Susan Collins’s Maine Money Machine
The sky was still streaked with sunrise one recent morning when Senator Susan Collins arrived at Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard in Midcoast Maine. Her campaign team had set up folding tables covered with “Bath Built Is Best Built” T-shirts, and as workers showed up for their shifts Collins darted around handing shirts to anyone who would take them. A few people were agitated—“Fuck your T-shirt, and fuck you!”—but most seemed happy to see Collins. Men carrying tanker-size iced coffees from Dunkin’ called out, “Morning, senator!” A woman in a green sweatshirt grasped forearms with Collins and invited her to the fair in Litchfield, forty-five minutes away.
Bath Iron Works, or B.I.W., is one of the largest employers in Maine. The shipyard is particularly symbolic for Collins: as the chair of the Senate’s powerful Appropriations Committee, she can influence line items in spending bills. The perception in Maine—aggressively pushed by Collins—is that her seniority in the Senate keeps defense contracts flowing to the state. At a recent ship-christening at B.I.W., the acting Secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, said, “Tell you what, Maine. This woman is not just a bulldog. She’s a honey badger.” Collins later told staffers that she wasn’t sure whether “honey badger” was a compliment or an insult.
Collins, who has served in the U.S. Senate for nearly thirty years, is up for reëlection, in one of the most closely watched midterm races in the country. Since her initial Democratic opponent, Graham Platner, flamed out this summer, she has been running against Troy Jackson, a former logger and a career politician in the Maine legislature who has positioned himself as an ally of the working class. “If you’ve ever been ignored, underestimated, pushed around, or told that you have to wait your turn while the rich cut the line, I’m asking you to stand with us,” he has declared.
Voters around the country, in both parties, seem to want candidates who can give voice to their populist anger. Collins is not that candidate. Standing outside B.I.W. in white jeans, blue tennis shoes, and a spotless red pullover from New Balance—which has a factory in Maine, of course—she certainly didn’t look like a champion of the working class. But she’s betting that voters will support her anyway, because she has used her power to bring home cash. Her campaign ads and the stops on her statewide bus tour tend to focus on subjects like the forty-five fire stations she’s secured funding for, or the emergency money she got for a port’s falling-down breakwater.
On Tuesday, the argument for supporting Washington insiders got more complicated: ProPublica published an article reporting that Collins had participated in a pay-to-play scheme with a defense-research firm called Navatek, which allegedly offered contributions to her campaign and super PAC in exchange for federal contracts. An investigation under the Biden Administration did not name Collins as a suspect, but the firm’s C.E.O. pleaded guilty to fraud in 2022. Afterward, as he tried to secure a more lenient sentence, the article says, he made further allegations about Collins. ProPublica says that these claims led the F.B.I. to initiate another investigation, which was then dropped when the Trump Administration dismantled the bureau’s public-integrity unit. (The Collins campaign has vigorously denied any wrongdoing, and has said that it hasn’t heard from the F.B.I. about this matter since the original investigation was closed.)
In Maine, a state with a million and a half residents, Collins is an almost familial figure. “I love her right to death,” Marie, a ship painter with a purple French braid, told me in the parking lot. A few years ago, her mom died, and she encountered some logistical snags. She turned to Collins for help: “I finally called her office, and they said, ‘Well, that’s not really something we handle.’ ” But, soon afterward, the state Department of Health and Human Services sent someone over, she told me. “They said, ‘Where’s Marie?’ ” Then, she recalled with a laugh, “They said, ‘Please don’t call Senator Collins again.’ ”
A couple of Bath Iron Works employees who had helped organize the campaign event stood near the entrance, holding signs in support of the senator. Although the union hadn’t yet made an endorsement, Raymond Gauthier, one of the employees, said that he expected it to pick Jackson. Gauthier was frustrated. “What she’s done for this shipyard—it’s appalling to me that anybody would not support her,” he said. But, he explained, “I worked for the union for sixteen years. To be supporting a Republican candidate is like voodoo.”
In Maine, it’s not only unions that see Republicans as voodoo: every statewide elected official besides Collins caucuses with the Democrats, and the Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. Associating with Trump is a liability. “It’s not just that she votes with Trump,” Jackson said at a recent campaign event. “It’s that she votes against us!” She’s also blamed for the President’s policies, even when she doesn’t support them. This recently came to a head around B.I.W. In August, the Administration announced that certain naval ships could now be built in foreign facilities. Collins went on a Fox affiliate in Maine to issue a threat: if the Administration didn’t change its policy, the Appropriations Committee would block overseas construction in the next defense-spending bill.
