Tag Archives: Susan Collins

Trump Impeachment and 2024

By tmess2 | Published February 14, 2021

Despite hopes for better from the Republican Party, Donald Trump again escaped being held politically liable for his misconduct.  Of course, President Trump is the only U.S. president in which members of his own party voted for conviction, but seven Republican senators out of fifty.

There were some surprises in the final vote.  Of the four Republicans who will be retiring in 2022, two voted to convict.  The only Senator currently running for re-election in 2022 that voted to convict was Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.  Given that Alaska has done away with party primaries and will be using a top four primary with ranked choice voting in the general, Donald Trump’s threats against Senator Murkowski do not carry much weight.  Of the other four votes, two come from long-time Trump critics — Mitt Romney of Utah and Ben Sasse of Nebraska — whom Trump would go after regardless of their vote and one came from Susan Collins of Maine who has always faced the need to triangulate between being a loyal Republican and the Democratic majority in her state.  The only Senator to vote to convict who is probably running again and was not considered to be  a member of the moderate/conservative wing of the Republican Party was Bill Cassidy of Louisiana (who like Collins was just re-elected and can hope that six years is long enough for this madness to pass).  And like Murkowski, Senator Cassidy is from a state that does not have partisan primaries.  He just needs to keep enough Republican support to finish in the top two and then win the run-off.

But the bigger question is what this means for the 2024 election.  Not being convicted means that Donald Trump is technically eligible to run in 2024.  And he will continue to make noise about running.  While the odds are that he will not run, his omnipresence will alter the trajectory of the run-up to that race.  While some would-be candidates (like Nikki Haley) are apparently going ahead with making initial plans, others are going to have to wait for Trump to  yield the field.  Candidates will certainly not be able to raise money from Trump supporters until he announces that he is not running. Continue Reading...

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The New Senate

By tmess2 | Published November 7, 2020

Based on where things currently stand, it looks like when the new Senate convenes on January 3, the Republicans will have a 51-48 or 50-49 majority (depending upon the results in Alaska).  First, a word on why there will be only 99 Senators.

At this point, it looks like both races in Georgia are headed to a run-off on January 5.  Senator David Perdue’s current term ends on January 3.  As there will be no winner in that race, the seat will technically be vacant as of January 3.   Senator Kelly Loeffler, however, was appointed to fill a seat.  The term for that seat ends on January 3, 2023.  Under the Seventeenth Amendment, until there is a winner of that special election, she continues to hold that seat.  (For Arizona, that means that as soon as the result is certified, Mark Kelly replaces Sally McBride as the new Senator.  So, if there is a lame duck session in December, the margin will be 52-48 rather than the current 53-47.)

The big issue is whether anything will be able to get through the new Senate.  The real question is whether there is a moderate caucus that could try to leverage both parties against each other to make some real reform to allow the Senate to function.  On the Democratic side of the aisle, Senator Joe Manchin (Senator from Coal Country West Virginia) has to walk a very fine line if he wants any chance at re-election.  Likewise Senator Sinema and Senator-to-be Kelly from Arizona represent a marginally swing state as would potential Senator Osser and potential Senator Warnock from Georgia.   And Senator King from Maine seems to be a true independent.  So, there is a group of four to six in the Democratic caucus that are not going to want to move too fast and might be open to reforms to make the Senate a more “collegial” body. Continue Reading...

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Runoffs and Control of the Senate

By tmess2 | Published October 14, 2020

With less than three weeks to go until election day. A lot of ink has been spilled over how state laws on the receipt and counting of absentee/mail-in ballots could delay knowing who won the presidential election.  But it could take even longer to know who will control the U.S. Senate.

One of the reasons is, of course, that the same delay in counting votes for the Presidential election could also delay counting the votes for the Senate elections.  However, given where the seats are and the current polling average, I expect that most Senate seats will be called on election night.  And it is possible that one party or the other will have a good enough night to get to 51 seats by midnight.

But there is a real chance that control of the Senate will come down to three races.  (At the very least, these three races will impact how comfortable the majority is.  Both parties have a handful of Senators who will occasionally split on a key vote.  Needless to say a 50-50 Senate with Vice-President Harris only voting in the case of a tie is going to be less likely to pass major legislation than a 53-47 Senate especially if the filibuster finally goes the way of the dodo.)  And in all three races, the election may not be over on election night. Continue Reading...

