Power in Maine has a bookkeeper. Susan Collins has spent years moving federal money into towns that Washington could otherwise ignore, and she has spent those same years remembering who stood with her and who did not.
She is again before the voters in a Senate election that turns on that double record. The first column is public and proudly recited: millions of dollars delivered to every corner of the state. The second is quieter and, people in Maine say, just as real.
A map drawn in federal dollars
Collins has long treated appropriations as the essential work of the job. Millions of dollars have reached communities far from the usual centres of American power. That is the case she makes for remaining in office, and it is not a trivial one. In a state that can be easy for Washington to overlook, the cheques have been her proof of worth.
“You do not want to find yourself on the wrong side of her.”
— A warning repeated by people in Maine
The score she keeps
The warning is the other half of her method. Collins is described as a senator who records slights with the same care she records grants. In Maine, where politics is personal and memories are long, that habit becomes leverage. Favours are banked. Defections are noted.
“She never stops keeping score.”
— How her power is now discussed across the state
None of this arrives as news to the people who will vote. The senator’s strength has been the marriage of delivery and discipline. Maine must now decide whether a representative who brings the money home, and who remembers every account, is still the representative it wants. The election will not settle whether she keeps score. It will settle whether the state still wants a senator who does.
