The fall of New England’s last Republican

Rome. With the defeat of Susan Collins, there are no longer any Republicans left in the whole of New England. An era has come to an end, of which she – the senator who held Maine’s Senate seat for thirty years – was the last symbol. Every six years, when the west coast turned blue, that red patch remained high up there: Maine was hers and no one could take it away from her. The Democrats tried everything: vast sums of money, adverts, endorsements from all their leading figures. Nothing worked. In 2020, when Joe Biden won the White House and Trump was preparing to storm the Capitol, she defied all the polls that had her as the clear underdog: five or six points behind her challenger, Sara Gideon. She won by eight. This time, the progressive primaries had produced the unlikely Graham Platner, who ended up embroiled in controversy for his pro-Nazi views and, above all, for being accused of sexual abuse. 

The Democrats, who already had little patience for the man – a ‘man of the people’ who claimed to have understood the world through oyster farming – forced him to step down. In his place, they hastily put forward Troy Jackson as their candidate. A ‘decent bloke’, said those who knew him – and that’s usually never a compliment when it comes to fielding a candidate in an extremely tough race. Ironically, it was precisely him – this populist lumberjack who didn’t even receive the official backing of his state’s outgoing governor (who is herself a Democrat), and who, in years and years of serving in the local legislature (he was president of the state Senate), had distinguished himself by doing absolutely nothing – who dealt the fatal blow to Collins. In all the TV debates, she insisted that being ‘a good man’ is not enough; that, to quote Rino Formica, ‘Washington is blood and shit’; and that one must know how to navigate those corridors. A valid point, but one which, amidst the creeping populism, was perceived as a snide dig from a snob who belongs to the elite club. The Republican’s entire election campaign was based on what had been achieved: Collins brought money – a great deal of money – to Maine. She was chair of the Appropriations Committee, a body with jurisdiction over the federal government’s entire public expenditure. Over the years, the Committee has allocated one and a half billion dollars specifically to Maine in funding for local projects and infrastructure. ‘Without that money, in this era of tariffs, we wouldn’t even have had the salt to melt the ice on the roads!’, she thundered during a debate. She failed to realise that she was implicitly touching on a raw nerve in the economy of a state that has paid a heavy price because of the tariffs. Hence the accusation: thirty years in Washington have caused her to lose her ability to connect with the people. She thinks only of power and wealth. Then came the charge that annoyed her most: she is a Trump supporter. Susan Collins has built her career on her bipartisan stance. Thirty years ago, for nearly two decades, she and her fellow Maine senator Olympia Snowe were the most left-leaning senators in the Republican Party, even though they did not get on at all (Snowe, who retired in 2012, always avoided publicly supporting Collins). She voted against the impeachment of Bill Clinton, to name but one example. A few weeks ago in Maine, Joe Manchin, the former Democratic senator from West Virginia, was seen campaigning for her. See? Forget about ‘MAGA’ – I’m bipartisan. But even this was a sign of the difficulty she faced. Collins didn’t need any help; she has always been able to rely on a well-oiled and flawless machine: money, support, consensus. The trade unions, or at least a large majority of them, were behind her. Her mentor William Cohen, who handed over his Senate seat to her after eighteen years, even published last September the usual editorial that he unfailingly writes every six years in the Portland Press Herald: ‘Dear fellow citizens, think carefully. Think about whatever you like, but above all, think about your own pockets.’ It didn’t work.

Here too, contempt for the president has triumphed over everything else, as one voter interviewed as she left the polling station put it so well: ‘I like Susan, I’ve always voted for her. But I can’t bring myself to vote for Trump’s agenda.’ It was probably inevitable that this would happen, sooner or later. Trump or no Trump. Demographics, the cultural fabric, polarisation: in New England, election cycle after election cycle, the liberals have grown in strength, driving the Republicans to extinction. Though they do occasionally secure a victory here and there: Kelly Ayotte, a former senator, was re-elected as Governor of New Hampshire, even though the Senate race was won hands down by the Democrat Chris Pappas. Collins has always been methodical, careful to balance her independence with loyalty to the party, even when it was under Trump’s thumb. She is still held to account for just one decision: her ‘yes’ vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It was 2018, and the nominee had been accused of sexual misconduct and assault dating back to the 1980s, when he was a student. The battle in the Senate was fierce, and the nomination was passed by the narrowest of margins, with Collins voting in favour. Even in recent weeks, there were those who were still holding that vote against her. In any case, that is now water under the bridge. No more Washington—it is back home. Although it is hard to believe she will be going on bike rides like Maine’s most famous woman, at least on our TV screens: Jessica Fletcher, the Murder, She Wrote.