Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins is sometimes called a moderate, but she has repeatedly fallen in line with the Trump administration-backed GOP party line on key issues throughout Donald Trump’s time as president. Now, as the Senate impeachment trial of Trump slowly but surely gets underway, new polling has emerged showing the effect of these capitulations on Collins’s standing in her home state. According to Morning Consult, Collins is now the most unpopular Senator in the entire country in terms of the size of the portion of respondents who say that they actively disapprove of the job she’s doing in office.
In the newest data, a full 52 percent of respondents said that they disapproved of Collins, while only 42 percent said that they approved of her. Collins is facing a tough re-election race this year, and that’s not exactly a good sign for her chances! Her rising disapproval means she displaced Senate Majority Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) himself as the most unpopular Senator in the country according to the Morning Consult data set. He only had 37 percent of respondents approving of his job performances, but those who disapproved measured just 50 percent of the total, rather than Collins’s 52 percent.
The majority of the top ten most unpopular Senators in the country are, in fact, Republicans, while the majority of the top ten most popular Senators are not Republicans. In line with past data, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders is recorded as the most popular Senator in the country. A full 65 percent of relevant respondents approved of him, while only 29 percent disapproved. His presidential campaign is currently one of the few frontrunners in the Democratic presidential primary race — and the first votes will be tallied very soon.
Most recently, Collins has been attracting criticism for her only very tepid opposition to Republican leaders’ plans to fix the impeachment trial for Trump. That criticism has included ad campaigns from groups like Republicans for the Rule of Law and Need to Impeach. Collins has insisted that she wants to follow the same procedure as the 1990’s impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, which she was also present for. In that trial, the question of witnesses was not considered until after opening arguments and initial questions from Senators, a process that in this case will begin next week.
As she put it:
‘For this trial, as was done in 1999, both sides should have the opportunity to state their case and the Senators should have the opportunity to pose questions. Then, the Senate should have an up-or-down vote on whether to subpoena witnesses and documents.’
Witnesses have been heard from at every single impeachment trial that the Senate has ever held, but in an apparent gambit to keep Democrats from having any more openings to air evidence against the president, Republicans have refused to flatly go along with hearing from them in this case.
Dems want to hear from figures with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s scheme to bribe Ukraine for election help. Those targets include White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, and others.
