Bangor, I. – Maine Senator Susan Collins finds the challenge on her hands.
Republicans are preparing to run for re-election in a difficult year for his party, Ms. Collins’s vote was opposed by Democrats with a political base in affluent Southern Maine, hoping to earn Republican’s unpopularity in White. Home. But, in the 2008 competition, such as G.O.P. No. Presidential candidate May lost by 17 percentage points, Ms. Collins won re-election by more than 20 points from each county in the state.
That was after.
Ms. Twelve years after Collins was considered the most difficult re-election of her career, she is facing very similar circumstances – but this time she is struggling in her political life. And that’s what has changed in Maine, the Republican Party, and politics since 2008 that could end his career.
Judge Brett M. Democrats have removed the four-term senator from here and there by voting for Kavanagh’s confirmation. It has become a national punchline among liberals they see as President Trump’s toothless tuttering, which he has always been concerned about. And ડે 63 million to 25 25 million has been raised by her Democratic opponent, State House Speaker Sarah Gideon.
Mr. Collins’ biggest problem this year, however, may be the ground that will move under his feet, not Mrs. Gideon or the donors eager to send her a message.
It is facing a state, clearly scattered by area and class, which would have been politically invisible to its predecessors; A growing alien party by the president seeking undisclosed allegiance; And, most desperately of all, a polarized political culture that transcends tribal and national issues bipartisanship and pork-ban is more than she has always pursued.
Former Maine Senator William S. Cohen admits, “I don’t know if the Central Republican, whose Ms. Collins succeeded in the Senate after working for him as a young staff member.” “It’s a challenge to be in the middle of someone.”
Ms. Collins is the only Republican senator on the ballot this year who has not endorsed Mr. Trump.
In an interview on the bus of her campaign, she said, for a moment she thought of running this year as an independent – “it crossed my mind,” she said – but she was quick to point out that she easily abandoned “New England’s brand Republicanism”. Will not be able to.
It is a dying race. Mr Collins is a remaining Republican member of the New England Congress.
However, there is an equally endangered senator who can win re-election in the state when his party’s candidate is properly defeated. Mr. Trump expects him to be the only contestant in Maine’s second congressional district, which he won in 2016, and even there polls suggest that Democratic candidate Joseph R. Biden is Jr.’s edge.
In 1984, when Ronald Reagan won a 49-state landslide, the Democrats won two Senate seats. And more recently, as in 2008, Ms. Republicans, like Collins, were winning re-election in blue states, while Democratic senators moved to the red ones, such as South Dakota and West Virginia.
However, by 201 By, the results of each Senate race reflect the state’s choice in the presidential race.
Now Mrs. Collins is unlikely to outperform Mr. Trump by 20 points, as she did John McCain in 2008, rather than Maine hugging the crab over the lobster as the crustacean of her choice.
Yet his argument is that in this age of polarization there are exceptions, and well-known legislators in light-populated states can overcome bias. Montana Senator John Tester and West Virginia’s Manchin III, for example, both won as Democrats in Republican-leaning states just two years ago.
“There are a lot of parallels,” said Rich Collins. “I still believe most voters want to solve problems and they’ve put it through us-against the tribe.”
Listening to Ms. Collins from the start of a statewide bus tour in Bangalore was like stepping into a machine of political time.
She applauded after trumpeting her record as the most bipartisan senator, noting that she had never lost a floor vote and lamenting the federal deliverance she had delivered for a new breakdown in small communities.
He then completed the final rites: “With your help, when I am re-elected, one year later I will be chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.”
The pitch resonated with some supporters, but he was also self-aware of the nature of Mrs. Collins’ date of appeal.
“I think I’m a dinosaur in that I appreciate his centrist views and I also appreciate that he’s been doing this for a long time and has a ranking position on many important committees,” said Janna Jensen of nearby Brewer. “I don’t know how many people value it.”
Last year’s New York Times-Siena College College survey pointed to the limitations of localism – and it raised issues such as the Supreme Court and abortion rights before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
Fifty percent of Mainers said national issues, such as the party controlling the Senate, are the most important for their Senate vote, while one percent said local issues, such as who can do more for Maine, are paramount.
A native of Rhode Island, as Mrs. Collins delights in noting, Mrs. Gideon has made health care the focus of her campaign, even more so than Judge Kinslin’s vote on Justice Kavanagh.
During his time in the legislature, Democrats pushed for the expansion of medical aid in the state, and clashed with former Republican Gov. Paul LaPage over the issue.
