Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine released a campaign ad this week that paints her as a bipartisan workhorse, hoping that it will convince enough voters in left-leaning Maine to cast their ballots for her in November and save her reelection.
However, the ad has to go back six years to the COVID-19 pandemic and 25 years to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to find bipartisan accomplishments that may possibly appeal to Mainers—a sign of just how difficult her reelection bid is.
“After a devastating attack on 9/11, Susan Collins led the way forward, enacting historic bipartisan reforms that made us safer,” a narrator says in the ad as somber yet triumphant music plays in the background.
The narrator goes on to say that Collins has never missed a “single vote,” saying she has cast “10,000 in a row.” She is “Maine’s first chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee in a century,” the narrator adds.
That is not just a boring message but a head-scratching one. The 2026 electorate is in a decidedly anti-incumbent mood. Many voters are mad that aging Congress members like Collins, who would be 80 years old at the end of another term, have stuck around for so long while not enacting meaningful change.