Susan Collins’s Maine Money Machine

In Maine, a state with a million and a half residents, Collins is an almost familial figure. “I love her right to death,” Marie, a ship painter with a purple French braid, told me in the parking lot. A few years ago, her mom died, and she encountered some logistical snags. She turned to Collins for help: “I finally called her office, and they said, ‘Well, that’s not really something we handle.’ ” But, soon afterward, the state Department of Health and Human Services sent someone over, she told me. “They said, ‘Where’s Marie?’ ” Then, she recalled with a laugh, “They said, ‘Please don’t call Senator Collins again.’ ”

A couple of Bath Iron Works employees who had helped organize the campaign event stood near the entrance, holding signs in support of the senator. Although the union hadn’t yet made an endorsement, Raymond Gauthier, one of the employees, said that he expected it to pick Jackson. Gauthier was frustrated. “What she’s done for this shipyard—it’s appalling to me that anybody would not support her,” he said. But, he explained, “I worked for the union for sixteen years. To be supporting a Republican candidate is like voodoo.”

In Maine, it’s not only unions that see Republicans as voodoo: every statewide elected official besides Collins caucuses with the Democrats, and the Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. Associating with Trump is a liability. “It’s not just that she votes with Trump,” Jackson said at a recent campaign event. “It’s that she votes against us!” She’s also blamed for the President’s policies, even when she doesn’t support them. This recently came to a head around B.I.W. In August, the Administration announced that certain naval ships could now be built in foreign facilities. Collins went on a Fox affiliate in Maine to issue a threat: if the Administration didn’t change its policy, the Appropriations Committee would block overseas construction in the next defense-spending bill.

Collins has been mostly lagging in the polls, but the race is tight; this week, as the ProPublica piece went online, one poll suggested that she is ahead. Maine has roughly equal numbers of voters registered as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Those who lean left face a dilemma. They may hate Trump and his party, and they may hate the Washington swamp—but they also know that Collins’s influence in D.C. makes a huge difference. “We have a very, very strong union ally in Troy Jackson,” Tim Suitter, the president of the local that represents B.I.W., told me. “Is he going to go in and sit on the Appropriations Committee as a freshman? Nope.”

Collins grew up in Caribou, Maine, about as far north as you can go before hitting Canada. Both of her parents served terms as the town’s mayor, and her father was in the state legislature. At twenty-two, Collins went to Washington to work for Bill Cohen, who represented Maine in the House and the Senate. The first time she won an election was in 1996, when she landed her old boss’s Senate seat. That’s the job she’s held ever since.

Almost two years ago, Collins took over as chair of Appropriations. The committee’s members draft all spending bills, which determine how much money, say, the Departments of Agriculture or Defense get. As chair, Collins can haggle with other members to include line items that might benefit her state, and she has significant influence over the spending categories that get written into draft legislation.

Collins and the other senators do not award federal contracts to particular companies, and they cannot write lines into the budget meant to benefit specific firms. But the Appropriations Committee controls a separate pot of money that they can direct to pet projects back home—what used to be known as earmarks, or, less generously, pork. Earmarks got a bad name in the early two-thousands, because of projects like the several-hundred-million-dollar “bridge to nowhere,” which was proposed to connect a small town in Alaska to the nearly uninhabited island that housed its regional airport. For a decade, they were banned, but they were revived in 2src21. The new grants, limited to nonprofits and to state and local governments, were given scrupulously benign new names: “community project funding” in the House, and “congressionally directed spending,” or C.D.S., in the Senate.