As with any personal policy issue, however, Mrs. Giden’s main message is that the vote for Ms. Collins is a vote to keep Republicans in control of the Senate.
“Until Susan Collins is re-elected to the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell will again be the leader of a potential Senate majority,” Ms. Gideon told attendees at a supper near Lewiston last month.
Later in the short interview she repeated the version of that line, and it became slightly defensive when pointed out.
“I don’t always walk around talking about Mitch McConnell,” before retreating to talk about what the miners are focused on, “when they sit at their kitchen table.”
Yet Mrs. Gideon was more candid at the end of the conversation, when she was asked if she was happy with the nationalization of the Senate contest.
He said, ‘We are where we are in this country.’
In the vicious circle between Mr. Trump and a party that hates him is Mrs. Collins.
Her most often heard criticism is that she has changed, and betrayed with her moderate roots. Mrs. Gideon has encouraged this sentiment, and when asked what she has in mind, cites Mr. Collins’ support for the 2017 Republican tax cut.
Yet Ms. Collins also met George W. Bush supported the same high underlying tax cuts as he supported his nominees in the Supreme Court.
People who vote for Maine often mean it when they say Ms. Collins has changed, though, because the Republican Party has changed – and that means Mr. Trump.
“The party has moved on,” said Carl Buccini, a retired teacher who came to hear Mrs. Gideon. “It simply came to our notice then”
Ms. Collins continued to dodge the question of how she would vote for president, but she said last month that she might avoid Mr. Trump if he were to run for Maine.
In a similar interview before Judge Ginsberg’s death, Ms Collins said she would oppose filling the Supreme Court vacancy in October. Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Mrs. Collins since the senator reaffirmed that view after the death of Judge Ginsberg.
“I think Susan Collins has been hurt so badly – her people won’t take this,” the president predicted in September, before Hackling her on Twitter For urgently opposing the court’s nomination last week.
Just as Mr. Trump confronted her heroine, former Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Joseph McCarty, why she never broke down, Ms. Collins recalled that she helped torpedo the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Was gone. Ways with the President on issues Like their attempt to use military money for a border wall.
He said, “I have many Margaret Chase Smith moments.
A more inspiring answer came from a supporter of the bus tour introduction, who hates Mr. Trump but said Ms. Collins was caught up in the political trend.
“She can’t,” said supporter Kathy Anderson when asked why Mrs. Collins would not condemn Mr. Trump. “See demographic topics here.”
Maine is always divided between its richer beaches and its blue-collar interior. But in recent years the political and social gap has widened.
John Baldasi, a former Democratic governor of the state who grew up in Bangor and now works in Portland, said, “Many people here are more connected to the Napa Valley than to the Penobascot Valley.
The influx of transplants along the Maine coast and the migration of working-class whites to the Republican Party, led by Mr. Trump, and calling himself “Trump before Trump,” has insulted state politics.
Probably the most notable and most dangerous for Mr. Collins, Mr. Lapage’s consistent majority victory encouraged Maine rank-and-file voting. In this system, voters place their order of choice on the ballot so that a few first-place winners are eliminated and eventually the winner gets a majority.
This means that the votes of supporters of the liberal independent candidate Lisa Savage could eventually go to Ms. Gidun if Mrs. Savage’s supporters put Mrs. Gidon on their second-choice list.
It is a significant shift in a state with a long tradition of independence.
Maine has elected two unscrupulous governors in the last half century, and in 1992 Ross Parrot received more than 30 percent of the vote, the best performance of any state. Now, however, it has a red and blue division like the rest of the country – and the old outline of its political map has been redrawn.
Republicans ran some of the best margins in the wealthy scattering along the Atlantic, while Democrats consistently outperformed migrant-heavy and union-planned mill cities.
Maps of the last two major elections, 201. The presidential race for the presidency and the race for governor of the 201 race, from Kitrie to Bar Harbor, reveals a unique stretch of the Democratic Blue over the Atlantic coast.
Effectively there are two states – one more the working class and more pro-Trump, and the other more deeply ignoring the president and the president – Ms. Collins must pull that off.
They The ubiquity of Trump’s signals spread from the inside to Maine and the ubiquity of Biden’s signs can be seen anywhere in the air in salt water.
Returning to Mrs. Collins’ bus, he recalled in an interview in 2008 that he had “lost only eight communities across the state.”
But once she set foot in the oil heating company’s office fees to address employees, she returned to the present.
“The country is so polarized and unfortunately, so is Maine,” Ms. Said Collins.
