--- title: Polls Show Susan Collins May Struggle to Win Re-Election description: The Republican Senator from Maine has seen her polling plummet this year. Voting against the Big Beautiful Bill may hurt more than help. canonical: https://time.com/7301062/susan-collins-big-beautiful-bill-polls/ author: Philip Elliott article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-07-09T16:00:49.000Z article:modified_time: 2025-07-10T15:58:57.000Z article:section: Politics og:title: Susan Collins' Re-Election Prospects Dim og:description: The Maine Republicans' polling has plummeted in Trump's second term. og:url: https://time.com/7301062/susan-collins-big-beautiful-bill-polls/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71133bfd6f3dfcfa/6998c82807a30d676077d282/Susan-Collins.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: Senate Tweaks Trump Tax Bill In Bid To Court Republican Holdouts og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Susan Collins' Re-Election Prospects Dim twitter:description: The Maine Republicans' polling has plummeted in Trump's second term. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt71133bfd6f3dfcfa/6998c82807a30d676077d282/Susan-Collins.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Susan Collins Was Facing a Tough Re-Election Even Before Voting Against Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill' > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=0ab46f3e-06c6-4654-a149-92cc538b43dd&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: The "Big, Beautiful Bill" Is Massively Unpopular and Democrats Plan to Keep It That Way [Watch (HLS stream): The "Big, Beautiful Bill" Is Massively Unpopular and Democrats Plan to Keep It That Way](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/RdG0PHWf.m3u8) (2:11)  _Published 2025-07-03. In the end, Democrats were unable to stop Republicans from getting their tax-cuts-and-spending plan across the finish line on Tuesday. But, in conversations with strategists close to the Democratic leaders, they had a pretty clever consolation spin: this bill is the most hated piece of major legislation since at least 1990, and Republicans have no plan to fix that. GOP strategists seemed to understand the buzzkilling buzzsaw they were marching toward with a grim sense of inevitability. Even then, there was still no guarantee the House would accept the Senate’s rewrite of their work._  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Jul 10, 2025 3:58 PM UTCPublished: Jul 9, 2025 4:00 PM UTC  Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, speaks to members of the media outside a Senate Republican luncheon at the Capitol in Washington, on June 28, 2025. Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, speaks to members of the media outside a Senate Republican luncheon at the Capitol in Washington, on June 28, 2025. Aaron Schwartz—Bloomberg /Getty Images  by [Philip Elliott](https://time.com/author/philip-elliott/)  ## Philip Elliott Senior Correspondent Updated: Jul 10, 2025 3:58 PM UTCPublished: Jul 9, 2025 4:00 PM UTC _This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up_ [_here_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite) _to get stories like this sent to your inbox._ When someone crosses Donald Trump, the retribution tends to come fast and fierce. But when Sen. [Susan Collins](https://time.com/5492645/susan-collins-center/) of Maine voted last week against his One Big Beautiful Bill, a tax- and safety net-cuts behemoth, the President was atypically silent. That may be the biggest indicator of just how much danger Collins is in as she faces re-election in Maine in 2026. Collins’ opposition was not enough to kill the giant domestic bill that may be the lone legislative lift of the 119th Congress. She was the 50th _nay_, which forced Vice President J.D. Vance’s to provide a tie breaking 51st vote. Collins is seldom the deciding factor; she did not sink [Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination](https://time.com/5492645/susan-collins-center/) to the Supreme Court and voted for all but one of Trump’s second-term Cabinet picks, while also voting against Kash Patel’s nomination to lead the FBI. Her protest votes are as strategic as they are symbolic; FiveThirtyEight [found](https://web.archive.org/web/20210422123731/https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-congress-votes/) she voted with Trump 67% of the time during his first term. Plus, on an early test vote on this bill, she let it proceed as she continued, unsuccessfully, to negotiate for carve-outs for [rural hospitals](https://time.com/7298891/rural-hospitals-closing-explained-health-care/). Collins is the lone Senator up for re-election next year in a state that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris carried in 2024\. Democrats have yet to settle on a favored candidate to become the nominee although all eyes are on Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the tough-minded former prosecutor who [stared down](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/janet-mills-donald-trump-maine.html) Trump at the White House and refused to comply with his administration’s anti-transgender athlete orders. State Democrats have other options at the ready if the 77-year-old Mills passes and are primed either way to make Collins own the Trump record, especially her votes for his Supreme Court nominees in his first term. While she was re-elected after those votes, the Justices have since overturned a half-century of precedent on abortion rights in _Roe_. Republicans in Washington, meanwhile, have seemingly endless patience with Collins and understand her savvy. Her tangles with Trump have been largely performative, not predictive. She is no John McCain, who with a single thumbs-down signal [thwarted](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/obamacare/mccain-hated-obamacare-he-also-saved-it-n904106) Trump’s first-term effort to repeal Obamacare. Cynics say that Collins shows independence only when it doesn’t really make a difference; no one on her side of the aisle really unloaded on her after the vote against the latest package. Most had her back, saying they understood her choice. Collins, a powerful player and chair of the all-important Appropriations panel, is not terribly difficult to understand, politically speaking. She has never won re-election by less than 8 points despite her home state’s fickle politics. The last time the state’s majority vote went for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1988, also