Jordan Wood, a Democrat from Lewiston, Maine, was the first person to announce a 2026 campaign challenge to Senator Susan Collins, and he made a priority of winning the endorsement of the mayor of his hometown. He met with Mayor Carl Sheline, a fellow Democrat, in his office and over drinks at a local Italian restaurant. They had a series of phone calls. But ultimately Mr. Sheline declined to back him.
Ms. Collins, the longtime Republican incumbent, was not in the room, at the bar, or on the line.
But she had made her presence known.
Mr. Sheline had various reasons for withholding his support, he said in an interview. Among them, he acknowledged, were a housing project, a food distribution center, and a mill museum in Lewiston. Ms. Collins had helped with the finances for all of them.
“It’s just an environment of possible retribution,” Mr. Wood said. “It is that fear she instills.”
Over nearly 30 years, Ms. Collins, a self-styled moderate in a familiar Maine mold, has cultivated a public persona as a workhorse and a fastidious maestro of constituent services and pork-barrel disbursements, using her Washington know-how to get her constituents what they need.
But for just as long, her detractors say, she has managed to mostly mask another reality. “The gentlewoman from Maine,” as her colleagues say on the Senate floor, is a formidable power broker who can play a fierce brand of politics with a how-dare-you air. According to more than 40 interviews with Republicans and Democrats in Maine politics, former staff, colleagues and longtime observers, Ms. Collins has wielded power not so much as a Yankee Republican but as a shrewd machine politician.
“It’s almost like Tammany Hall,” said Amy Fried, a retired political scientist from the University of Maine. “You’re going to get this benefit here if you vote for me.”
Lance Dutson, a Republican strategist and former aide to Ms. Collins, did not disagree.
“That’s exactly what it is,” he said. “She’s openly discussing the fact that Maine is going to be set back if she’s not in that position,” he added. “It puts people in the position of very clearly understanding that voting against her is a vote against their own well-being.”
Ms. Collins’s staff stresses that she has worked to bring money back to all communities in Maine — regardless of whether they support her.
Annie Clark, a longtime aide to Ms. Collins, provided The New York Times an exhaustive list of projects, from Orono and Ogunquit to Belfast and Blue Hill, for which the senator had secured funding since 2021. The senator got $234 million for 96 projects in Cumberland and Knox counties — the only two counties she lost in 2020. In Portland, where she received just 21 percent of the vote: $51.2 million for 28 projects.
“Senator Collins has been extraordinarily effective,” said Blake Kernen, a spokeswoman for Ms. Collins. “She works tirelessly to deliver results for the state, meets with thousands of Mainers every year, and she secures billions of dollars for communities in all of Maine’s 16 counties whether they vote for her or not.”
Ms. Collins, 73, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is running for re-election this fall the way she always has — no clickbait TikTok posts or big, rah-rah rallies, but a relentless focus on stops in small towns where she has brought home federal dollars for boat landings, emergency operations centers and wastewater treatment facilities.
At her campaign events, supporters hold signs that underscore the point she is trying to make: “Thank You, Susan.”
In debates this month with her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, a former logger and Maine Senate president, Ms. Collins was unsubtle about the crux of the deal.
“In the past five years I’ve secured $1.5 billion for properties all over the state,” she said.
She was even more blunt in a radio interview this week, citing 672 projects that she had secured across the state, including 45 new fire stations.
“All that goes away,” she said, “if Troy were to be elected.”
‘I have a lot of power’
Her whole life has been a lesson in the accrual and use of power.
Ms. Collins was born and raised in Caribou in Aroostook County, the state’s most northern terrain. The Collinses didn’t just own and run the local lumber company and hardware store. They were politicos too.
“My parents,” Ms. Collins told The New York Times this past summer, “both served as mayor of Caribou. My father was in the State Senate, my grandfather, great-grandfather served in the state legislature.”
Her parents were supporters of William S. Cohen when he ran for Congress in 1972 and beyond, and Ms. Collins was a driver and an intern for Mr. Cohen when she was in college at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. After she graduated, she was hired as an aide and was on his staff for a dozen years, known by her colleagues and peers as a meticulous note-taker and over-preparer.
She ran for governor in 1994 when she was 41 and lost. She ran for Senate in 1996 and won. She said she would serve no more than two terms but then ran for re-election in 2002, 2008, 2014 and 2020.
Over the course of her three decades in the Senate, drafting off the renown of her cordial, consensus-building Maine forebears like Mr. Cohen and Senator George Mitchell, Ms. Collins has emphasized her image as the last of a vanishing breed. She has bucked her party, and in particular President Trump, more than enough to frustrate many Republicans — albeit not nearly enough to satisfy most Democrats.
“I’m consistently sought out by both sides for cosponsorship of bills,” she told The Times in her first year in the Senate. “I have a lot of power — I like that.”
Behind closed doors, though, she long has had a reputation as a lone wolf.
Her relationship with Olympia Snowe, the Republican who was elected to the Senate from Maine two years before Ms. Collins and served three terms, was marked by rivalries and perceived slights, according to former aides to Maine lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Publicly, they issued joint statements and often voted together. Privately, the relationship was far more fraught, as is sometimes the case when a state is represented by two senators of the same party.
“She was just hypersensitive to Olympia getting more credit than she was,” said Kurt Bardella, a former press secretary for Ms. Snowe.
“It was very machine-politicky: ‘I am owed a certain level of stature and respect,’” Mr. Bardella recalled.
Ms. Collins has a bristly relationship with Angus King, the independent junior senator from Maine, who defeated her in the governor’s race in 1994 and succeeded Ms. Snowe in 2013. While they exchange occasional text messages, the two haven’t spoken in months, according to people familiar with their communications who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. They last texted Oct. 12, according to Ms. Clark. Aides in Mr. King’s office often are instructed to let Ms. Collins get the lion’s share of the credit, they said, if that’s what it takes to get a policy initiative accomplished.
