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Maine Senator Susan Collins has long been positioned as a persuadable moderate Republican who nevertheless has a strong record of voting for extremist policies and Trump nominees. Here, Collins meets with Ketanji Brown Jackson on March 8, 2022, who was successfully confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court with three Republican votes: Collins, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah. Photo credit: Renee Bouchard/Wikimedia Commons
Our opening clip is from a 2020 interview in which Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine up for re-election this November, expresses “concern” about then-President Donald Trump’s remarks that he would not accept the election results if he lost.
Democrats targeted Collins’s seat as part of their plan to win the Senate majority. So, when Democrat Graham Platner, dogged by scandal and credible allegations of sexual violence, I knew Amy Fried could help us think more insightfully about what had happened in Maine, that state’s political culture, and whether a new candidate has the time and savvy to win.
Fried is Professor Emerita of Political Science, and the former John Mitchell Nickerson Professor of Political Science, at the University of Maine, and a former President of the New England Political Science Association. She has served as the Policy Advocate for the Rising Tide Center, funded by a five-year National Science Foundation ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation grant Frored co-wrote and for which she served as Co-Principal Investigator. She is also an alternate delegate to the Maine convention that will pick a new candidate to replace Collins.
Neil and I began the political obituary for Platner here in case you missed it. Our theme music this week is “Susie Q,” written by Dan Hawkins and Robert Chaisson, performed by Johnny Savage & the Riders, and licensed through LickD.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Claire Potter: I am here with one of my favorite political scientists, and definitely my favorite political scientist from Maine, Amy Fried of Political Sightlines. Amy, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your Substack?
Amy Fried: I decided to start it about a year ago: I always knew I would be writing some about Maine politics because I’ve lived in Maine since 1997; I thought I’d write about other things as well. But somehow, with everything that’s been going on in Maine, particularly the Senate race. But there’s also this interesting race in Maine’s second congressional district, one of the few competitive house races really out there; it’s a Trump district with a now a very conservative Democrat who’s not running again.
It seems like Maine has taken over.
It certainly has. Last week, Neil Young and I talked about the implosion of the Graham Platner campaign. Before that, when the sexting scandal occurred in May, I wrote a post called “Who’s Afraid of Graham Platner,” in which I talked about whether sexting was a political issue or not.
It turned out there was a lot more bad stuff out there, which a number of political journalists told me on X, and it makes me think that some of these stories were more well and widely known than Democrats who endorsed and supported Platner had imagined.
Well, that’s certainly possible. I heard various rumors over time as well. I think that when the earliest controversies about the tattoo and the Reddit posts came out, Platner had a whole narrative about how he had changed, how he had worked through a lot of things in his life—including a lot of anger. The tattoo he just attributed to being drunk in Croatia with a bunch of his buddies, even though the social media posts were afterwards.
Platner created this whole redemption arc, and Americans like that sort of thing a lot, I think. It always seemed to me to have certain kinds of Christian overtones that I didn’t necessarily relate to, and Maine’s a very secular state. But it’s in the cultural water currently, right? So, a lot of people were willing to say: That’s fine. That was in the past.
They could believe Platner’s story because they liked other things about him. They liked his message. And he certainly was exciting. Lots of people were going to the town halls, and he got tons of volunteers. It fit a political moment in which people are somewhat anti-establishment.
In addition, Platner’s major opponent initially was Governor Janet Mills, who’s 78 years old, and people don’t want older politicians. So, voters were willing to let a lot go when the campaign began. I think when that started to change was the sexting story in May, these texts between him and his various partners after he got married. After that came the first story, from Lindsey Fifield, about abuse. But with the sexting story, I started to see some people pulling away from him.
Finally, there was Jenny Racicot’s allegation that Platner raped her. And I think the big difference, even before that, was that we had gone from things that happened a while ago, in words primarily--messages on Reddit and such--to behaviors, and they were more recent. All of those incidents—the sexting, the alleged violence towards women—were within the last five years.
I agree with you: I think it escalated, as you’re saying, and on a certain level, the early scandals allowed us to become inoculated to later scandals, and then that too crumbled. With the Nazi tattoo, I thought, I’ve known a lot of troubled young men who’ve gone into the Marines. I’ve known a lot of troubled young men who’ve gotten weird tattoos when they were drunk.