the last year a Democrat won a Senate race in the state. But her net approval rating [sank](https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/senator-approval-ratings#america-s-most-popular-and-unpopular-senators) 12 percentage points—more than any other Senator’s numbers—between the first and second quarters of this year, according to Morning Consult. Her disapproval number stood at 51%, up from a 44% average in the January-March window. And she is definitely viewed less warmly than when she was at a comparable point ahead of her 2020 bid. In 2019, 52% of Mainers had a favorable impression of Collins, according to Morning Consult [polling](https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/senator-approval-ratings#america-s-most-popular-and-unpopular-senators). Today, the number is 42%. This suggests she’s going to have a trickier time than when she was at the comparable point ahead of her last campaign. In 2019, ahead of her 2020 bid, her net positive numbers were 13 points. Today she’s at a net negative of 9 points, according to the same pollsters. That means roughly 1-in-5 Maine voters have changed their minds about Collins in a state where her last victory was secured by less than 9 points. Collins’ allies, meanwhile, offer a different read, noting that she enjoyed a net positive of 2 points in September of last year, and that has moved to a net positive of 4 points last month, according to an independent survey from Pan Atlantic Research. As a practical matter, about 34,000 Mainers stand to [lose](https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/harsh-work-requirements-in-house-republican-bill-would-take-away-medicaid-coverage) health coverage as the bill was drafted. Two solar projects in the state were put [on hold](https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/regional/the-maine-monitor/trumps-big-beautiful-bill-maine-clean-energy/97-0999bcaa-8a9e-4a2c-bf2b-e4ad0c905255) even before the bill passed. Hospitals were already [bracing](https://www.mainepublic.org/maine/2025-07-03/trumps-budget-bill-will-add-significant-stress-to-maine-hospitals-officials-say) for shifting services. Collins’ no vote, in a rational world, made sense for her constituents. But that may not help her. Among voters in Maine, a majority—including a majority of Republicans—says she does not deserve to be re-elected, according to [polling](https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1866&context=survey%5Fcenter%5Fpolls) from neighboring University of New Hampshire. A striking 71% of all Maine voters say this should be her last term, and 57% of Republicans agree, according to a survey taken in April. That’s a simply brutal number. Flipping ahead a few pages in the same UNH binder, things get even worse. Their survey finds Collins with a favorability number of just 12%, landing a 58% unfavorable number. Among Republicans, the gap is a 19% positive to a 43% negative. The University of New Hampshire Survey Center [found](https://scholars.unh.edu/survey%5Fcenter%5Fpolls/877/) the bill was deeply unpopular, according to a June poll. A 58% majority did not want to see the bill pass, including 72% of independent voters. Still, Democrats are realistic about what they face. While Collins has just $3 million in her account, she raised almost $31 million for her 2020 bid and won her 2014 campaign with less than $6 million in spending to notch 67% of the vote. Senate Republicans’ campaign committee is, first and foremost, an incumbent-retention operation and will have her back. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are going to be defending tricky seats in Georgia, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, and Colorado. They would need a net pick-up run of four seats to take a majority, and the path to that would require upsets in Trump-backing states like Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, and Texas, plus holding every seat that is currently blue. So Collins is facing some pretty lousy poll numbers and is going to be dogged by her no vote that had no real upside. The vote against Trump is not going to be the salve that cures her dour numbers. She defied Republicans but is not going to get any love from Democrats. She’s going to be hounded by a bill she did not support. Plus, the headwinds are historic—and that’s before Trump decides whether he will launch his own revenge. _Make sense of what matters in Washington._ [_Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter_](https://cloud.newsletters.time.com/signup?nln=dc-brief&source=dc%5Fonsite)_._ ## Transcript The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill is the most hated piece of major legislation in decades. And Republicans seemingly have no plan to fix that. The list of haters is long. Fiscal conservatives hate the massive spending here. Centrist Republicans and all Democrats despise the deep cuts to programs that help the poor and the elderly. And pragmatists are watching and worrying. The GOP's biggest donor, Elon Musk, has threatened everyone who voted for the bill with a primary challenge. And he's threatening to throw money toward a new third party. We might have to put Doge on Elon, but still. The longest list of haters may be the majority of the American public. Polling shows most folks don't want anything to do with this so-called one big, beautiful bill. The level of opposition is truly historic. Polysci Professor Chris Warshaw at GW has studied the clunker bills over decades, and his ad shows Obamacare and the auto bailout were just slightly more unpopular than popular when they were passed. Bill Clinton's failed health care efforts were in similar territory. Call Congress and tell him you want what they have. Trump's first attempt to repeal Obamacare was a total dud in the polls, but also a non-starter in reality. But Trump's one big, beautiful bill is more unpopular than not, to the tune of 24 points. Democrats have made sure their colleagues across the aisle feel the Bern, and it's going to be how the 2026 campaign plays out. House Democrats official campaign arm is circulating a strategy memo about the 2026 midterms, outlining a plan to keep the consequences of this bill in the headlines for the next 16 months among Republican strategists. There's no clear answer on how to make any of this popular or explain this vote before the Senate vote. As one Republican strategist, how do you get through this? And his answer was, I'm all ears. 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