The tragedy of Susan Collins: the passing of an American political tradition
A truly dignified American politician
By Matthew Parish
Thursday 5 November 2026
There is something profoundly melancholy about the electoral defeat of Susan Collins, the Republican Senator from Maine who has served in the United States Senate for almost thirty years. Her defeat by the Democrat Troy Jackson in the American midterm elections of 3 November 2026 represents rather more than the conclusion of one distinguished politician's career. It symbolises the gradual extinction of a species of American public servant whose virtues were once considered essential to the functioning of the republic: moderation, independence of judgement, courtesy towards political opponents and an instinctive preference for compromise over confrontation.
Collins conceded defeat in the early hours of 4 November, acknowledging the end of a remarkable career during which she had survived successive political upheavals that destroyed the reputations and careers of countless colleagues. Her departure will not be mourned by everyone. Indeed many Democrats, particularly those who regard the contemporary Republican Party as an institution that has abandoned its constitutional responsibilities, will celebrate her defeat as an overdue reckoning. Nevertheless there are reasons to believe that American democracy has lost something valuable, even if the candidate who defeated her is a capable politician with legitimate aspirations of his own.
The tragedy is not simply that an experienced Senator has lost her seat. Democracies require politicians to lose elections, and nobody is entitled to remain in office indefinitely. Rather the tragedy lies in the possibility that Collins represented an understanding of democratic politics that the United States is progressively losing the capacity to sustain. She belonged to a tradition in which it was possible to be a Republican without treating Democrats as enemies, to disagree with one's party leadership without being branded a traitor and to regard political compromise not as cowardice but as an indispensable instrument of government.
Collins was born in Caribou, a small town in northern Maine, in 1952. She came from a family with a long tradition of public service, her parents both having served as mayor of their hometown, and her family operated a lumber business whose origins stretched back to the nineteenth century. After graduating from St Lawrence University, she began working for William Cohen, the moderate Republican Congressman who would subsequently become a Senator and then Secretary of Defense under the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton. Collins inherited Cohen's Senate seat in the election of 1996, and with it an understanding of politics that now seems almost quaint: that the purpose of elected office was to serve the public rather than to advance the ideological purity of a particular political faction.
This was not an eccentric political philosophy in the Maine of the twentieth century. The state had produced Margaret Chase Smith, the Republican Senator who famously confronted the poisonous anti-communist demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy in 1950, delivering her celebrated Declaration of Conscience. Smith understood that the republic might face dangers from within its own political institutions as serious as those presented by its foreign adversaries. Maine also produced politicians such as Edmund Muskie, George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe, who understood the necessity of accommodating political differences in a federal republic whose citizens held profoundly divergent opinions. Collins belonged to that tradition, and for much of her political career she embodied it with considerable distinction.
Her record of bipartisanship was not merely a convenient political slogan. The Lugar Center and Georgetown University repeatedly ranked her among the most bipartisan members of the Senate, placing her first in nine of eleven years in one extended period of measurement. These rankings reflected the degree to which legislators sponsored and supported legislation across party lines, rather than simply their willingness to make conciliatory speeches. Collins understood that the Senate, with its complicated procedures and extraordinary constitutional responsibilities, was not supposed to be a theatrical arena in which two irreconcilable tribes exchanged insults. It was supposed to be a deliberative institution in which legislation emerged through negotiation between competing interests.
There were practical consequences to this philosophy. In 2017 Collins joined John McCain and Lisa Murkowski in resisting the Republican attempt to dismantle central provisions of the Affordable Care Act, thereby helping to preserve healthcare protections for millions of Americans. She participated in bipartisan agreements on infrastructure, supported reforms to the intelligence services and helped construct emergency financial assistance for small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic. These were not always glamorous achievements, and they rarely produced the sort of dramatic headlines that dominate contemporary American political discourse. Nevertheless they represented the painstaking business of democratic government, in which the measure of success is not the humiliation of one's adversaries but the construction of policies that improve people's lives.
Collins also possessed a quality increasingly unusual in American politics: a willingness, on important occasions, to oppose the most powerful figures within her own party. Following the attack upon the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, she was one of only seven Republican Senators who voted to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial. Whatever one's views about the proper constitutional interpretation of impeachment, this decision required considerable political independence. Collins had concluded that Trump's behaviour warranted conviction, and she voted accordingly despite the hostility that such a decision was bound to attract from significant elements of the Republican electorate.