Platner doesn’t have a whole lot of formal education, so it also seemed plausible to me that he really had thought it was just a tough guy tattoo. And then that level of believing and making excuses takes you to the next level: sexting. Is this really something a voter should be concerned about? Isn’t this something his wife should be concerned about?
Two other red flags that I think many people like me missed. Apparently in 2024 there was a Facebook post by Jenny Racicot on a Facebook forum where women identify men that might be cheating on them or might be married while trying to date them. Racicot saw his picture, wrote the woman and said: This is a problem, PM me.
But the other red flag, and this allows us to turn to your post this week about misogyny on the left, was that very early on, a woman who was very high up in the campaign resigned.
Genevieve McDonnell resigned in October 2025 after the Reddit posts and the tattoo came out.
That should have been a signal for the rest of us to step back and look a little more coldly at this, right?
I think so. And you know, people sometimes say Maine is just a big, small town. I don’t live far from Genevieve McDonald; probably an hour and a half away. I know people who know her and they said to me, I really trust her.
Very oddly, it turns out that someone I know also knows Jenny Racicot: Jenny was her massage therapist. So, there are all of these like connections. But one of the things Genevieve was upset about was that the vetting was so poor. She said, I would have never joined this campaign if I knew they hadn’t really checked him out. She was also upset because of the way she was being treated by the consultants. Because even though they tried to create this flavor of it being very homegrown main campaign, Platner was recruited by people from out of state and that’s who was really running the campaign.
Right. And there’s a lot of money in political consulting. I mean, some political consultants routinely recruit candidates who they actually know aren’t going to win because of the fundraising. If you raise ten million dollars, the political consultant gets about twenty-five percent off the top, the media people get another twenty-five percent, and so on. So, there’s a lot of money passing through political campaigns.
But the political consultant, and maybe you can remind us of his name, had also been part of the Sanders movement since 2015, where had misogynist elements, and this guy apparently had been kicked off Summer Lee’s campaign for sexually harassing people. So, as we were all focused on “should we or shouldn’t we” with Graham Platner, there was other evidence we should have been looking at.
Absolutely. The one who had this sexual harassment thing from the other campaign is Daniel Maroff, and he was one of the two main recruiters. He had been involved with Sanders, involved with Fetterman and a number of other people. and interestingly, Platner wasn’t even his first choice. They were first trying to get this guy who is a labor leader in Bath, where naval ships are built. It’s one of these things which is very important, a local part of the military industrial complex. And Susan Collins is always bragging about getting the contracts for Bath Ironworks. But it’s also a place with very strong organized labor.
And so initially, they had tried to recruit this labor leader, and they found something in his background they thought could be a problem. So, they decided to go find someone else and they ended up with Platner and didn’t have much time.
Now, why didn’t they have much time? Because they had a schedule they wanted to follow. They wanted him to launch by Labor Day. To launch by Labor Day, you then have to make the launch video, you have to get some training, you have to get some of the legal stuff set up so they can start taking contributions.
So, it meant that they were kind of pushed up against their own self-imposed deadline and they went ahead with him. Maroff, after his first conversation with Platner, called Mo Katz, who’s another one of these consultants, and was very involved in the Zohran Mandami campaign. Actually, the Democratic Socialists recently came out with a statement saying maybe this isn’t a good guy to work with because he doesn’t do things very well, they didn’t really vet him. They did this super-cheapo job: normally it takes at least a month to do a full vetting. They create a whole big book, hundreds of pages, so you don’t have any surprises—or you may even decide not to run.
At least you know what’s in the person’s background. But instead of doing a month-long one that would cost at least twenty thousand dollars, they did a cheapo one that took three days and it cost about, I don’t remember, $4500, something like that. That shows kind of an arrogance and a lack of seriousness.
Well, let’s talk a little bit also about this fictional outsider candidate who’s supposed to be the magic man for Democrats, something I don’t remember being a thing in politics until Donald Trump was so successful, or maybe right before—the Tea Party.
The problem of a sketchy political consultant is amplified when the candidate is also not a politician, or an experienced campaigner. People who have run before are aware of what a good campaign looks like or doesn’t look like. Platner himself might have thought, in all of his inexperience, that none of these things in his background were that important, and been very willing to take the political consultants’ opinion that he had something special that would override his vulnerabilities.
Do you think the political consultant even knew about these things?
