Susan Collins Voted To Put Abortion Surveillance In Charge Of The CDC

Politics runs on the trick of the loud vote and the quiet one. The loud vote gets the press release. The quiet one gets buried.

Here is the loud one. Susan Collins said Tuesday, August 4, she would vote against Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general³, and the coverage practically wrote itself: the brave moderate, the lone Republican in a state Trump keeps losing. Collins is the only Republican senator seeking reelection in a state that President Trump lost.¹ She dressed it up in high principle, warning that the Department of Justice had become increasingly political and that Blanche had taken several actions that further eroded the Department's independence.¹ Fine words. They cost her nothing. Collins' vote wouldn't sink Blanche's nomination on its own^1,3, and it didn't: the Senate confirmed Blanche 50-49 early on Saturday, August 8, with only Collins and independent Angus King breaking against Trump's former personal attorney.⁴ A no vote that changes nothing is not courage. It's set dressing.

Now the quiet one, the vote she'd rather you not read about. The day before the Blanche theater, the Senate confirmed Dr. Erica Schwartz as CDC director on Wednesday, August 5, by a 51-44 vote almost entirely along party lines, and Collins voted yes.⁵ And here is what Schwartz told Missouri's Josh Hawley on the way in: abortion surveillance, she said, is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing, adding that she wanted to pull out true abortions and tighten case definitions so the data is accurate.⁷ Read that again. The federal government cataloging who terminated a pregnancy and where. One Bangor Daily News letter writer put it flat: a vote for Collins is a vote for government healthcare surveillance.⁶

This is the woman who spent 2018 assuring Maine that Brett Kavanaugh would leave Roe alone. Now she waves through the bureaucrat who wants to expand the abortion registry. The consistency is the point: Collins reliably delivers for the machine, then finds one safe, doomed vote to launder her reputation back home.

Maine is watching, and Maine is not buying. A Senate Majority PAC poll by Hart Research, taken July 27 to August 1, put Democrat Troy Jackson ahead of Collins 49 to 45 with 6 percent undecided, and pegged her approval at 46 percent against 52 percent disapproval.² A Fox News poll conducted August 6-10 found Jackson leading by two, with 55 percent of Maine voters worried Collins' record aligns with Trump too often.⁸ The RealClearPolitics average has Jackson up 2.3 points.¹ Her own team's counter is that she trailed in 2020 too, and won by nine. True. It's also the only card she has left.

Money is not her problem, and it never is. At least 79 billionaires and their spouses donated to Collins' network between January 2025 and May 2026, funneling nearly $9 million to Pine Tree Results PAC, the super PAC that faces no contribution limits.⁹ New Balance chairman Jim Davis, worth an estimated $6.1 billion, gave $1 million to that PAC seven months before Collins launched her campaign by holding up a New Balance sneaker to the camera and saying it was perfect for 2026.⁹ The candidate who once told a Maine campaign forum she favored limiting out-of-state donations now runs on billionaire air cover. Roughly $193 million in ad spending and reservations has poured into this race.¹⁰

She never misses a vote. Collins has cast more than 9,800 consecutive roll-call votes without ever missing one. Congratulations. Perfect attendance means nothing when you show up to hand the machine what it wants and save your one 'no' for the fight already lost. Show up 9,800 times, Senator. It's what you do while you're in the chair that Maine remembers. MUCK YOU.