Collins has been mostly lagging in the polls, but the race is tight; this week, as the ProPublica piece went online, one poll suggested that she is ahead. Maine has roughly equal numbers of voters registered as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Those who lean left face a dilemma. They may hate Trump and his party, and they may hate the Washington swamp—but they also know that Collins’s influence in D.C. makes a huge difference. “We have a very, very strong union ally in Troy Jackson,” Tim Suitter, the president of the local that represents B.I.W., told me. “Is he going to go in and sit on the Appropriations Committee as a freshman? Nope.”
Collins grew up in Caribou, Maine, about as far north as you can go before hitting Canada. Both of her parents served terms as the town’s mayor, and her father was in the state legislature. At twenty-two, Collins went to Washington to work for Bill Cohen, who represented Maine in the House and the Senate. The first time she won an election was in 1996, when she landed her old boss’s Senate seat. That’s the job she’s held ever since.
Almost two years ago, Collins took over as chair of Appropriations. The committee’s members draft all spending bills, which determine how much money, say, the Departments of Agriculture or Defense get. As chair, Collins can haggle with other members to include line items that might benefit her state, and she has significant influence over the spending categories that get written into draft legislation.
Collins and the other senators do not award federal contracts to particular companies, and they cannot write lines into the budget meant to benefit specific firms. But the Appropriations Committee controls a separate pot of money that they can direct to pet projects back home—what used to be known as earmarks, or, less generously, pork. Earmarks got a bad name in the early two-thousands, because of projects like the several-hundred-million-dollar “bridge to nowhere,” which was proposed to connect a small town in Alaska to the nearly uninhabited island that housed its regional airport. For a decade, they were banned, but they were revived in 2021. The new grants, limited to nonprofits and to state and local governments, were given scrupulously benign new names: “community project funding” in the House, and “congressionally directed spending,” or C.D.S., in the Senate.
The list of C.D.S. initiatives that Collins has championed is longer and more lavish than almost any other legislator’s: since 2021, there have been six hundred and seventy-two projects, for a total of $1.5 billion. A Washington Post analysis found that the states that won the most money per person in the last fiscal year were Maine and Alaska—whose senior senator, the Republican Lisa Murkowski, is a staunch Collins ally. Collins makes sure that her constituents know what she gets for them. This summer has been a convenient whirlwind of ribbon-cuttings and christenings. When I spoke with her in Biddeford, she rattled off details: a million dollars for a new fire station in Sweden, Maine (population four hundred), because the old station had no running water; another million for a mobile mammography unit to travel through rural parts of the state. “It has screened over a thousand women,” she said, locking eyes with me. “I know for a fact that there have been cancers detected.”
In D.C., Collins is known as a demanding boss. She has given incoming staffers copies of “The Elements of Style,” and sometimes corrects the placement of commas in policy memos. In Maine, she gets personally involved with every C.D.S. project. When the Presque Isle airport, which serves the population of rural Aroostook County, requested twenty million dollars to replace its passenger terminal, Collins visited to make sure that the terminal was actually too small. “People tend to be really in tune with federal and state funding,” the airport director, Scott Wardwell, told me. “Being able to procure funding, especially in rural Maine, is pretty darned important in people’s minds.”
The senator seems to take particular pleasure in projects that benefit places where people hate her. “The city of Portland never votes for me—never will vote for me,” she said. She then told a story about a fire that broke out last December at a wharf on Portland’s waterfront. Some hydrants were jammed up by freezing temperatures; the blaze was contained in part because of a fireboat that Collins had funded. “It’s very satisfying,” she said.
If a Republican challenger wanted to create an oppo file accusing Collins of being a liberal squish, her C.D.S. projects would be a good place to start. She has secured millions of dollars for public theatres, of the kind that feature prominent land acknowledgments on their websites. She’s gotten millions for conservation, a cause that tends to unite camo-clad hunters and fleece-wearing birders. She is not inclined toward culture warring; in 2024, she and the rest of the state delegation secured $3.4 million for Maine public media’s emergency-broadcast system; the national broadcasters later faced attacks from other national Republicans for being too leftist. Although Collins’s staff maintained that projects are not evaluated on a political basis, the crunchy side of her portfolio seems to reflect her governing philosophy: it helps to accrue favors that you can call in later.
