More bad news for Susan Collins

| 8:30 pm EST November 15, 2018
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Democratic candidate Jared Golden was finally named the winner today in Maine’s 2nd congressional district, flipping yet another U.S. House seat from red to blue. This means that there won’t be a single Republican in the House from New England. The only Republican from New England remaining in the Senate: Susan Collins. The bad news just keeps pouring in for her.

Maine is a moderate enough state that its two Senators are Angus King, a registered Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and Susan Collins, long seen as a moderate Republican. Yet Maine – and every other state in New England – has now decided that even “moderate” Republicans aren’t suitable in the Trump era, because in the end, they all side with Trump when it comes down to it. But Collins isn’t up for reelection until 2020, and two years is plenty of time for the wind to blow back the other direction, right?

Not so much. Susan Collins made herself the poster child for Republicans bowing down to Donald Trump when she rubber-stamped Trump’s absurdly unsuitable Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and then she gave a deranged speech attacking the American left and middle. No one knows for sure why she did it, but she aligned herself with the deranged far-right at a time when Maine and New England (and most of America) are running away from it. It’s not just the left who thinks Collins is in trouble.

The conservative-leaning CNBC has included Susan Collins on its new list of the “seven senators most likely to lose their seats in 2020,” citing all the reasons you’d think. She can’t successfully come back to the middle after marrying herself to Kavanaugh, and she can’t win in Maine on the far-right. Collins is in real trouble, and the bad news keeps piling up.