Susan Collins is a Republican senator from Maine and chair of the Senate appropriations committee, which controls all discretionary spending by the federal government. She is the first senator in history to cast more than 9,800 votes without ever missing a roll call, and the first senator from Maine to be popularly elected to five consecutive terms. She is the only Republican senator to represent a state that Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election. She regularly ranks first among senators in the bipartisan index kept by the Lugar Centre and Georgetown University's public-policy school.
Collins is pro-choice. She has cited Margaret Chase Smith, a fellow Republican senator from Maine, as a role model. She is running for a sixth term in autumn 2026, with the primary filing deadline in March. She was 73 years old as of January 2026.
Collins has broken with her party on several occasions. She opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton and supported Barack Obama's stimulus. She provided a crucial vote to save Obamacare when Donald Trump wanted to repeal it during his first term. She voted to acquit Trump in his first impeachment trial but to convict him in his second. She voted in 2018 to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, saying she believed he would not vote to curtail abortion rights; he did. That vote alienated many of her left-of-centre constituents.
Collins was one of five Republican senators who voted to curtail Trump's war powers after the Venezuela raid in 2026, prompting Trump to declare that they "should never be elected to office again". After a second American citizen was shot dead by immigration agents in Minneapolis on January 24th 2026, she called for an independent investigation.
Her 2026 Democratic challenger is Graham Platner, a 41-year-old oyster farmer and former Marine infantryman who served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Janet Mills, Maine's two-term governor, gave up a Senate bid in April 2026, accepting Mr Platner would crush her in the primary. He inspired controversy over a tattoo of a skull and crossbones (since covered) and extreme social-media posts, but explained the tattoo was unwittingly associated with Nazism and his Reddit posts came from combat-related trauma. He campaigns on universal health care and economic populism.
All extremists should be taken out and shot.