Susan Collins is in trouble

| 9:09 am EDT June 25, 2019
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After Susan Collins cast the deciding vote in favor of putting alleged serial rapist, anti-woman extremist, and unstable rage monster Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, she instantly became one of the most hated Senators in the history of the United States. Her reelection in 2020 has been in doubt ever since. The question has been just who was going to challenge her, and whether that person was going to be high profile enough to get the job done.

Now that question has been answered. Sara Gideon may not be a household name nationwide. But in Maine, she’s the Speaker of the House, and she’s successfully done battle with Maine’s far-right former Governor Paul LePage. Gideon announced today that she’s running against Susan Collins in the 2020 Senate race, instantly giving the Democratic Party a political heavyweight and local hero to rally behind.

Sara Gideon has her own strong political record to run on. But when it inevitably comes to explaining why Susan Collins needs to be unseated, Gideon won’t have to look far. Collins not only almost single-handedly put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, she gave a deranged speech accusing Kavanaugh’s detractors of being conspiracy theorists. Collins has also continued to vote for the far-right anti-woman judges that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have been nominating. Collins has long tried to paint herself as a moderate, but her record in the Trump era reveals that she’s every bit as much of a horrifying extremist as Trump is.

All that said, it’s not difficult to parse that when McConnell convinced Susan Collins to emphatically and combatively throw her support behind Kavanaugh, he did it by ensuring Collins that her 2020 campaign would be well funded. McConnell controls numerous GOP Super PACs that are funded by ethically dubious sources, so Collins will have plenty of money to spend while trying to convince voters in Maine to hate her less than they currently hate her. That means Sara Gideon will need to be well-funded as well.