Congress

Susan Collins finally got her dream job. Fellow Republicans are making it a nightmare.

Published

11 months ago

July 16, 2025

To protect their majority, Senate Republicans are praying Susan Collins decides to seek a sixth term next year. But they aren’t making her life easy right now.

Earlier this month, GOP leaders pushed through President Donald Trump’s megabill while ignoring most of her concerns about safety-net cutbacks that the Maine Republican warned will be “harmful” to her state.

Now, they are barreling forward with Trump’s effort to claw back $9 billion in spending she played a key role in approving. Democrats and even some Republicans warn the maneuver could upend the bipartisan government funding process she now oversees.

Collins mounted a protest Tuesday night, joining two other Republicans in voting to block the Trump administration’s spending clawbacks. Afterward, she said in an interview her vote was in keeping with her longstanding approach to legislating.

“I vote according to what I assess to be in the best interests of my constituents and my country — and I do that regardless of who’s in control of the Senate and who is president,” Collins, 72, said.

Pressed on the recent difficulties her fellow Republicans have given her, she said, “They’re doing what they think is right. I’m doing what I think is right.”

All in all, it has been a disappointing start to the dream job Collins spent decades striving for — chair of the historically powerful Appropriations Committee — and now her power is at risk of being further eroded.

Democrats, mad as hell about the funding clawback, are threatening to withdraw from government funding talks; top Trump administration officials would love to sidestep Congress altogether on spending cuts; and there are few reasons to hope lawmakers are heading toward anything other than a spending patch — or worse, a shutdown — when the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

Still, Collins confirmed Tuesday she is still planning on running again, though she has yet to formally launch a campaign. She said she was “pleased” with the strong fundraising she reported this week, collecting $2.4 million in the second quarter of the year and having $5.25 million on hand as of June 30.

But Democrats are holding out hope that the deteriorating environment for bipartisanship on Capitol Hill might cause her to reconsider. More than any other personnel decision, a Collins retirement could upend the 2026 Senate map.

Democrats have a steep road back to the majority, needing to flip an unlikely four seats while also holding onto their own swing seats in Georgia and Michigan. But they view Maine as a top pick-up opportunity, and they would unquestionably have an easier time without Collins on the ballot, potentially allowing them to pour more resources into tougher races.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who recently announced he would retire from his own swing seat, said Collins has a “thankless job” as chair of the Appropriations Committee but also noted the obvious political reality: Without her, Republicans would lose the seat.

“The one thing I am certain of is if Susan Collins is not running for re-election, then that state is even more at risk than North Carolina,” he said.

Maine Democrats are already mobilizing to run against Collins, linking her to the “big, beautiful bill” by calling her the “deciding vote” in the legislation coming up for debate on the Senate floor, even though she ultimately voted against it on final passage. (The vote to start debate was 51-49, so even if Collins had voted no, Vice President JD Vance would have broken the tie.)

“At the end of the day, Donald Trump and Washington Republicans know Susan Collins will have their back,” Tommy Garcia, a Maine Democratic Party spokesperson, said in a statement.

They have taken heart from recent polling showing deteriorating home-state support for Collins, including a Morning Consult survey from April that found 51 percent of Maine voters disapproving of her performance. Separately, 71 percent of respondents to a University of New Hampshire April poll in Maine said that Collins did not deserve to be re-elected, including a majority of Republican respondents.

But Collins, the only Senate Republican from a state won by Kamala Harris, is helped by an obvious rule of political life: You can’t beat somebody with nobody, and so far Democrats have struggled to recruit a big name to challenge her. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other party leaders are still making overtures to Gov. Janet Mills, who has largely left the field frozen while the party awaits her final decision.

There’s also little expectation Collins would flinch from the political challenge. Her Senate career was all but written off by many political observers in 2020, when polls showed her constantly trailing Democratic rival Sara Gideon. She went on to win by roughly 9 points.

Many in the GOP share Tillis’ view that Collins is about the only Republican who can win a Senate seat in Maine, and she has gotten a wide berth to break with her party because of that. Trump hasn’t lashed out at Collins for opposing the megabill — unlike with Tillis and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

“Everybody cuts her a lot of slack,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on Tuesday night. “She represents … a very blue state. She has to run for reelection this year. She’s the only Republican that can win. And so, you know, she sees the world through a different lens, and she’s always very upfront about what she’s going to do.”

GOP colleagues, he added, “are encouraging her and urging her, doing everything we can to help her to make sure she runs. … She’s got a different calculus, probably than some do in our conference. But there is nobody in our conference who represents a state like hers.”