I think that there’s a lot they didn’t know, but they should have known more because they should have done a serious job in looking at his background and asking him questions. One thing that struck me about the sexting story was that it was a few days after the campaign launched when Platner’s wife Amy Gertner told Genevieve McDonald about it.
They shouldn’t have waited until after the campaign started to find these things out, and it shouldn’t have been up to the candidate and the wife to just volunteer the information. That should be something that someone running a campaign would ask about. Do you have a history of XYZ? You go through a whole list of possibilities, have them tell you about it. and then decide what to do about it.
The flip side of this is that we have someone in the White House, Donald Trump, who has been convicted by a civil jury of sexual assault. We have Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, who allegedly committed Biblical sins against his marriage. We have former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who engaged underage sex workers. There are any number of Republicans about whom various ugly sexual shenanigans, some of them illegal, some of them immoral, have been revealed.
One of the things I remember hearing from people is that Democrats lean too far towards punishing masculine misbehavior. The phrase they use is “HR Lady politics:” you know, “Democrats are just too sensitive and Republicans let men get out there and be men and the voters love it.”
Maybe the Democrats need to sort of adopt some tolerance for human error and flaws, but they draw the line with violence against women. In point of fact, it looks like Maine voters did care: Platner was leaking support even as he was winning that primary by such big numbers, right?
His numbers did start going down in the matchup with Collins. He started out being ahead by eight, ten, maybe even more, points. Then, by the time of the primary and immediately after, it was much closer. There was even a poll with Collins ahead. So, I think this information really made a difference.
I heard a lot of people saying during the campaign, Well, there’s Trump out there, so we shouldn’t care about that. But I think there is actually a different ethic among at least many Democrats where they don’t find this sort of thing acceptable. People didn’t know him well, and I think a lot of people were worried about what was going to happen next, and what was going to come out next. Platner kept saying there’s nothing more, there’s nothing more—then something new would happen. Voters just really lost faith in him.
About that big primary win: I think that in some ways it’s being misinterpreted. By election day, Janet Mills had suspended her campaign, and it was essentially an uncontested race. There was one more person on the ballot, David Costello, who was really not doing much of anything—no events, he didn’t have much money. Very few people knew about him. Then there was a write-in candidate who was trying to get some purchase, but how do you do that when your name isn’t even on the ballot?
So, I saw news reports, both interviews and in print, with some voters who said: I do have concerns, but he’s going to be the nominee and I’m going to vote for him.
So, some portion of the people who voted for him weren’t necessarily hard-core Platnerites. And, putting my little political science hat on, there’s some interesting research about what is called “mandate construction,” in which after an election, the person who wins tries to make a case for why they won that will be politically useful.
For example, Ronald Reagan said: I won because people wanted a tax cut, so let’s cut taxes. But in fact, a lot of people voted for Reagan because they were upset with high energy prices and inflation. It really it wasn’t a big anti-tax moment. In the same way, Platner and his supporters have said he won because everybody supported everything he had to say. And I don’t think that’s quite right.
But then there was the charisma argument. I remember listening to an interview that Platner did with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and up to that point, I hadn’t been impressed with him. I’d thought, this is Maine, I vote in Massachusetts, and I don’t have to be impressed with him. But the interview was deeply moving. I remember him talking about his friends being killed in Iraq and he started to cry and get very emotional. The video in which he dropped out of the race was also extremely emotional—and a little scary.
He has something that a lot of male candidates don’t, which is the capacity to at least appear to be projecting an authentic self. But that too was a problem, since he presented himself as working-class when, in fact, that wasn’t true.
There was a lot of discussion about that, and part of it got into: what does it mean to be working class?
But Platner didn’t come from a working-class family, that’s for sure. His father’s an attorney, and his mother had been very involved in Democratic politics and owns a pretty upscale restaurant. Then, they tried to get their son, in a way all parents want to, the best education they could. They sent him to fancy boarding school; then he came back and he went to a prep school in Bangor—and a lot of people who go to there aren’t fancy because they attend for free. If you don’t have a local high school in your school district, the state of Maine will pay for you to go to private school.
Wasn’t there a Supreme Court case about that?
Yes; it had to do with a Christian school taking public funds that didn’t want to hire gay people.