Collins often touts herself as the most bipartisan member of Congress, based on how often members cross party lines to introduce and co-sponsor legislation. This metric is a little misleading—most bills that get introduced never go anywhere—and the claim tends to irritate Collins’s critics. “The Trump Administration, and the Republican caucus in the Senate and the House, has had a disproportionately negative effect on the state of Maine,” Michael Brennan, a longtime Democratic leader in the state legislature, told me. He cited Collins’s vote to confirm the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Maine has some of the country’s strongest abortion protections, but the legislature has had to pass extra protections for physicians who fear prosecution, he said. “You can’t try to keep straddling that political divide.”
Jackson’s campaign is less nuanced. “She votes with Donald Trump 96% of the time, helps put his agenda in place, and then acts ‘concerned’ when Mainers suffer the consequences,” a spokesperson wrote in an e-mail. “Whether it’s tariffs, cuts to programs Maine depends on, billions for ICE, or another endless war, Mainers know the routine.” It is true that Collins has voted with the President about ninety-five per cent of the time during his second term, but the rest of the statement is misleading: she has opposed some tariffs, especially those on trade with Canada, and voted several times to invoke the War Powers Resolution to end the Iran war. She also voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the 2025 spending bill that imposed cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, although she did vote to advance the bill in order to negotiate stronger protections for rural hospitals. (After winning the concession, she still voted no.)
Democrats have long contended that Collins votes against Trump and Republicans only when it doesn’t matter—a performance of independence meant to bolster her reputation in a blue state. In Biddeford, Collins complained to me that this criticism was “so unfair, and so untrue, and very frustrating.” The Bangor Daily News recently found that while Collins doesn’t often cast decisive votes against her party, she does so more than any other senator.
The issues where Collins has pushed back against Trump are often narrowly tailored to her state. During an Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in December, she quizzed the U.S. Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, on how national tariffs would affect Maine’s blueberry industry. But, when she chooses to, she can flex real political muscle in pursuit of a practical goal. Last year, the Trump Administration proposed cutting the forty-eight-billion-dollar National Institutes of Health budget nearly in half. Collins increased the funding instead, by four hundred and fifteen million dollars.
Collins has voted to confirm most of Trump’s appointees, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who has led efforts to roll back billions of dollars in congressionally allocated funding. But she pointed me to moments of dissent: her votes against confirming Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, and Kash Patel, the F.B.I director, or her 2017 vote, with Murkowski and the former Arizona senator John McCain, that halted Republicans’ efforts to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act. She also mentioned “President Trump’s discussion—I put that in quotes—with me on the War Powers Act.” In January, she was on the floor during a vote concerning the Administration’s actions in Venezuela when her phone rang with a White House number. She went to the cloakroom to take the call and realized that it was the President. “It was twenty minutes of him chastising me,” she said. As he yelled, she stayed quiet, she told me. “He said, ‘Susan, Susan, are you still there?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m just listening to the President of the United States make his points.’ ” She added, “That didn’t change my mind. I didn’t go march back onto the floor and change my vote.”
At times, Trump Administration officials play into Collins’s carefully crafted image of distance. “Whenever I’m in Maine, I’ve got to give Susan a little bit of crap,” Vice-President J. D. Vance said during a rally this August. “As you know, Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate.” Still, the fact remains: Susan Collins is a Republican. When you vote for a senator, you’re also voting for the party, and right now the Republican Party is led by Trump. I spoke with several community leaders in Maine, some of whose organizations had received funding through her office, who also felt deeply conflicted about sending her back to Washington. “Susan Collins is better for Maine,” one of them said. “A Democrat in the seat will be better for the country.”
In recent days, Jackson’s campaign has recentered its attacks around ProPublica’s allegations. “Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, and then Donald Trump helped her cover it up,” Jackson said in a statement. “The jig is up.” An F.B.I. spokesperson, Ben Williamson, said in a statement that the agency had investigated the allegations “years ago and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.” Collins has also dismissed the allegations. “The Biden-led Justice Department and F.B.I. totally cleared my office, my campaign, and me five years ago,” she told the Wall Street Journal. Her campaign redirected the money from the fraudster to a local Maine school district. Collins’s staffers have also pointed to the limits of her power: as Appropriations chair, they say, she does not have the ability to secure government contracts for companies.
