To protect their majority, Senate Republicans are praying Susan Collins decides to seek a sixth term next year. But they aren’t making her life easy right now.
Earlier this month, GOP leaders pushed through President Donald Trump’s megabill while ignoring most of her concerns about safety-net cutbacks that the Maine Republican warned will be “harmful” to her state.
Now, they are barreling forward with Trump’s effort to claw back $9 billion in spending she played a key role in approving. Democrats and even some Republicans warn the maneuver could upend the bipartisan government funding process she now oversees.
Collins mounted a protest Tuesday night, joining two other Republicans in voting to block the Trump administration’s spending clawbacks. Afterward, she said in an interview her vote was in keeping with her longstanding approach to legislating.
“I vote according to what I assess to be in the best interests of my constituents and my country — and I do that regardless of who’s in control of the Senate and who is president,” Collins, 72, said.
Pressed on the recent difficulties her fellow Republicans have given her, she said, “They’re doing what they think is right. I’m doing what I think is right.”
All in all, it has been a disappointing start to the dream job Collins spent decades striving for — chair of the historically powerful Appropriations Committee — and now her power is at risk of being further eroded.
Democrats, mad as hell about the funding clawback, are threatening to withdraw from government funding talks; top Trump administration officials would love to sidestep Congress altogether on spending cuts; and there are few reasons to hope lawmakers are heading toward anything other than a spending patch — or worse, a shutdown — when the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.
Still, Collins confirmed Tuesday she is still planning on running again, though she has yet to formally launch a campaign. She said she was “pleased” with the strong fundraising she reported this week, collecting $2.4 million in the second quarter of the year and having $5.25 million on hand as of June 30.
But Democrats are holding out hope that the deteriorating environment for bipartisanship on Capitol Hill might cause her to reconsider. More than any other personnel decision, a Collins retirement could upend the 2026 Senate map.
Democrats have a steep road back to the majority, needing to flip an unlikely four seats while also holding onto their own swing seats in Georgia and Michigan. But they view Maine as a top pick-up opportunity, and they would unquestionably have an easier time without Collins on the ballot, potentially allowing them to pour more resources into tougher races.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who recently announced he would retire from his own swing seat, said Collins has a “thankless job” as chair of the Appropriations Committee but also noted the obvious political reality: Without her, Republicans would lose the seat.
“The one thing I am certain of is if Susan Collins is not running for re-election, then that state is even more at risk than North Carolina,” he said.
Maine Democrats are already mobilizing to run against Collins, linking her to the “big, beautiful bill” by calling her the “deciding vote” in the legislation coming up for debate on the Senate floor, even though she ultimately voted against it on final passage. (The vote to start debate was 51-49, so even if Collins had voted no, Vice President JD Vance would have broken the tie.)
“At the end of the day, Donald Trump and Washington Republicans know Susan Collins will have their back,” Tommy Garcia, a Maine Democratic Party spokesperson, said in a statement.
They have taken heart from recent polling showing deteriorating home-state support for Collins, including a Morning Consult survey from April that found 51 percent of Maine voters disapproving of her performance. Separately, 71 percent of respondents to a University of New Hampshire April poll in Maine said that Collins did not deserve to be re-elected, including a majority of Republican respondents.
But Collins, the only Senate Republican from a state won by Kamala Harris, is helped by an obvious rule of political life: You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and so far Democrats have struggled to recruit a big name to challenge her. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other party leaders are still making overtures to Gov. Janet Mills, who has largely left the field frozen while the party awaits her final decision.
There’s also little expectation Collins would flinch from the political challenge. Her Senate career was all but written off by many political observers in 2020, when polls showed her constantly trailing Democratic rival Sara Gideon. She went on to win by roughly 9 points.
Many in the GOP share Tillis’ view that Collins is about the only Republican who can win a Senate seat in Maine, and she has gotten a wide berth to break with her party because of that. Trump hasn’t lashed out at Collins for opposing the megabill — unlike with Tillis and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
“Everybody cuts her a lot of slack,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on Tuesday night. “She represents … a very blue state. She has to run for reelection this year. She’s the only Republican that can win. And so, you know, she sees the world through a different lens, and she’s always very upfront about what she’s going to do.”
GOP colleagues, he added, “are encouraging her and urging her, doing everything we can to help her to make sure she runs. … She’s got a different calculus, probably than some do in our conference. But there is nobody in our conference who represents a state like hers.”
Democrats’ bet is that Collins concludes that spending another six years in a legislative body whose governing norms have eroded — and a party whose principles she is increasingly out of step with — simply isn’t worth it.
One fellow GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Trump isn’t happy with Collins and might not keep quiet indefinitely.
“He’s very irritated at Susan — very, I can tell,” the GOP senator said of Trump. “But she doesn’t care, because the more Trump gets irritated with her, the better it is for her politics back home.”
Collins “is in an awkward spot” and “gets a pass on a lot of the things that she has to do,” the senator said. But nobody believes Collins’ happy talk about getting government funding back on track, the GOP lawmaker added.
Thune, for his part, said it is his “intention” to “see if there’s a path forward to doing appropriation bills around here.”
“I know Senator Collins … is very interested in a normal appropriations process, and I’m hopeful we can get that back on track,” he said.
But with a 53-seat majority, Senate GOP leaders have already shown their willingness to sidestep Collins. Early in the megabill negotiations she detailed to White House officials, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, what changes she would need to vote for the bill, but leaders didn’t bend the legislation in her direction — and didn’t need to. As with the Trump spending clawback, they calculated they could afford to lose Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), her close ally and friend, by catering to holdouts on the right.
Collins and Murkowski opposed proceeding with the rescissions package Tuesday, emerging unmoved from a last-ditch lunch pitch from White House budget director Russ Vought, who has sought to placate Collins along with other administration officials. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former GOP leader, joined them in opposition.
Republicans acknowledge privately that any turbulence in the appropriations process doesn’t help Collins, who has made her gavel and seniority a key part of her home-state image. Just last week, GOP senators had to hit pause on one of the 12 annual funding bills because of a partisan fight over the Trump administration’s plans to relocate FBI headquarters — the sort of dispute the typically bipartisan Appropriations Committee usually expertly resolves.
But they remain confident she’s running and can win despite forcing her to run against large parts of her own party’s agenda. She recently held a campaign event at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to one colleague who attended, who described it as a “lobster roll event.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he wasn’t worried about Collins, calling her “the greatest politician.”
“She wins by as large a margin as a lot of people in red states,” he said. “She knows her state. She knows how to navigate. I don’t worry about it.”
Calen Razor contributed to this report.
