KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and lives in Scarborough.
By now, most of us have seen the ad dozens of times. Four (identified) female narrators castigate Sen. Susan Collins for never standing up to President Trump.
The narrators focus on three issues: the Iran war, Medicaid cuts and the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. They cite four votes by Collins: against a measure to invoke the War Powers Resolution on the Iran war, in favor of a measure to allow Senate debate on Trump’s major funding bill last year and to confirm Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, two of the five justices who voted to overturn Roe.
The ad doesn’t mention that Collins (along with 2nd District Democrat Jared Golden,
whose votes followed a similar path) subsequently voted in favor of invoking the
War Powers Resolution on Iran. Or that she voted against passing the Trump 2025
spending bill.
Most misleadingly, the ad does not note that Collins has voted to confirm all three pro-choice justices on the Court (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson). Nor does it reveal that she broke from Trump to oppose the 2020 confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, who provided the fifth vote necessary to reverse Roe. In fact, if the Court consisted solely of justices who earned Collins’ support, it seems likely that Roe would still be the law of the land.
The thrust of the ad, funded by a group called WinSenate, seems to be that independence or open-mindedness is a bad thing in a senator. Two of the narrators place independence in air quotes as they describe Collins. And the three issues chosen — Iran, the 2025 spending bill and Trump’s Supreme Court nominees — are ones where Collins has taken independent positions from the president.
Perhaps such a claim is unfair to WinSenate. Their ads identify a website — winsenate.org — where Maine voters can go to learn more about the group’s positions, which is funded by a super PAC affiliated with Senate Democrats.
I visited the website to try to get more information on why the organization seems so hostile to an independent approach in the Senate, and in particular what justification the group could have to attribute the reversal of Roe to Collins, given her opposition to Barrett’s confirmation.
The website consists solely of a photograph of the American flag. It provides no statement of principles about the group’s mission, no rationalization for its hostility to a senator who doesn’t always vote a party line and no explanations to bolster its claims.
The two WinSenate ads about Collins analyzed by the fact-checking website PolitiFact
are rated “false” and “mostly false.”
As someone who voted for Joe Brennan in the 1996 Senate race, Chellie Pingree in
2002, Tom Allen in 2008 and even Shenna Bellows (who lost by a greater than 2-1 margin to Collins) in 2014, I understand the impulse to vote against Collins. But 2026 is not 1996, nor even 2014.
With Collins chairing the Appropriations Committee, her demonstrated clout on behalf of the state highlights her importance to the state.
Perhaps more importantly, at a time when American politics is more polarized than it’s been in decades, it’s critical to maintain one of the Senate’s few bipartisan voices — especially since the Democrats’ replacement nominee, Troy Jackson, seems likely to be little more than an automatic vote for whatever position Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren take, rather than an independent vote for Maine.
A 2026 vote for Collins provides a way to resist the two parties’ race to ideological extremes — and, perhaps, also a way to reject misleading ads that, as here, quite literally wrap themselves in the American flag and hope that voters don’t look too closely into their underlying claims.
Read the op-ed: Portland Press Herald