Nor was this independence entirely extinguished during Trump's second presidency. In July 2025 Collins voted against his administration's principal domestic spending and tax legislation because of the damage she believed its Medicaid provisions would cause to poorer Americans and rural healthcare institutions. During 2026 she also supported efforts to restrain the President's conduct of the war against Iran, having initially opposed some earlier attempts to limit his military authority. Her record was therefore neither one of consistent resistance nor unquestioning submission. It was considerably more complicated, which is precisely what might be expected of a politician who insisted upon judging individual questions on their merits.
Nevertheless there were important failures of judgement, and any serious assessment of Collins's career must acknowledge them. The most consequential was her decision in October 2018 to support Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the United States Supreme Court. Collins placed considerable weight upon Kavanaugh's statements concerning the status of Roe v Wade as judicial precedent. Four years later Kavanaugh joined the majority in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning the constitutional protection for abortion rights previously established by Roe. For many Americans, particularly women who considered reproductive autonomy a fundamental liberty, Collins's vote became evidence that her reputation for moderation concealed a troubling willingness to accommodate the ideological objectives of the Republican right.
This criticism cannot simply be dismissed as partisan hostility. Collins was entitled to believe that judicial nominees deserved careful individual consideration, but her assessment of Kavanaugh's likely approach to established precedent proved mistaken. It is possible to admire her independence of judgement while accepting that independent judgements can be wrong, sometimes with constitutional consequences of exceptional gravity. Indeed one of the dangers of treating moderation as a virtue in itself is that it can become detached from the substantive questions of justice and legality that political decisions must ultimately address.
There was also a more fundamental difficulty with Collins's political position. As the Republican Party became increasingly dominated by Donald Trump and his highly personalised style of government, the space available for a moderate Republican became progressively narrower. Collins could oppose particular presidential initiatives, but she remained a member of the party whose leadership and congressional majorities enabled the administration to exercise power. Her Democratic critics therefore argued that she could not reasonably demand credit for resisting individual decisions while continuing to support the broader political structure that made those decisions possible. This argument was not without force, although it risked reducing the complicated responsibilities of an individual legislator to a simple question of party allegiance.
The election of 2026 brought these contradictions to a head. Maine has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, yet Collins had repeatedly persuaded its electorate to distinguish between its preferences in national presidential elections and its judgement of her personal merits. In 2020, for example, voters supported Joe Biden for President while returning Collins to the Senate by a comfortable margin. Her success depended upon a willingness among citizens to vote for individuals rather than parties, and to recognise that a Republican Senator might sometimes represent a predominantly Democratic state's interests more effectively than a Democrat. By November 2026 this delicate political arrangement had finally collapsed.
Her opponent, Troy Jackson, was no ordinary Democratic challenger. A former logger from northern Maine who had risen to become president of the state Senate, Jackson offered voters a very different political personality. His campaign emphasised working-class grievances, the rising cost of living, healthcare insecurity and the influence of wealthy interests upon American political institutions. He presented himself as a man who understood the economic difficulties of ordinary Maine families because he had personally experienced them. His populism was from the left rather than the right, but it was nevertheless populism: an assertion that the political establishment had become remote from the practical concerns of the people it purported to represent.
Jackson's campaign was particularly effective because economic circumstances had turned against the Republican Party. The war against Iran had contributed to sharply higher energy prices, an especially sensitive matter in Maine, where heating homes throughout the winter represents a substantial household expense. Trump's tariffs and confrontational trade policies towards Canada had also damaged economic relationships upon which industries such as logging, fishing and tourism depended. Collins could explain that she had opposed particular administration policies, and she could point to the federal expenditure that her seniority had helped secure for Maine. But these arguments were increasingly unpersuasive to voters confronting immediate financial hardship.
There is a profound political lesson in this. Experienced legislators frequently understand the importance of institutions, committee procedures and the careful allocation of public resources. Ordinary voters are more immediately concerned with whether they can afford to heat their homes, purchase groceries or obtain medical treatment. Neither perspective is illegitimate. Yet the increasing inability of American politics to connect institutional competence with the everyday anxieties of citizens creates conditions in which experienced politicians become vulnerable to candidates offering a more emotionally immediate form of representation.