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Primary Day

By tmess2 | Published July 14, 2020

Today is primary day in three states.  In two of the three (Alabama and Texas), it is actually primary run-off day as the first round of voting occurred prior to COVID-19 becoming a household word.  In the other state (Maine). today is the actual primary day.  Maine uses ranked-choice voting in its primary which means that voters are casting votes for all rounds of the election today.   In all three states, there are senate primaries to choose challengers, and the results could matter in November.

In Alabama, you have former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeking to get his job back against former Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville.  Besides his coaching experience, Coach Tuberville appears to have relocated to Florida until just recently and has some ties to some hedge fund fraud.  All of which makes him Trump’s type of candidate as Trump wants to stick it to Attorney General Sessions for only bending the law into a pretzel on some occasions and actually realizing that it would be unethical to head an investigation into a campaign in which he played a significant role.   Now, it’s going to be hard for Democrats to keep this seat in November, but I would rather be running against the former coach for Auburn (the “second” school in Alabama) in the hopes that some Alabama fans who would normally vote Republican might have trouble voting for somebody from Auburn.  Additionally, the scandal involving Coach Tuberville might just become a big deal by November allowing us to narrowly keep the seat over a flawed Republican candidate.  While Democrats rightly loathe the positions that Jeff Sessions took as Attorney General, Alabama is still a deep red state.  If Trump and Sessions decide that they have to make nice after the primary, I think it would be almost impossible to beat Sessions in November.

In Texas, you have almost a replay of the recent Kentucky primary.  The preferred candidate of the national party is a moderate, white, female, military veteran (MJ Hegar).  The other choice is a progressive, male, African-American, state legislator (Royce West).   And, like in Kentucky, you have an incumbent Republican member of the party leadership (John Conryn) who will be a favorite for re-election but could be beatable with the right candidate. Continue Reading...

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Sunday with the Senators: Let’s Talk Maine

By DocJess | Published August 18, 2019

I have a gut feeling that we can retake the Senate. One of the seats that is definitely on my list is Maine. So let’s take a deep dive into that race…as you certainly know, the incumbent is anti-choice, Bret-Kavanaugh-enabler Susan Collins, who has held her seat since 1997. On the plus side, as I’ve pointed out many times before, she makes great blueberry muffins and passes them out at constituent events. And um…..that’s it, the upside is the muffins.

On the other side, she’s just plain bad news. She wasn’t always this way, but she’s now. She’s got a primary challenger in Derek Levasseur, He’s challenging from the right and says that Collins isn’t supporting Trumpkin enough. He launched a few months ago and has raised about $7,000. At first, I thought I read it wrong and he raised $7 million, but then I put my glasses on and saw it’s $7 thousand. All of that money is from individuals who gave less than $200 each — on the bright side for him, that translates into votes. On the downside, he spent all the money and is now $2 grand in the hole.

Collins, meanwhile, has about $5.5 million CoH, and receives about a quarter of her funding from PACs. But is money everything? Her polling is fascinating. she is now the second lowest polling Senator. The only Senator hated more than she is #MoscowMitch. Read all the juicy details here. But let’s say she gets through the primary, she’ll still need to face a Democrat, and, this being Maine, some third party folks. And remember, Maine has ranked voting. Continue Reading...

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Ranked Choice Voting and the Senate

By tmess2 | Published August 4, 2019

Earlier today, DocJess posted the first Sunday with the Senators of this cycle.  I am posting this follow-up on the weird features of Maine election law that could determine whether there is a Democratic majority in 2020.

In Maine, for federal elections, there is ranked choice voting — both for the general election and the primary.  While we do not yet know the full list of candidates who will be running in 2020, my hunch is that ranked choice voting probably hurts Senator Collins in the primary but may help her in the general election.

My thinking behind this is that a multi-candidate primary field would make it difficult for any candidate to get more first choice votes than Senator Collins.  However, I think that most of the primary challenge to Senator Collins will be from candidates who do not think that she is loyal to the new LePage-Trump version of the Republican Party and see her as a RINO.  The voters who support these candidates are likely to rank Senator Collins last among their choices.  So if Senator Collins only got 45% or so of the first choice votes, there would be a decent chance (assuming that everybody ranked the entire field) that the strongest of her opponents would pass her once all preferences are distributed.  A primary loss by Senator Collins would move the Maine Senate race from lean Republican to likely Democrat. Continue Reading...

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