Let’s pivot back to your post about misogyny on the left. Platner in fact stayed alive as long as he did in part because so many people, perhaps outside the state of Maine, were willing to tolerate bad behavior from men. I remember at one point this phrase sort of popped up about Graham Platner being a “bad boyfriend;” I think around the Lindsay Fifield revelations. Even though I wasn’t sure I believed her, because she was a Republican political operative, I still thought: That’s not being a bad boyfriend. That’s being a really screwed up, violent and scary person.
So why did it satisfy some on the left to say that Platner was just a bad boyfriend?
Young men moved decisively towards the Republican party in the last presidential election. Since then, there’s been a lot of interest in trying to figure out how to recapture them. Now, one thing I can say, as someone who follows polls, is there’s not that much you have to do right now, because those same young men who moved towards Trump now can’t stand him. They’ve totally flipped.
But I think there is still an interest in trying to bring those folks into, or back to, the party, even though women have been the democratic base for a long time. Women became more democratic than men in 1980. In 1980 that, for the first time, the Republican Party platform opposed Roe—and the Equal Rights Amendment, which they had supported when it was first introduced in the early 20th century.
Right. The gender gap.
So, there’s been this recent interest in getting someone with a particular kind of style, a swagger, to appeal to young men. But I think it goes over a line at points, and I wrote the piece with that in mind after that abuse story. That’s when Platner went on the Chris Hayes show and said, “I was a bad boyfriend.” I thought: Is he just totally misunderstanding this? If so, he needed to take women’s studies 101 because he doesn’t understand gendered violence and abuse, and he doesn’t understand how it affects women’s lives.
Is there also something in our current culture that makes it possible for Platner, and/or his political consultants, to ignore misogyny?
Yes. Feminists used to talk a lot about what our experiences were. Whether it was in consciousness-raising groups or whatever, people talked about what it meant to live in a female body and how they were treated by men, experiences that have included sexual harassment and too often, sexual assault.
I think a lot of the feminist movement is now professional and institutionalized. We focus on policies, or on these other things run by organizations. Somehow, we’ve stopped talking so much about the day-to-day experiences of women. There’s a lesson there, because I think the debate over Platner would have been different if feminism had been part of the overall conversation.
Instead, Platner’s campaign was so focused on class, class inequality, the oligarchy, and then relating policies to that, with some focus on war and peace. But mostly it was about Medicare for all and other things we could be getting if we raised taxes on the rich and decided to care about ordinary people. Platner talked only a little bit about race and really did not talk about women at all. When the anniversary of Dobbs, the decision that overturned Roe, came around, he did talk about abortion; and he was endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action.
Then of it turns out that he’s also the guy who’s been accused of taking his condom off in the middle of intercourse and thinking that was really funny, which—maybe because I’m gay—I’ve never heard of before. It’s just an awful, cruel, dangerous and disrespectful thing to do.
Let me add some other cross-cutting themes. The Maine Democratic Party has all of these great candidates who are popping to the top to do the Kamala Harris thing: you know, 100 days and go!
Chuck Schumer stepped on a lot of those candidates during the primary campaign because he wanted Janet Mills. So, for me, one of the cross-cutting themes is age versus youth. I am a great admirer of Janet Mills. How she stood up to Trump for trans kids and won is a lesson for all of us. She’s obviously smart and a great fighter. She is also 78.
I have very strong feelings about how old the Senate is. We’re seeing the Republicans are kind of suffering from that now, having lost two of their most senior members to illness and death. In addition, it never seemed to me like Janet Mills really wanted it. She was obviously very popular with a range of Mainers, but I didn’t feel like she had that campaign in her.
Having watched Mills in two other campaigns, I think she was different. You know, she got a late start. She could have declared much earlier, before Platner created a different dynamic. If she had declared a month after that whole “see you in court” confrontation with Trump, she could have been way, way ahead.
But she didn’t do that, and then she took her time. And yes, there were a lot of people who were thinking of running. I’m not sure if the ones that are in it now are those people, because they claim they always wanted to be governor and not a senator, but who knows? Other people were waiting for Janet to decide and then all of a sudden, Platner bursts upon the scene.
Mills also didn’t campaign terribly hard. She did a lot of very small events. She didn’t push very much or remind people of things she had done, which I thought was kind of a problem. You can’t expect these days for people to know.
