

Brewer said there’s no doubt that Maine is shifting blue, but it’s still a purple enough state that Collins could pull out a victory.

“A classic kind of New England style, Rockefeller-type Republican can still win here, and Collins demonstrates that cycle after cycle,” he said. “Now, that’s not going to go on forever. But I don’t know if the clock strikes midnight in 2026 or not.”