Susan Collins brought Joe Manchin to Lewiston to vouch for her independence. It's hard to imagine a more revealing witness.
Manchin is the man who, as the decisive vote in a 50-50 Senate, sank Build Back Better in 2021. The bill carried an expanded child tax credit, climate investment and child care money, and he killed it on his own timetable and for his own reasons. He then left the Democratic Party and became an independent. He is now a man who is celebrated for independence in proportion to the damage it does to Democrats. Collins has cultivated the same brand for decades, and it has the same function.
The brand is worth examining because it is the entire campaign. Collins's pitch to Maine is that she is a check on her party. The record is that she is a check only at the margins. She voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh after telling the country she was reassured Roe was settled law. Dobbs followed. She voted to acquit Trump in 2020, saying he had "learned a pretty big lesson." Voters can judge how that prediction aged. Each time, the performance of concern was followed by the delivery of the vote.
Her defenders will point to her recent breaks. She opposed the Hegseth nomination. She voted against the big Republican tax and Medicaid bill. Those votes are real, and she deserves credit for them. But look at the arithmetic. That bill passed anyway, with the vice president breaking the tie. Dissent is easiest when it is survivable, and a senator who can defect without changing the outcome gets the credit with Maine voters while her party gets the result. A genuine check changes outcomes. A pressure valve lets the system keep running.
That is why Troy Jackson's attack on her appropriations chairmanship is the sharpest point in this race. The chair of Appropriations does not just cast a vote. She controls the power of the purse: what gets funded, what gets starved, and whether war spending comes with oversight or a blank check. Collins has held that gavel through an administration that has tested the limits of executive spending authority. Statements of "concern" are cheap, and a chair who writes the bills can do something about it. Jackson is right to ask what she has actually done with that power, rather than how many times she has sighed.
Manchin's attack on Chuck Schumer deserves a note, because it is the one place Collins's camp tries to turn the contest into a referendum on Democratic leadership. Plenty of Democrats have complaints about Schumer, and many on the left voice them loudly. But a Senate race is not a vote on Schumer's tenure. Electing Collins does not repudiate him. It hands Republicans another seat toward the majority that decides who chairs every committee, which judges are confirmed and what the budget looks like. Mainers who dislike Schumer can't punish him by reinforcing Mitch McConnell's former conference.
There is a real argument for Collins, which is that Maine is a state Trump lost and she is the only Republican up for reelection in one. Voters there like moderation and distrust partisan machines. That is a fair instinct. But moderation is a description of results, not a posture. If the results are the same Supreme Court, the same tax priorities and the same deference to the executive, the posture is just packaging.
So the question for Maine is simple. Does the independence on offer change what the Senate does, or does it only change how it feels to watch? Bringing Manchin to Lewiston answers that more honestly than Collins perhaps intended.
How it may affect me
This race could help decide Senate control, and with it the appropriations process that sets federal spending on Medicaid, health programs, education, disaster aid and defense. Mainers who rely on those programs, or on federal funding for local projects, have a direct stake in who chairs Appropriations next year.