Collins had argued that her position as Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee gave Maine an unusual degree of influence over federal expenditure. This was not an empty claim. Her chairmanship, which began in January 2025, placed her at the centre of decisions concerning federal discretionary spending, including defence expenditure, medical research and infrastructure. A newly elected Senator, however talented, cannot immediately reproduce the influence accumulated through three decades of legislative relationships and institutional experience. Maine's voters were perfectly entitled to decide that these advantages were outweighed by the need for political change, but the resulting loss of seniority is nevertheless a tangible consequence of their decision.
For Ukrainians, there is an additional reason to regret Collins's departure. She has been a consistent supporter of Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression, and her support has extended beyond rhetorical sympathy. She helped negotiate the bipartisan American national security legislation of 2024 that provided substantial military assistance to Ukraine. In March 2025 she spoke in the Senate alongside colleagues from both parties to insist upon continued American support for Ukraine's struggle against Russia. In August 2026 she welcomed the Senate's passage of legislation strengthening sanctions against Russia, specifically identifying Russian energy revenues and the shadow fleet as essential sources of financing for Vladimir Putin's war.
This record matters because Ukraine cannot afford to regard American foreign policy as the exclusive property of either political party. The survival of Ukrainian sovereignty has depended in significant measure upon a bipartisan consensus that Russian territorial aggression threatens the principles upon which European security is founded. That consensus has become increasingly fragile as American politics has polarised, and politicians such as Collins have played an important role in maintaining it. Although Democrats may now control the Senate, the long-term preservation of American support for Ukraine requires Republicans capable of defending international commitments against the more isolationist tendencies within their own party.
There is also a philosophical dimension to Collins's defeat that deserves consideration. Democratic institutions require a distinction between one's political opponents and one's moral enemies. The former are people with whom one disagrees and whom one seeks to defeat through constitutional procedures. The latter are people whose very participation in public life is considered intolerable. An alarming feature of contemporary political discourse is the gradual erosion of this distinction, accompanied by the assumption that almost every disagreement reveals some deeper moral defect in those who hold opposing views.
Collins's political temperament was ill-suited to such an environment. She generally approached disagreements as problems to be resolved through discussion, accommodation and occasionally an acceptance that neither side could obtain everything it wanted. This is not a particularly exciting approach to politics, and it provides limited material for the short, furious messages that dominate social media. Yet it is precisely the approach upon which complex democracies depend if they are to avoid degenerating into permanent institutional warfare. The American Constitution was designed around the assumption that competing political interests would be obliged to negotiate with one another, not that one faction would achieve permanent supremacy over all others.
The danger is that moderation itself may become politically impossible. A Republican who breaks with Donald Trump risks the hostility of the Republican base, while a Republican who supports him on consequential questions risks alienating the Democratic and independent voters whose support is necessary to win elections in moderate states. Collins attempted to navigate this predicament through individual judgements rather than ideological declarations. Her defeat suggests that this approach may no longer provide a sustainable political identity, particularly when the electorate is deeply dissatisfied with the incumbent administration. The political centre cannot survive merely through the personal integrity or negotiating skills of individual legislators if the underlying party system makes their position intolerable.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Troy Jackson's election necessarily represents another step towards the destruction of American democracy. Jackson emerged from a working-class background, participated for many years in state government and possesses his own experience of negotiating within legislative institutions. His election can reasonably be understood as an assertion that ordinary citizens wish to reclaim influence from an increasingly wealthy and remote political establishment. A democratic republic ought to accommodate such aspirations, just as it ought to value the institutional experience that Collins represented.
The question is whether Jackson and his fellow Democrats will use their new authority to restore the habits of constitutional government, or whether the temptation to retaliate against their Republican opponents will prove irresistible. The American midterm elections of 2026 have delivered a sweeping rebuke to the Trump administration, with Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress. That result creates opportunities for renewed legislative oversight and institutional restraint, but it does not automatically guarantee a revival of political tolerance. A democracy can change its governing party without changing the adversarial political culture that has made effective government so difficult.