When Mr. Wood announced his candidacy for Senate, he thought he knew what he needed to know about Ms. Collins. His campaign quickly became a window into what he did not know.
Elected Democrats and political donors, Mr. Wood said, told him Ms. Collins reviewed the lists of who gives more than $1,000 to whom — and kept score.
“People told me they could not give me money because they knew she would look at the report,” he said. “Democrats.”
Ms. Clark, the spokeswoman for Ms. Collins, said the senator does not review such lists.
Ultimately, Mr. Wood’s fledgling campaign was overwhelmed by the unexpected rise of Graham Platner, whose subsequent fall precipitated Mr. Jackson’s selection as the Democratic nominee. Still, he got an eye-opening tutorial in the sway of his state’s senior senator.
Last November, when he ended his Senate campaign and switched to run instead for the Maine’s Second Congressional District, Mr. Wood couldn’t help but notice the difference.
This time, Mr. Sheline, the Lewiston mayor, endorsed him right away.
‘We should be thankful’
This month, politicking her way through the annual fall fair in Fryeburg, Maine, Ms. Collins walked from a cattle auction to a livestock barn, putting up with out-of-town press asking her questions about the president while trying to steer clear of manure.
“I know you don’t like me,” she told one reporter, “but don’t make me walk through shit.”
She quickly changed the subject — to $38 million in federal aid for heating oil.
“I was delighted,” she said, “that I was successful in expediting the funding.”
That matters a lot, said Mr. Dutson, the senator’s former aide.
“Federal money is incredibly important up here,” he said. “The choice a lot of people are facing right now is: OK, well, I can listen to the noise out of Washington or what my party tells me to do — or I can support the lady who got me a new fire truck in my 500-person town.”
In the past few weeks in Maine, as Mr. Jackson has campaigned in front of large, loud crowds alongside progressive megastars such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ms. Collins has brandished a shovel at a groundbreaking at a boat landing in Orrington and attended a grand opening of a wastewater facility in Windham.
And in the stretch run of the race, people all over the state have received targeted text messages from her campaign.
“Susan Collins delivered $33 million for Knox County …”
“Susan Collins has delivered nearly $59 million for the City of Bangor …”
“Susan Collins is delivering real results across Kennebec County — 50 projects totaling more than $109.3 million …”
Her supporters say it’s why they trust her and one of the main reasons she should be re-elected.
“What she produces is real — it’s tactile,” said Chris Gardner, the executive director of the Eastport Port Authority, who has appeared in an ad for Ms. Collins. “We should be thankful.”
Kevin Raye, a former Maine Senate president and Ms. Snowe’s former longtime chief of staff, is an anti-Trump former Republican who is now an independent — “rooting,” he said, for Democrats to take control of Congress. “But I’m in the Collins camp,” Mr. Raye said, citing her record of bipartisanship. “The thought of replacing her with a reliable partisan vote, no matter the party,” he said, “is so the wrong direction for America.”
But the calculation, her critics counter, is more complicated. Her vote to advance Mr. Trump’s big domestic policy bill before she ultimately voted against it, her initial votes against setting congressional limits to military actions in Iran followed by eventual votes to do just that — all of it costs her constituents, they say, contributing to cuts to health care and higher prices for fuel, food and more. Many remain furious about her vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, a move that ultimately led to the end of Roe v. Wade.
“She’s very good at cutting ribbons,” Betsy Sweet, a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and for Senate in 2020 against Ms. Collins. “She’s also really good at cutting your health care.”
Moreover, as she works to fend off her challenger in a tough year for Republicans, Ms. Collins’s sharp political style has been apparent not just to political insiders but to voters as well.
In a recent interview with Politico, Ms. Collins was startlingly cutting about her opponent.
“I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin,” she said. “I don’t know whether people know that or not.” They did now.
“This is a Susan people haven’t seen,” said Tony Payne, the executive director of the Republican Party of Maine in the 1970s who became an independent after the rise of Mr. Trump and a longtime critic of Ms. Collins. “This is the peeling off of the veneer.”
Last week, the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC backing the Republican Party’s candidates, aired a radio ad about Mr. Jackson with a crude jingle alluding to the relationship. After it had made the rounds, Ms. Collins told reporters she “had nothing to do with that ad,” saying it should be removed from the air.
This week, Ms. Collins’s campaign has been airing a TV ad that many in Maine considered elitist. “We’re not talking about a cord of wood here, we’re talking about the U.S. Senate, and Troy doesn’t have the tools he needs to be effective,” Bill Green, a well-known, retired local sportscaster, says in the ad.
“For more than 30 years, Susan Collins has carefully concealed her intrinsic arrogance,” Sam Patten wrote in a post on social media castigating the ad. (Mr. Patten, a former aide to Ms. Collins, pleaded guilty during the first Trump administration to failing to register as a foreign agent.)
“She’s very smart, and she works very hard,” Mr. Patten told The Times. “There’s an arrogance in everyone in Washington,” he added, “but she never showed it before. She’s always been careful not to.”
Ted O’Meara, a former aide to Ms. Snowe who also worked for Mr. Cohen alongside Ms. Collins and managed Eliot Cutler’s campaigns for governor in 2010 and 2014, described it as a sense of entitlement. “The sense that there’s nobody else that can do this job but me or do it as well as me,” he said.
He stopped himself.
“Is this on the record?” he asked.
It was.
“She’ll be pissed,” he said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research. Tim Balk contributed reporting from Fryeburg, Maine, and Esmé E. Deprez from Caribou and Casco, Maine.
