After long-serving Maine Sen. Susan Collins’ 6-point defeat to progressive challenger Troy Jackson, the New York Times (11/4/26) ran a panegyric to Collins that framed her defeat exactly the way she framed it herself: an unfortunate casualty of Trump’s unpopularity, rather than a repudiation of Collins’ own record. “‘It Is Never Enough’: Susan Collins Couldn’t Outrun Trump,” the headline declared, with the subhead arguing that “the anti-Trump fever in her state doomed her this time.”
Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for the Times, introduced the piece with an anecdote from Collins about a woman who said she “absolutely loved” Collins, but wouldn’t vote for her because “it was the only way she could send a message to Trump.”
You’d think a journalist might be skeptical of getting voter sentiment directly from a candidate, but Hulse didn’t probe more deeply. Instead, he called the anecdote “the story of the election for Ms. Collins.” He followed with a quote from Collins that similarly acknowledged no failures of her own:
I was caught up in the Trump tsunami that swept away many incumbent Republican senators who have served their states well for many years and really care about our country.
It wasn’t just Collins’ words that painted that picture; Hulse wrote in his own voice that “Ms. Collins was brought down by a combination of factors, most of which were attributable to President Trump and the war with Iran.” Hulse listed some of those: fuel prices, tariffs and
an immigration crackdown that resulted in a fatal shooting by federal agents in one Maine community. And always the perception that she wasn’t doing enough to stand up to the president, even when she was one of the few Republicans to occasionally break with him.
“Everybody ignores the fact that I voted to convict him in the second impeachment trial,” Ms. Collins said. “What bigger break could there be? It is never enough. I want results and they want angry rhetoric.”
