Susan Collins Is Feeling the Heat Again With Trump Back in Office Ahead of 2026 Campaign

As she readies for a re-election bid, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) starts off this electoral cycle in a worse place than she did six years ago when the political dynamics of President Donald Trump’s first term had only begun to damage her home-state reputation.

According to our latest quarterly data, 51% of Mainers disapprove and 42% approve of her job performance, a rough inversion of her standing in the first quarter of 2019, before she went on to outrun Trump by nearly 7 percentage points and win re-election.

Collins is one of a handful of Senate Republicans to vote against some of the president’s appointments for his second term in office, and she appears to be paying for it at home. Her net approval rating has declined by 12 percentage points since last quarter — more than any other senator’s — as voters of all political stripes, but especially Republicans, have turned against her.

Collins, who shifted her coalition to the right in 2018 when she provided the decisive vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, gets positive marks from about 1 in 3 Democrats, roughly where she was ahead of her 2020 contest and generally in line with our findings over the past year.

But she has lost majority backing from independent voters, a key focus of the moderate-tempered 72-year-old’s electoral strategy in the blue-leaning state she represents, and the decline is even more striking among Republican voters, who for the first time in several quarters are almost evenly divided on her job performance.

Collins’ weakness among Republican voters is particularly striking when compared with the larger cast of GOP senators who could run for re-election in 2026.

Looking across the map, no senator has less — or more tepid — support among the Republican base than Collins. Just 12% of Republicans in her state “strongly” approve of her job performance, 10 points fewer than the next vulnerable GOP incumbent up for re-election next year, Thom Tillis of North Carolina. 

The bottom line

Collins is the only Republican senator representing a state that saw a majority of its voters back a Democratic presidential candidate in the past two elections, which means she’s never under more pressure than when a Republican is in the White House.

Should the powerful appropriator who’s focused on health issues during her time in Congress move forward with a re-election campaign next year, she’ll be facing her toughest race yet.

Like her erstwhile colleague from the other side of the aisle who also swam against the partisan tide, former Democratic-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, her success depends on picking off enough voters from the middle and other end of the political spectrum to go along with nearly unanimous (if not enthusiastic) support from her own party’s adherents.

But as our data shows, many Maine Republicans don’t appear to appreciate that she’s their only option to keep the seat in their hands. And facing a midterm election environment, Collins likely cannot rely on the help of presidential-level turnout from GOP voters like she did last time she was on the ballot, meaning she’ll need to work to shore up her standing with educated or politically engaged voters in the middle.

To state the obvious, this leaves Collins as a prime target for advocacy efforts to push back on Trump’s agenda. But a look at Trump’s political nature suggests that any severe pushback could be responded to in kind, and she likely lacks a lot of legitimacy with Republican voters to fend off such attacks given the president’s 89% intraparty approval rating in her state.