Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon speaks at a ‘Supper with Sara’ campaign event in Skowhegan, Maine, February 2020.
Sara Gideon had to be on point. When the Speaker of the Maine House took the plunge by running against Sen. Susan Collins, she had paltry statewide name recognition, fundraising disadvantages, and the albatross of a southern Maine ZIP code—three strikes in a state that twice had elected Paul LePage, the Pine Tree State’s very own proto-Trump.
Once she declared, Gideon pulled in the big guns of the Democratic Party, and on Tuesday she trounced her primary opponents, picking up 70 percent of the vote to win the Senate nomination. The contest is already the most expensive in Maine history—and on track to become one of the most expensive in the country. Republicans have vowed to knock themselves out to protect Collins in a contest that hinges largely on how Mainers view her allegiance to Donald Trump and how much they want a new face to take on post-COVID challenges.
Gideon has had a remarkable rise for a little-known candidate. But her ascent is not wholly surprising, given the anger that Collins, once a reliable prospect for re-election, has managed to stoke in four years. Gideon has raised nearly $25 million as national Democrats quickly made two calculations: that the previously unbeatable Collins had stuck so close to Trump that she’d alienated her centrist supporters; and that Gideon, who’d beat back LePage on issues like distributing Naloxone to people under 21 and expanding Medicaid, could deal with the expected onslaught from national Republicans.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer jumped out early with an endorsement shortly after Gideon announced last summer, opening the spigots for establishment dollars. Contributions came rolling in from party stalwarts like NARAL and Emily’s List. Gideon was also the beneficiary of an unusual $4 million wad of cash from a small-dollar crowdfunding campaign launched by the Maine People’s Alliance, Mainers for Accountable Leadership, and Be A Hero after Collins voted to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Outside groups have spent a total of $15.5 million in Maine on the race overall.
If saving the Affordable Care Act burnished her standing with Maine’s centrists—Collins famously walked through the Bangor airport to applause after her vote to reject an ACA repeal three years ago—her vote to elevate Kavanaugh to the Court despite the bruising testimony from Christine Blasey Ford about an alleged episode of sexual assault undid decades of goodwill. Her opposition to impeaching Donald Trump and support for a tax plan that offered next to nothing for most low-income and middle-class Mainers energized a Republican base dominated by LePage loyalists, but dismayed independents, the state’s swing voters, who make up about 35 percent of the electorate.
Having endured eight years of LePage, who was a perpetual source of embarrassment, most Mainers view Collins’s choice to stand by Trump as, at best, inexplicable, and at worst, a positive danger to the Republic. According to a June Zogby Analytics poll. , 54 percent of Mainers disapprove of Trump. The Portland Press Herald called for the president to resign in the days before his June visit to Maine—a visit that Collins famously skipped. But instead of joining Sen. Mitt Romney on his quest for historical absolution, Collins prefers to offer feeble assessments of Trump that exist on a continuum from disappointed” to “very disappointed” to “disappointed and dismayed” that have become fodder for campaign ads, Democratic fundraising appeals, and media criticism.
Collins’s deliberate inarticulateness speaks volumes about her reliance on Trump’s GOP to shovel buckets of money into her campaign coffers. At the end of June, she had raised $16 million, still short of the haul that Gideon has amassed. The usual support that Collins could expect from LGBTQ and pro-choice advocates has evaporated with her votes for Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. The Human Rights Campaign, a longtime supporter of the senator, is backing Gideon this year. Planned Parenthood is, too.
In the Democratic primary race, Gideon played it safe, focusing relentlessly on Collins’s record and largely ignoring progressive proposals like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, which her progressive opponents Betsy Sweet and Bre Kidman endorsed.
But Gideon will have to come to terms with where her state is headed: Mainers overwhelmingly support Medicare for All, though the state has not been as hard-hit by the pandemic as many others (though it does have a serious drug abuse problem). But the worst may be yet to come: Before the virus hit, 106,000 people, 8 percent of the state’s residents, were uninsured. A May Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute report found that in a worst-case scenario, 220,000 Mainers could lose their jobs and their insurance, sending the ranks of the uninsured skyrocketing.
Instead of joining Sen. Mitt Romney on his quest for historical absolution, Collins offers feeble assessments of Trump that exist on a continuum from disappointed” to “very disappointed” to “disappointed and dismayed” that have become fodder for campaign ads, Democratic fundraising appeals, and media criticism.
Maine was also the first state to enact a Green New Deal program for workforce development, which the state’s labor movement supports. Two New England members of Congress, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, have launched Renew New England, an initiative to encourage the region’s lawmakers to push for stronger Green New Deal legislation, which many Mainers support.
Gideon is scabbed by ethics issues that Collins can pick at. The senator is also going after Gideon over her decision to skip debates with her primary opponents, which led one voter to comment in a letter to the editor that Gideon “acts a lot like Susan Collins” who famously avoids the Maine media and some public events. It’s a strange opening gambit for Collins, but expect the jousting over debates to continue: Gideon has proposed five debates with the senator; Collins saw her five and raised it to 16, one in each Maine county.
The race will be close. A July 6 Public Policy Polling snapshot of 1,000 voters gave Gideon a four-point advantage over Collins, 46 percent to 42 percent. Whether Collins sits in the well of the Senate next year hinges on how she finally responds to questions about a president whom she has stuck with despite a steady stream of misdeeds, outrages, and inaction—including his failure to respond to a virus that has killed nearly 150,000 Americans in the past four months. For her part, Sara Gideon must tie Maine’s dissatisfaction with Trump to Collins, and provide a coherent vision for a post-pandemic way forward on health care, the climate, and the economy.
