The latest casualty of President Trump going after Republicans who he deems insufficiently loyal is Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. Despite being a solid vote for the administration, Trump reached out and endorsed Ken Paxton in the GOP primary. Paxton then trounced Cornyn.
Because Paxton has a history of deep corruption and lawbreaking, strategists from both parties think his place on the ticket gives Democrats a chance to flip the Lone Star State.
Given how far right the Maine Republican Party has gone-- witness the gubernatorial field’s scrapping over who is more anti-immigrant and more committed to slashing health care -- it’s especially striking that Trump has kept out.
Surely, if Trump wanted, he could have encouraged someone, anyone to mount a primary challenge to Collins.
Imagine the posts trashing Collins, along with some personal shots and maybe a carefully curated nasty nickname. Trump knows how to do this but he refrained.
I, of course, have no inside information about Trump’s internal processes and thinking.
But it brings to mind the classic Sherlock Holmes mystery where the ultimate clue was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. In the context of the MAGA primary purge, Trump’s silence on Maine’s senior senator is that quiet dog.
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While Sen. Collins likes to portray herself as thoughtful and independent, she voted with Trump 95% of the time in 2025, just a little less than the three Republican senators Trump targeted and drove out of future political office -- Cassidy of Louisiana (100%), Cornyn of Texas (100%) and Tillis of NC (98%).1
But, while destroying Cornyn makes retaining Senate control for Republicans more difficult, pushing out Collins with a primary opponent from the MAGA wing of the party would be substantially worse for the GOP.
Maine congressional races use ranked choice voting since 2018. Thus the winner has to get a majority of the vote.
Who wins majorities in Maine?
Not Trump, who Trump lost the state overall in each of his three runs, or any other Republican presidential candidates this century. In fact, the last time a Republican presidential candidate won Maine statewide was 1988, a whopping 38 years ago.
In other statewide races from 2000 on:
Democrat Janet Mills won majorities in each of her runs for governor, in 2018 and 2022. (Ranked choice is not used in Maine gubernatorial general elections.)
Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, won all of his Senate races (2012, 2018, 2024) with majorities.
And other than that, Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins also got majority wins from 2000 on. Snowe was less of a party loyalist than Collins.
Trump keeps Collins out of his revenge tour because no MAGA Republican has any chance of winning a Maine Senate race and because she is really rather loyal to him and his agenda.
As Democrats puncture Collins’ carefully cultivated image as somewhat independent, they should highlight this curious case and ask why a president who demands loyalty everywhere else is content to leave Maine’s senior senator unbothered.
Tillis didn’t lose a Republican primary after Trump targeted him but rather announced he wouldn’t run for reelection; this, along with Gov. Roy Cooper’s decision to run for the open seat, put North Carolina in play. Cassidy lost his primary decisively with a third place showing in Louisiana, a state no one thinks has a chance to flip blue. In any case, the slightly higher support for Trump of these two (plus Cornyn) versus Collins, points to Maine specific reasons for Trump not bringing a primary challenge against her.
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