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Susan Collins Is Corrupt. She Still Might Be Reelected.

Despite being embroiled in scandal, the Maine senator is benefiting from Democratic Party divisions.

Susan Collins greets supporters in Kittery, Maine, on August 14, 2026.

Susan Collins should never be underestimated. She won her first Senate election 30 years ago, and her sheer tenacity in staying in power is formidable, especially since, over the course of her political career, Maine hasn’t been hospitable ground for Republicans (the state last gave the popular vote to a GOP president in 1988). Collins has kept her seat by repeatedly convincing Maine voters that she’s a different kind of Republican. Along the way, she’s broken all sorts of records: She’s the longest-serving member of Congress from Maine and the longest-serving female Republican senator in history. Earlier this year, The New York Times recorded that she was “the first senator in history to reach 10,000 consecutive votes cast without an absence.”

The Senate, along with the Supreme Court, is a bulwark of American gerontocracy—an institution where seniority is power. Just by hanging around long enough, Collins has become the chair of the Appropriations Committee, an immensely powerful post that itself helps her win reelections by allowing her to shower Maine with government largesse. For voters, the choice between Collins and any Democrat carries with it a brutal cost/benefit equation whereby ideological rectitude has to be weighed against losing a senator who can bring home the bacon. Time and again, Mainers have opted for the bacon; in 2020, Collins won reelection by more than 8 percent even as Donald Trump was trounced in the state by 11 percent.

But Collins’s undeniable gift for pork-barrel spending could now come back to haunt her, thanks to a new pay-for-play scandal broken on Tuesday by ProPublica. The ProPublica story focuses on Collins’s links to Martin Kao, the former CEO of a defense contractor called Navatek. Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison for bank fraud and Covid relief fraud.

Prior to his conviction, Kao had provided damning testimony to the FBI about a political quid pro quo scheme he was working. Legally, defense contractors are not allowed to donate to campaigns, so Kao used shell corporations to donate to super PACs supporting politicians who promoted Navatek projects to the Pentagon. Collins and her office were in the crosshairs of the FBI investigation into Kao’s activities, but the senator was saved from possible criminal charges by Donald Trump’s reelection, which led the president to fire FBI agents working on the investigation (some of whom had also investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election).

According to ProPublica:

Collins’ office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations…. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate........

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