There were also some things that people on the left were unhappy with her about. She had vetoed some labor bills. And tribal sovereignty is a really big issue in Maine: while she had taken a lot of steps towards expanding that, the push was for full tribal sovereignty and she didn’t support that. She had a legalistic reason about an agreement signed decades ago, and believed Maine was acting within that.
So, there were a lot of people on the left who called her racist because of it, and those two things really threw the entire campaign. That said, she signed a sweeping reproductive rights bill: Maine had been pro-choice, but this protected women up to the point when any doctor would say it is acceptable to have an abortion, which meant that women with dangerous pregnancies or non-viable fetuses late in a pregnancy could have abortions in Maine.
That was a big step, and she was very good overall on trans rights, which was very controversial. he Maine Christian Civic League was talking about going out and getting signatures for referenda to overturn those two things, which they didn’t end up doing.
My point is: it’s not like those were like necessarily easy things to do. Yet even though she had done a lot of things like that and signed a state-level Family Medical Leave Act into law, she had these other problems. A lot of unions were unhappy, and I think that is really part of how the Platner candidacy came to be, because union people were interested in finding someone to run against her.
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So, that’s another backstory that actually explains the elevation of Platner in a way that that maybe people who aren’t from Maine wouldn’t understand.
Yes, and I think ties that intersects with the lack of attention to women’s issues. Obviously, a lot of unions have women, but with when the voter base is in places like the Bath Ironworks—this is a very male union. You have all these electricians, pipe fitters and welders, jobs which tend to be male. The Maine Education Association was another big union backer, and I don’t know them directly, so maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t think they really had women’s issues on their mind either.
When all of this started coming out, like that thing about being a bad boyfriend, I wrote a piece about how Platner should learn more about gendered abuse and harassment in women’s lives. There were people who tried to get that to his campaign to get them to listen: one told me that she thought women in the campaign felt the same way, but there just was no response.
The phrase “bad boyfriend” is so trivializing. It’s very different from saying “I was a bad man.” Saying you’re a bad boyfriend kind of conveys: “I was I was late to the restaurant all the time, I didn’t open doors, I forgot the flowers, blah blah.” It really does trivialize the nature of these charges.
I think what you’re saying about labor is very interesting too, because of course one of the big struggles nationally over working class votes is when both parties say they support workers, they really do mean white men. They don’t mean Hispanic people. They don’t mean Black people. They don’t mean women or LGBTQ+ folks. Which is nuts, because there is a labor tradition of supporting marginalized workers. Alan Bérubé wrote about a maritime union that was very pro-gay, and we’ve seen a lot of really good queer and feminist politics coming out of labor unions.
If, in fact, you’re saying this archetypic typical working-class voter is really a white man or a young white man who can’t get the training to be a pipe fitter or something like that, you’re really not dealing with the history and, in many ways, the present of labor, right?
And Frances Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman in the job, is from Maine.
Right. Maine is a really interesting state for labor because there are so many different kinds of workers. There’s the big maritime trade, there is the interior, there’s the seasonal trade: what I am getting at is that a lot of people who I’ve been talking to about this race, I think fundamentally misapprehend the political culture of Maine. Maine is not Connecticut; it’s not even Massachusetts. Maine is a place that, in my understanding and in my experience campaigning there for Sarah Gideon, cares about itself as a kind of state culture, a set of values organized as a state.
Susan Collins has been expert at mobilizing that. I mean, I know somebody, a Democrat, who used to work with her in the Senate who said she’s a really good person. And she’s a really moral person. If the worst thing they could think of to say aboutCollins was that she started dating her husband before he left his previous wife, that really doesn’t hold a candle to a Nazi tattoo.
Sure, sure. When I moved to Maine, which now is almost 30 years ago, what people told me about the political culture was that it had a big emphasis on civility and bipartisanship, and that people liked to be able to talk to each other and be kind of reasonable with. They liked people who would be respected and independent in Washington.
That’s the tradition. In the 1950s, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, made a speech questioning McCarthyism, so she has all these things named after her. The federal courthouse in my town, Bangor, is the Margaret Chase Smith courthouse. You walk in, and there’s a quote from her 1950 speech, the Declaration of Conscience, which is about standing up for certain values and not giving way to fake scandals and calumnies; not attacking people for no reason. Maine has elected other Republicans in that vein—Bill Cohen, Olympia Snow—and independents who caucused with Democrats.