Democrats’ bet is that Collins concludes that spending another six years in a legislative body whose governing norms have eroded — and a party whose principles she is increasingly out of step with — simply isn’t worth it.

One fellow GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Trump isn’t happy with Collins and might not keep quiet indefinitely.

“He’s very irritated at Susan — very, I can tell,” the GOP senator said of Trump. “But she doesn’t care, because the more Trump gets irritated with her, the better it is for her politics back home.”

Collins “is in an awkward spot” and “gets a pass on a lot of the things that she has to do,” the senator said. But nobody believes Collins’ happy talk about getting government funding back on track, the GOP lawmaker added.

Thune, for his part, said it is his “intention” to “see if there’s a path forward to doing appropriation bills around here.”

“I know Senator Collins … is very interested in a normal appropriations process, and I’m hopeful we can get that back on track,” he said.

But with a 53-seat majority, Senate GOP leaders have already shown their willingness to sidestep Collins. Early in the megabill negotiations she detailed to White House officials, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, what changes she would need to vote for the bill, but leaders didn’t bend the legislation in her direction — and didn’t need to. As with the Trump spending clawback, they calculated they could afford to lose Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), her close ally and friend, by catering to holdouts on the right.

Collins and Murkowski opposed proceeding with the rescissions package Tuesday, emerging unmoved from a last-ditch lunch pitch from White House budget director Russ Vought, who has sought to placate Collins along with other administration officials. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former GOP leader, joined them in opposition.

Republicans acknowledge privately that any turbulence in the appropriations process doesn’t help Collins, who has made her gavel and seniority a key part of her home-state image. Just last week, GOP senators had to hit pause on one of the 12 annual funding bills because of a partisan fight over the Trump administration’s plans to relocate FBI headquarters — the sort of dispute the typically bipartisan Appropriations Committee usually expertly resolves.

But they remain confident she’s running and can win despite forcing her to run against large parts of her own party’s agenda. She recently held a campaign event at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to one colleague who attended, who described it as a “lobster roll event.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he wasn’t worried about Collins, calling her “the greatest politician.”

“She wins by as large a margin as a lot of people in red states,” he said. “She knows her state. She knows how to navigate. I don’t worry about it.”

Calen Razor contributed to this report.

Congress

Mamdani-backed socialist ousts Espaillat in NY-13

Published

2 hours ago

June 24, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — Darializa Avila Chevalier has ousted five-term House member Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in a massive victory for the Democratic Socialists of America.

Her win marks another rebuke of the Democratic establishment in New York following Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election last year, cementing the DSA as one of the city’s most potent political forces. The upset reflects a political climate in which voters have become increasingly willing to cast aside longtime incumbents in favor of outsiders promising change.

Avila Chevalier focused much of her campaign on attacking Espaillat for accepting donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and real estate interests during his career.

“I really feel that this is a fight to make sure that we are representing working-class New Yorkers who have been left behind by a politics that only serves the interests of corporations, of corporate landlords, of special interest groups that are making life in New York deeply unaffordable for so many,” Avila Chevalier said last month, during an appearance with Mamdani on MS NOW where the mayor endorsed her campaign.

Espaillat, who is the first formerly undocumented person to serve in Congress, came up short despite having the support of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James and New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin.

Avila Chevalier, 32, was a leading organizer in the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University in 2024 and is a sociology Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has served as an investigator for a public defender’s office and is originally from South Florida.

For most of the race, Espaillat was widely viewed as the favorite, but Mamdani’s late May endorsement of Avila Chevalier jolted a contest that began to show signs it was tightening. An April poll from Avila Chevalier’s campaign showed her down 14 points.

Her victory came despite intense outside spending in support of Espaillat, including from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm.

Avila Chevalier’s election to New York’s 13th district also shows a changing of the guard in Upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. Espaillat has served at the helm of a political alliance, known as the “Squadriano,” that has ruled over those areas of the city, home to large Dominican American and African American populations.

At times during the race, Espaillat and his supporters sought to frame the primary battle as a contest between gentrifiers and long-term residents.

“Those that choose or want to parachute in, after the men and women of this city, the working men and women of the city, have built our neighborhood, we’re gonna send them back home packing wherever they came from,” the 71-year-old member of Congress said last month.

The story of his political ascendance and reign in Upper Manhattan has also been characterized by an intense rivalry with Manhattan Democratic Party Chair Keith Wright, an ally of the late Rep. Charles Rangel, whom Espaillat challenged for Congress in 2012 and 2014.

