Susan Collins Is Always Keeping Score

The long-serving senator has delivered millions of dollars to every corner of her state. But in Maine, people say, it's best to avoid getting on her bad side.

Jordan Wood, a Democrat from Lewiston, Maine, was the first person to announce a 2026 campaign challenge to Senator Susan Collins, and he made a priority of winning the endorsement of the mayor of his hometown. He met with Mayor Carl Sheline, a fellow Democrat, in his office and over drinks at a local Italian restaurant. They had a series of phone calls. But ultimately Mr. Sheline declined to back him.

Ms. Collins, the longtime Republican incumbent, was not in the room, at the bar, or on the line.

But she had made her presence known.

Mr. Sheline had various reasons for withholding his support, he said in an interview. Among them, he acknowledged, were a housing project, a food distribution center, and a mill museum in Lewiston. Ms. Collins had helped with the finances for all of them.

"It's just an environment of possible retribution," Mr. Wood said. "It is that fear she instills."

Over nearly 30 years, Ms. Collins, a self-styled moderate in a familiar Maine mold, has cultivated a public persona as a workhorse and a fastidious maestro of constituent services and pork-barrel disbursements, using her Washington know-how to get her constituents what they need.

But for just as long, her detractors say, she has managed to mostly mask a another reality. "The gentlewoman from Maine," as her colleagues say on the Senate floor, is a formidable power broker who can play a fierce brand of politics with a how-dare-you air. According to more than 40 interviews with Republicans and Democrats in Maine politics, former staff, colleagues and longtime observers, Ms. Collins has wielded power not so much as a Yankee Republican but as a shrewd machine politician.

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