Here’s why Susan Collins has been silent on Trump’s Roger Stone clemency

Analysis: The four-term Maine Republican has tried to distance herself from the president while not alienating his core supporters with incendiary comments about his behaviour, writes US political correspondent Griffin Connolly

Maine Senator Susan Collins is facing the toughest re-election battle in her career. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images)

Maine Senator Susan Collins has drawn the short end of the electoral stick for moderate Senate Republicans.

Unlike other frequent antagonists of Donald Trump in the GOP, such as Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah, who aren’t up for re-election until 2022 and 2024, respectively, Ms Collins finds herself in the unenviable position of appearing next to the president on Mainers’ ballots this November.

The four-term Republican, who long ago carved out a political reputation as a no-nonsense legislator with a penchant for working across the aisle, has an obvious disdain for the president, whom she vociferously declined to endorse in 2016.

But she has chosen over the last several years to couch her feelings about him in milder terms, such as how “disappointed” she is in his often “problematic” behaviour.

And now, she’s gone mostly dark.

Hitting mute

Since voting to acquit the president of impeachment charges in February, Ms Collins has chosen to hit the self-mute button — or at least lower the volume — on all things Trump, even as the president’s actions have become more brazenly anti-institution, such as his decision to commute the sentence of his longtime chum and 2016 campaign adviser Roger Stone for lying to the House Intelligence Committee.

While Mr Romney tweeted over the weekend that Mr Trump’s decision to spare Mr Stone from prison represented “historic, unprecedented corruption,” Ms Collins, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee that has also probed Mr Stone’s actions, said nothing.

“My inclination is just to stay out of the presidential and focus on my own race,” Ms Collins told the New York Times recently, indicating she would not align herself with or against Mr Trump in the lead-up to November.

Ms Collins simply cannot afford to alienate the president’s core base of supporters this November, which is widely expected to be the most difficult election of her Senate career if Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who has outraised her by more than $7m, wins the Democratic primary on Tuesday.

But at the same time, Mr Trump has fundamentally ripped the Republican party out from under Ms Collins’ feet in a way that has appeared to disaffect many of Maine’s Independents, who make up nearly one-third of the 1m active registered voters in the state, per a secretary of state report from May.

While the president lost the state’s popular vote by 3 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, recent polling there shows him trailing Mr Biden by double digits, a predicament that could have seriously deflating down-ballot ramifications for Ms Collins.

Inside Elections with Nathan L Gonzales, the Cook Political Report, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball all rate the Maine Senate race a Tossup, despite Ms Collins winning re-election three times since 1996 by successively larger margins, capped by a 37-point win over former Maine ACLU executive director Shenna Bellows in 2014.

Democratic broadsides

Her strategy to tune out the noise from the presidential campaign in order to shore up support among conservative-leaning Independents and Republicans who have swept her into office in the past has opened Ms Collins up to Democratic — and some Republican — broadsides that her soft position on Mr Trump inherently enables his behaviour.

The editorial board of her local paper agrees.

By voting to acquit the president in February and later telling CBS News that she believed Mr Trump “learned … a pretty big lesson” by being impeached, Ms Collins ensured she would “have to answer for every future act of the president that she has voted to enable,” the Portland Press-Herald wrote.

Since Ms Collins expressed her optimism Mr Trump would suddenly be chastened and alter his governing style, the president has removed several inspectors general who had either issued politically damaging reports or were probing politically damaging threads of inquiry about his administration; commuted Mr Stone’s sentence; and continually undermined his health experts’ assessments of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Each subsequent affront to these institutions by the president has provided Democrats in Maine another bullet for their campaign cartridge against Ms Collins.

The Kavanaugh question

Democrats have also hammered the senator for her vote in 2018 to confirm conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, despite her ostensible support of the 1973 landmark Roe v Wade decision affirming the legality of abortions.

Ms Collins, one of the only pro-choice Republicans in Congress, said in a rousing 45-minute Senate floor speech at the time that she believed Mr Kavanaugh would uphold a woman’s right to choose based on his promise to adhere to legal precedent.

“Protecting this right is important to me,” Ms Collins said. “[Mr Kavanaugh] believes that precedent is not just a judicial policy, it is constitutionally dictated to pay attention and pay heed to rules of precedent. In other words, precedent isn’t a goal or an aspiration. It is a constitutional tenet that has to be followed except in the most extraordinary circumstances,” she said.

Those “extraordinary circumstances” apparently presented themselves to Mr Kavanuagh last month when he voted to uphold a Louisiana law that would have severely restricted abortion access in the state.

The law was ultimately struck down by a 5-4 margin, with Chief Justice John Roberts voting with the liberal bloc, and conservatives have argued the Roe v Wade precedent did not apply to the case before the court last month.

But Democrats in Maine have spun Mr Kavanaugh’s decision as yet another example of Ms Collins appearing to misjudge how someone else will govern.

Ah, incumbency

Ms Collins cannot be counted out, despite the national and statewide trends that appear to be working against her.

She has the advantage of 24 years of incumbency in a small state, where voters often get to know their federal representatives on a more intimate level.

Her track record as a serious legislator is well-known, even among her Democratic colleagues, who nevertheless are flooding her state with money and negative ads against her in their pursuit of a Senate majority.

Whether swing voters can disassociate her from a president many of them view as fundamentally unserious will determine whether she gets six more years.