Maine Sen. Susan Collins is blaming the coronavirus pandemic for the difficulties she's having back home in her reelection campaign. As if. The New York Times details her Fourth of July this year, saying that the "pandemic has upended her standard campaign playbook" and describing how "a whirlwind of plane and boat rides offered a crucial opportunity for her to look voters in the eye amid a contest that is being fought primarily through political ads flooding the state’s airwaves." They say her "campaign schedule has been limited to virtual meetings and fund-raisers and the few remaining outdoor events that have survived the coronavirus restrictions," and let her say this: "I would be all over the state every single minute that I wasn't in Washington." The Times also quoted her as saying this campaign is "surreal."
Here's the thing, though: She's lying about how she'd be out there all over the state. Not meeting with constituents face-to-face is by no means a new thing for Collins. She hasn't held a town hall meeting for more than two decades. Sure, she'll march in parades, and she'll go to prearranged public events at well-chosen businesses for the photo ops, but she won't appear in any event that she doesn't control, where she will have to answer questions that aren't scripted. She won't do give-and-take with Maine voters, and hasn't since very early in her Senate career. Which is one of the reasons she's on the ropes this election.
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She's so absent on the political scene in Maine, people go to other politicians' events to complain to them about Collins! But now, Collins is moaning, "That's what's frustrating to me in this pandemic, because I can do this in a rural area, at an outside event, but the vast majority of fairs and festivals in our state have been canceled. […] I think that's a huge loss for me because people know that I'm there because I want to be there, and it energizes them." Ha.
That's not the end of her whining. "It's a more challenging environment in which to reach people," she said later in the day Saturday. "Being grossly outspent makes it harder, because I can't offset that by increasing the number of appearances that I'm doing." She's so picked on! Her opponents are actually telling the voters about her dogged support for Donald Trump's disastrous tax cut, his even worse judicial nominees, his entire agenda. But she insists, in fact, on trying to pretend like Trump doesn't exist. "My inclination is just to stay out of the presidential and focus on my own race," she said, refusing to say if she intends to vote for Trump in November or even if she voted for him in the state's presidential primary in March.
Maine voters are done giving her the benefit of the doubt anymore. Says retired journalism professor Sam Winch, whose lawn sports both Joe Biden and "It's time to retire Susan" signs, "I have a soft spot for Susan Collins in my heart." He said she's been "more thoughtful than your average partisan senator. […] But, unfortunately, the best I can do to help bring the Senate to being more functional is to retire her."