President Donald Trump’s return to the White House is proving to be a double-edged sword for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), whose fight for a sixth term in the Senate will hinge on how well she manages her reputation of independence in Maine.
Democrats have spent months tying Collins, who announced her reelection campaign this week, to the White House, accusing her of enabling Trump’s agenda and not forcefully confronting the perceived abuses of his administration.
Collins, meanwhile, has faced withering criticism from Trump for breaking with him on tariffs, Medicaid, and more. Most recently, he called her a “disaster” who should be thrown out of office after she voted to rebuke his war powers in Venezuela.
Such is the fate of Collins, a perennial swing vote who has built her career rankling Republican presidents and frustrating Democrats who have tried, and failed, to oust her since the turn of the century. But Trump is supercharging that dynamic with his short fuse and demand for unwavering loyalty, presenting Collins with both a bigger foil and liability in her reelection campaign.
The two played nice in the Oval Office earlier this month, when Collins awkwardly stood away from the president as he signed a government funding bill she helped usher through Congress as the Senate’s top appropriator.
“I heard you’re doing good,” Trump told Collins, who clasped a MAGA-style hat emblazoned with “America is back.”
But their marriage of convenience remains the single most fraught aspect of her reelection campaign and could very well determine the trajectory of both their political careers, with Democrats’ path to the Senate majority running through Maine.
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Washington odd couple
Trump can single-handedly keep the 45% of Maine voters who supported him in 2024 home if he is too aggressive in voicing his displeasure with her votes. But that daylight is still necessary for Collins to win given he lost the state.
Legislatively, Collins needs cooperation from Trump to burnish one of her biggest selling points as a senator – that her seniority gives Maine outsize sway in Washington. But she can’t work with him too closely, or else she will be seen as the partner of an increasingly unpopular president.
Collins threaded that needle last year, voting against Trump’s signature tax law while simultaneously helping broker a rural hospital fund meant to blunt the impact of its Medicaid reforms. Nearly $200 million will go to Maine in year one of the law, a fact outside GOP group One Nation is highlighting in a new ad this week.
Trump’s immigration crackdown later became another test case, as she convinced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last month to end the surge of immigration agents into Maine amid a ballooning uproar over enforcement tactics.
Collins registered concern about their presence in her state but did not join other centrist Republicans in calling for Noem to resign after the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Democrats pounce
The middle ground Collins has staked out with Trump could be her undoing this fall, when Democrats blast the airwaves with commercials emphasizing the times that she’s sided with him. In particular, Democrats are quick to highlight her confirmation vote for Noem – whom Democrats want to impeach after the death of Pretti and another U.S. citizen in Minneapolis.
Even her votes from Trump’s first term are being freshly litigated now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade. Collins cast a pivotal vote for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of the Trump appointees who voted to roll back federal abortion protections.
“Susan Collins enters her 2026 re-election campaign with some of the lowest approval ratings of her career after she greenlit Medicaid cuts, voted to gut affordable health care for thousands of Mainers, and confirmed the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade,” Maeve Coyle, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said earlier this week. “Mainers have had enough of Collins’ three-decade career in the Senate, and in 2026, they will vote her out.”
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Collins has been here before, and Republicans trust that she knows how to navigate the electoral politics of her home state. She cruised to a comfortable, 9-point victory in 2020 despite the political baggage associated with Trump and polls showing her behind.
But Republicans are also painfully aware of how much Trump’s influence matters to the fate of their three-seat majority. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has personally asked the president to endorse his incumbents or stay neutral, depending on the politics of the state, but is publicly deferring to Collins on whether Trump should get involved in Maine.
“I think she knows how to run in Maine, she’s been incredibly successful there, she is a veteran campaigner who knows her state well, knows what works,“ Thune told the Washington Examiner.
‘Natural tension’
Trump has shown less regard for Republicans’ fragile control of Washington, preferring to threaten primary challenges against any GOP lawmaker who opposes him and describing Collins and other defectors as weak for the times they vote against him.
Still, Trump does have a pragmatic streak, and Republicans believe that behind his fits of anger, he is willing to support the most electable Republicans in competitive states. Earlier this month, he endorsed ex-Sen. John Sununu, a onetime Trump critic who is giving the GOP a shot at flipping a Senate seat in New Hampshire. He has also buried the hatchet with Republicans who opposed his comeback bid for president in 2024.
“That natural tension between her and President Trump is exactly why she’s a senator from Maine,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND). “And so I’d be concerned if he was all in on her, and I’d be concerned if she had a worse voting record with him than Rand Paul does, but she doesn’t.”
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Other vulnerable Republicans have thrown in the towel out of exasperation with Trump’s fickleness, most notably Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who has increasingly flexed his newfound independence since announcing his retirement last year.
But Collins is wearing Trump’s criticisms as a badge of honor and predicting that Maine voters will reward her for not being reflexively for or against Trump in November.
“What I think the president’s criticism demonstrates is that I’m independent in the way I approach issues,” she told Fox News earlier this week. “I look at what the impact is on the state of Maine and what the impact is on the country, and Mainers appreciate that.”
First term problems
Trump has an uneven history with Collins dating back to his first term. He blessed her 2020 run for Senate after she voted to confirm Kavanaugh, but then called her “not worth the work” as she opposed another Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. After he left office, the president called Collins “absolutely atrocious” amid reporting that she was helping to recruit anti-Trump candidates.
Collins, for her part, voted against Trump all three times he’s run for president, most recently writing in primary opponent Nikki Haley, and was one of seven Republicans to support his conviction on impeachment charges after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
For now, Democrats are sorting out who will challenge Collins in the fall, with Gov. Janet Mills competing against progressive oyster farmer Graham Platner in the June primary. Both of their campaigns already have their attention fixed on Collins, however, accusing her of feigning concern with Trump’s agenda but not opposing him in ways that count.
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“Thirty years of concern. Never enough courage,” reads the tag line of a new ad from the Mills campaign.
Polls currently show Platner as the stronger match against Collins, but Mills is generally considered the more formidable opponent given her success statewide.