Still, Collins’s talents seemed, initially, best suited to working behind the scenes. Her first political job was as a staffer for 12 years to Maine Republican senator William Cohen. She returned north to serve as Governor John “Jock” McKernan’s commissioner of the Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, a role that put Collins at the center of a 16-day state government shutdown that was prompted by a dispute over workers’ compensation rates. “She was by far the smartest person in that administration,” Conley says. “She was dangerous, a tough negotiator.”
Bookish and bespectacled, Collins didn’t seem like an obvious candidate for office herself. It was something of a surprise, then, when Collins ran for governor of Maine in 1994; it was little surprise that she finished a weak third to Angus King, an independent, who won.
But Collins has always been a driven student. While working for Cohen, she met his chief of staff, Thomas Daffron. Daffron—who has shifted between jobs as a lobbyist and a congressional staffer—became Collins’s political mentor and, in 2012, her husband. In 1996, she returned as a more polished campaigner and won the Republican nomination to replace Cohen, whom president Bill Clinton appointed secretary of defense. Collins effectively styled herself a moderate in the vein of Maine senatorial predecessors Cohen, Olympia Snowe, and Margaret Chase Smith. She also demonstrated, not for the last time, a knack for facing an underwhelming opponent. Collins dispatched Joe Brennan, a retread Democrat, by slightly more than five points. In the three decades since, she hasn’t had a genuinely close race.
The battle against Jackson, though, looks like it will go down to the wire: a Washington Post poll, released October 9, showed the Democrat edging to a four-point lead. Bannon, interestingly, believes the Republicans’ intense focus on saving Collins could very well backfire for the GOP, not just in Maine, but across the country. “Iowa is in play, Kansas is in play, Nebraska is in play—because of Susan Collins,” he says. “The Senate majority didn’t move MAGA legislation, like the Save America Act, because John Thune was adamant about protecting his weakest members. And Collins is always number one on that list. If you don’t give the grassroots, low-propensity voters some reasons to show up in a midterm, they just don’t.”