There is a further irony in Collins's defeat. For much of her career, American political commentators treated her independence as an awkward inconvenience, criticising her for failing to support either party with sufficient consistency. Yet the very existence of politicians who occasionally frustrate their own parties is essential to the functioning of representative government. A legislature in which every member votes predictably according to party instructions ceases, in an important sense, to deliberate. It becomes an elaborate mechanism for registering decisions already made elsewhere, often by party leaders or the executive branch.
The gradual disappearance of independent-minded legislators therefore represents a transfer of political power away from elected representatives and towards the institutions that control their political survival. Party organisations, presidential administrations, political donors and highly mobilised ideological activists acquire increasing influence over the conduct of individual members of Congress. The ordinary citizen may continue to possess the right to vote, but the choices available become narrower and more rigid. This is one of the paradoxes of contemporary democratic politics: elections can remain fiercely contested while the intellectual diversity of elected institutions steadily diminishes.
Collins was by no means a perfect representative of an idealised political past. She sometimes misjudged the consequences of her decisions, sometimes placed too much confidence in the assurances of political colleagues and sometimes struggled to reconcile her personal convictions with the pressures imposed by party loyalty. Indeed these very imperfections make her career a useful illustration of the difficulties inherent in democratic representation. Political moderation is not an infallible guide to correct policy, and there are occasions when compromise with objectionable policies becomes complicity rather than statesmanship. The distinction requires judgment, and Collins did not invariably get that judgment right.
Nevertheless she possessed something that is increasingly scarce in contemporary public life: a serious commitment to the proposition that political institutions are worth preserving even when they frustrate one's immediate objectives. She was not a revolutionary, a demagogue or a politician whose principal talent consisted of exciting resentment amongst the electorate. She was a conscientious practitioner of the difficult and frequently unglamorous art of representative government. Her nearly thirty years in the Senate were characterised by an attention to legislative detail, a willingness to collaborate across political divisions and a belief that the responsibilities of elected office extended beyond the immediate interests of her own party.
Perhaps the most appropriate historical comparison is with Margaret Chase Smith, whose confrontation with McCarthy demonstrated that loyalty to a political party need not imply unquestioning obedience to its most powerful personalities. Smith's legacy reminds us that political courage is not always expressed through spectacular gestures or inflammatory speeches. Sometimes it consists simply of maintaining one's convictions when the prevailing political atmosphere makes doing so inconvenient. Collins inherited part of this tradition, although she expressed it in a quieter and more procedural fashion.
It is possible that future generations of American politicians will rediscover the virtues associated with this tradition. Political polarisation is not an immutable characteristic of democratic societies, and periods of exceptional hostility have sometimes been followed by the restoration of more accommodating political practices. Much will depend upon whether politicians and voters come to recognise that the destruction of one's adversaries is not a substitute for the construction of institutions capable of governing a diverse society.
Susan Collins will leave the Senate in January 2027, having represented Maine through five presidential administrations and almost three decades of extraordinary political change. Her electoral defeat is a legitimate expression of the democratic will, and her successor deserves the opportunity to demonstrate what he can achieve. Nevertheless the conclusion of her career ought to inspire reflection even amongst those who disagreed profoundly with her political decisions, because her departure marks the loss of a form of political experience and temperament that cannot easily be replaced.
The real tragedy of Susan Collins's defeat is therefore not that the voters of Maine have chosen a Democrat over a Republican. It is that American politics has become so fiercely polarised that a politician whose principal distinguishing characteristic was her willingness to think and act independently could no longer persuade enough voters that this was a virtue worth preserving. Her loss is a reminder that democracies need more than elections, party competition and constitutional formalities. They also require a political culture in which disagreement is tolerated, compromise is respected and public servants are permitted to exercise judgement without being condemned for failing to conform to the demands of their respective tribes.
If the United States eventually rediscovers these principles, Susan Collins may come to be remembered less for her defeat in November 2026 than for the political tradition she spent thirty years trying to preserve. That would be a fitting tribute to a public servant whose greatest achievement may have been her stubborn belief that the American republic could still be governed through reason, courtesy and the patient accommodation of differences.
And that, in the political circumstances of contemporary America, is a far more radical belief than it ought to be.
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Were Susan Collins to stand in the election to become the next US President in 2028, the Lviv Herald would give serious consideration as to whether to support her.