Maine voters are calm and even-handed. You may not agree with them on everything, but they’re willing to talk. In a way, I thought when Platner first came along that might be a problem, that he was too hot, and Janet Mills was a better fit.
The national misapprehension of Maine political culture is interesting to me at a moment when so many races nationalize. When it was clear that Platner had to drop out, but hadn’t done it yet, the New York Times wrote a piece in which they had three or four politicians they thought might succeed, a couple of businessmen, and then actor Patrick Dempsey and historian Heather Cox Richardson.
You know, Heather’s great, but I thought: no, she is not running for Senate. Then she put out a video explaining why she wouldn’t. But I thought: only in New York would they believe that the name recognition of a Patrick Dempsey or a Heather Cox Richardson would be the thing that Maine voters were actually looking for.
So, what do what do Maine voters want in the Senate candidate who is going to be picked by the July 25 nominating convention in Augusta?
I think that there are some things they want that Platner had. They want someone who’s going to be aggressive and is going to challenge the Trump administration. In the policy vein, they want a person who are going to stand up for policies like Medicare for all. They want to raise taxes on the rich, preserve social security, and oppose foreign wars. And I think they also want somebody who in some ways is going to run a campaign like Platner did, with lots of town halls.
Because it is true, the kind of thing that Platner did in terms of always getting out there, talking to voters—we really had not seen anything like that. It’s also very rare nationally. The only person I can think of who at least I knew something about doing that was Beto O’Rourke in Texas when he ran for Senate. He did a lot of big events, rallies with Q and A’s.
So, Maine Democrats will want someone who’s going to be accessible and come off as strong. Being less intense and having a little more experience and knowledge may be helpful. That is something that tends to be good for the swing voter in Maine, usually an older woman, either working class, or an educated worker like a nurse. You know, someone with a very like practical, day-to-day, job. They know what that job is and how to do it.
In the past, folks like that have tended to like Susan Collins, and they realize that they would be losing some seniority if he she’s replaced. On the other hand, her popularity has gone down, and I think someone has an opportunity, if they can both keep the energy that Platner had and persuade some of those voters. By the way, in the last New York Times/Siena poll before Platner dropped out, which had him ahead only by two points, he was only winning 4% of Trump voters. Collins was winning 10% of Kamala Harris voters.
So it wasn’t as though Platner was doing what he said he could do. If a new candidate could pick away at more of those Harris voters, they really could win.
My experience on the Gideon campaign six years ago was that voters would say, Of course I’m voting for Joe Biden—and I’m voting for Susan Collins. So, there were all of these ticket splitters who didn’t dislike Sarah Gideon. They were nice about her, but the big line was: She’s not from Maine. She just moved here twenty years ago and she’s not from Maine. Susan Collins is really from Maine, and she really gets us.
I guess I want to end on this question. I can’t imagine what the attack line is on Susan Collins. We’ve hung Brett Kavanaugh around her neck. I don’t think that really grabs people anymore, so what does?
I think the line has got to be that she’s not the Susan Collins you liked before, that she’s done good things, but she’s not the same person. That’s a very different tone than “Susan Collins is a bad person,” which was the Platner line. Say it more in sadness than in anger. She’s not the same person. She’s voting with Trump more than 90% of the time. Collins said she would have so much power when she was chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and yet she doesn’t, because she lets them run roughshod. She put this guy into power at the OMB who didn’t really believe that Congress has any power and that the President should run everything. She voted for him; she’s voted for all these terrible people. She’s not really using her power the way she said she would.
Yes, the Collins campaign can keep running all these ads about how Susan Collins got money for a firehouse here and there or did this little thing, but in the big picture she’s not doing what she should. She voted for the One Big Beautiful bill to proceed, then she voted against it. Before she voted against it, she got a little bit of money in the bill for this rural hospital fund, which is much less than what Maine lost under the bill. Then she runs ads about how she got all this money for rural hospitals.
When people said, But she she’s responsible for the One Big Beautiful Bill passing, one of the fact checkers came out and said, No, she’s not, because she voted against it. But she did vote for it to proceed. So, it’s very hard sometimes. She can be very, very slippery. And I think when debates happen, she will pull that sort of thing. With Kavanaugh, it is an old story. I think the way to frame that is that she either completely misjudged him, so she has poor judgment, or she was not honest about what she thought.
Neither of them is good.
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