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Collins a “Top Senate Target” After Failing to Put Mainers First

After helping pass the GOP’s tax giveaway to giant corporations and the wealthiest Americans and voting to confirm dozens of out-of-touch, anti-choice judicial nominees, Republican Senator Susan Collins “can’t pretend to be a moderate” anymore. A new report from Vox underscores why Collins is so vulnerable in 2020: Mainers see how she’s become an increasingly reliable vote for her Washington special interest donors and Mitch McConnell’s agenda. After voting in lockstep with McConnell and helping to confirm more than 100 Trump-nominated judges, it’s no wonder Collins’ approval rating has plummeted to its lowest level since she’s been in the Senate.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Vox: Why Democrats think 2020 is the year they can defeat Susan Collins

By Ella Nilsen

June 26, 2019

Key Points:

  • Maine voters like Pam Cunningham are Sen. Susan Collins’s worst nightmare. Cunningham, a business owner living in the coastal town of East Boothbay, voted for the Maine Republican senator when she was last up for reelection in 2014. But since President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Collins’s moderate Republican image has taken a beating among a subset of Maine voters. Cunningham is ready to abandon Collins.
  • “I was hopeful she would stand up to [Trump] and be a check on him,” Cunningham told me recently. “The big pivot points for me were first the Gorsuch vote and then the tax vote, and then Kavanaugh,” she said, referring to Collins’s votes for two Trump Supreme Court judges and a tax cut bill. “I don’t think she’s anywhere near as moderate as she’d like us to believe.”
  • …she’s already facing attacks from both sides: Republicans are still incensed with her pivotal no vote helping defeat the 2017 GOP bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and Democrats are furious with her yes votes on the GOP tax bill and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
  • … Since Trump took office, Collins’s voting record tracks closely with the president’s agenda. She voted with her party 87 percent of the time in 2017, according to a CNN analysis, a higher percentage than any other year of her career before then. 
  • “Despite the fact she would like to be, she is not John McCain,” [Sandy Maisel, a longtime Maine politics expert and professor of American government at Colby College] said, referring to the ‘maverick’ reputation the senator sometimes had before his death last year. “She doesn’t have the moral rectitude. She’s not going to stand up on these issues and say this is who I am. She frets so much about how she’s going to vote and is the last person to commit.”
  • Collins’s approval rating is hovering around 52 percent (with 39 percent disapproving), per Morning Consult. However, a recent Maine-based poll from Critical Insights showed her approval rating at just 41 percent (with 42 percent disapproval), a dramatic decline since last spring.
  • “She can’t pretend to be a moderate after those votes,” Cunningham said.

Read the full story here.

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