But this year’s primary seems to have calmed the bitter rivalry between Espaillat and Wright amid the encroachment of the Democratic Socialists of America on disputed turf. Earlier this month, Espaillat endorsed Wright’s son , state Assemblymember Jordan Wright, who was also facing a DSA-backed challenger.

The peace pact wasn’t enough to fend off the challenge from Avila Chevalier, who seized on a progressive swing in the district ever since Mamdani handily beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary there.

“We have come a long way from where we used to be as a party,” Mamdani said in the interview where he announced his endorsement of Avila Chevalier. “It’s time we have a new generation that not only takes us back to that ambition, but takes us forward to the tomorrow that so many New Yorkers are waiting for.”

Congress

Former Utah Rep. Ben McAdams is on track to return to Congress

Published

2 hours ago

June 24, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Former Rep. Ben McAdams won his primary Tuesday, paving the way for his return to Congress.

McAdams, a moderate, staved off a roster of progressive challengers in Utah’s newly redrawn 1st District, a rare deep-blue Salt Lake City district in a deep-red state that came as a result of a messy, decadelong redistricting saga.

McAdams will enter November as the heavy favorite in a district former Vice President Kamala Harris won by nearly 24 points in 2024.

McAdams won a GOP-leaning seat in the 2018 Democratic wave and governed as a centrist, Blue Dog Democrat who pushed for a balanced budget amendment — but he lost his reelection bid in 2020. He was one of the first Democrats to signal interest in running in the new 1st District and quickly garnered support from Utah elected officials and national centrist Democrats.

His progressive opponents attempted to paint him as too conservative, pointing to his previous mixed record on abortion. One opponent, state Sen. Nate Blouin, called on the other candidates to consolidate their support behind one person to avoid splitting the progressive vote. None agreed, and McAdams — who raised more money than the three other Democrats combined — prevailed.

Congress

Trump’s preferred candidate wins primary to succeed Elise Stefanik

Published

2 hours ago

June 24, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

ALBANY, New York — President Donald Trump’s preferred candidate to succeed Rep. Elise Stefanik cruised to victory in his Republican primary Tuesday evening.

Anthony Constantino, the CEO of custom sticker company Sticker Mule, defeated Assemblymember Robert Smullen, a retired Marine colonel, for the nomination in a deep red upstate New York House district.

Trump, along with MAGA figures Roger Stone and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, backed Constantino’s bid, casting aside Smullen’s endorsement from the New York Republican Committee.

Constantino’s victory underscores the power of Trump’s endorsement in a district he has won during each of his three presidential campaigns. His win also highlights how a candidate who’s fashioned himself in a MAGA mold can continue to resonate in a largely rural and predominantly white district that has struggled economically for decades.

A former boxer, Constantino has dabbled in music, producing songs that praise Trump. He initially drew Stone’s attention after erecting a large “Vote for Trump” sign on a building in Amsterdam, N.Y., a city less than an hour west of Albany. Constantino also gifted Trump a bronze statue in the president’s likeness.

The circus-like primary became a bruising battle between a first-time candidate who channeled Trump-style promotion and attacks against an establishment favorite with a long, accomplished resume.

Constantino referred to Smullen as “Slime Bob” and called him “evil” in a text message to his rival. Smullen, in turn, called Constantino “unfit” and knocked his prior enrollment as a Democrat.

The race became so bitter that Smullen refused to shake Constantino’s hand at the conclusion of their only televised debate.

Constantino poured $10 million of his own money into the race and spent more than $3.8 million on TV ads, saturating upstate media market airwaves. Smullen’s campaign spent a fraction of that amount, more than $500,000 in ad spending, according to the tracking firm AdImpact.

The sticker impresario also displayed a marketing flare, printing t-shirts that touted his Trump endorsement.

Smullen leaned heavily on his biography and background as a combat Marine. But he often found himself responding — sometimes angrily — to Constantino’s barrage of attacks.

Constantino will now have to make peace with some New York power brokers as he pivots to the general election. Smullen is set to remain on the November ballot with the backing of the state Conservative Party’s ballot line. Constantino is being sued for defamation by that party’s leader, Jerry Kassar.

The House seat opened after Stefanik, who has represented the area for more than a decade, announced she would leave Congress after scuttling her gubernatorial campaign. Stefanik was previously Trump’s nominee for United Nations ambassador, but that was yanked amid concerns her vacancy would complicate the House Republicans’ narrow majority.

Stefanik did not endorse in the race to replace her.