The ProPublica allegations serve Jackson’s campaign in part because he’s eager to tie Collins to Trump, and to focus on what’s going on in Washington. In July, soon after it became clear that he might replace Platner, he tweeted about Gaza. “Anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide,” he wrote. The issues listed on his campaign website are relentlessly national: abolish ICE, make abortion legal across the country, Medicare for All. Not a single item among his “Priorities” is specific to Maine; an identical list might appear on the website of any other populist Democrat.
This, perhaps more than party affiliation, is the dividing line between Collins and Jackson. James P. Melcher, a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, said that the Jackson campaign is trying to convince voters that “we’re in a war with the big corporations. We’re, in fact, in a war with the establishment of both political parties.” Collins, on the other hand, “does not run as a class warrior. She does not run as a culture warrior.”
The two candidates have very different attitudes toward incrementalism. When Collins successfully advocated for an exemption to the tariffs on Canadian salt and cement, Jackson was dismissive. “Thank you for the road salt,” he said during a press conference, to laughter. “Is that, in the end, going to feed people’s families?” His own aspirations are grand. “One of his big priorities is to overturn Citizens United,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University, pointed out. He was referring to the 2010 Supreme Court decision regarding campaign finance, which can be reversed only through a constitutional amendment, or by the Court itself. “That’s something that’s almost hard to fathom,” Hersh said.
America is clearly in an anti-establishment mood, and that energy could lead to major changes, Hersh said. Sometimes big cultural movements, driven by outsiders, can produce real change—take the Black Lives Matter movement. “But most things are not like that,” Hersh said. “Mostly, you want the insiders.” He described a “hobbyist tendency” among voters, who cast their ballot to “feel connected to important things, to solving some important problems. ‘I’m going to do things that are strategically bad’ ”—vote for a candidate against your own interests, say—“ ‘because my vote is expressive as opposed to instrumental.’ ”
During my reporting, a number of people posited a “secret Susan Collins voter”: someone who wouldn’t be caught dead putting up a lawn sign for her but who plans to support her in November. The strongest piece of evidence for this theory is Collins’s reëlection bid in 2020. As the campaign came to a close, her opponent, Sara Gideon, was ahead in most polls. Then Collins won by nearly nine points. Allegations about Collins’s connection to Navatek were also raised in that race, although they weren’t nearly as extensive.
Even among people who despise Susan Collins, there can be a certain nostalgia for her brand of politics. Senators like her are “potential bridge-builders. They sometimes play coalitional politics,” Hersh said. “Most people have a sense that that’s good. But they have a hard time stomaching what that looks like.” It’s no secret that the species of Washington moderate has been hunted almost to extinction. Jeff Flake, the former Republican senator from Arizona, told me that when Mitt Romney was considering a run for the Senate, Flake reassured him that he would have a natural ally in people like Collins, along with Bob Corker, of Tennessee, and Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina. Today, that roster is basically empty: Flake, Romney, and Corker have all left, and Graham is dead. “People like Susan Collins have to carry the water for some senators that vote no and hope yes,” Flake said. It’s not hard to see why most politicians don’t join the club that Flake described. On the Republican side, “if you’re not with Trump on everything, you’re dead to a lot of Republicans. But you’ll never vote as much with the Democrats as the Democrats would like,” Flake said. “So you’re in a no man’s land.”
Maine is a famously crotchety state; independence is baked into the culture. Still, Patrick Corey, a former Republican legislator who left the Party after January 6th, told me, “Maine has lost some of the political space that once allowed independent pragmatism to flourish.” Since losing a bid for the statehouse in 2024, running as an Independent, Corey has been selling his paintings on a street outside of Portland. He always supported Collins and her brand of moderation, but he won’t be voting for her, or for Jackson, this fall. “I don’t necessarily want her to lose. I want her to smarten up,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I want her to be willing to use the power of her office more forcefully.”
Every Tuesday, Collins’s office sends out a newsletter detailing her activities in Washington and in Maine. One recent edition featured the Citizens’ Climate Lobby—“a peaceful army, armed with respect and admiration, even for those with whom we disagree,” as the founder described it, according to one of its members, David Kunhardt. Despite the Republican taboo around climate change, the members were happy to meet with Collins, and she seemed happy to meet with them. “Her position as chair of Senate Appropriations has been a crystal-clear reason to engage,” Kunhardt said. But, as a private citizen, he just can’t bring himself to support her. “Big picture, who would I like to see win the midterms? I would like to see a dramatic blue wave that says, ‘You guys are doing the wrong stuff,’ ” Kunhardt said. “Even if we lose a leader of the Appropriations Committee, who has helped Maine so well, we have to have certain messages.” ♦