36 new york | february 17–march 1, 2020
father; she wanted it to be about the passing of her father.”
Collins’s mother is a particular influence on her daughter. As Katz
said, “Susan was known as Patricia’s daughter before Patricia was
known as Susan’s mother.” And Richard Guarasci, who was Collins’s
progressive-leaning government professor at St. Lawrence Univer-
sity in upstate New York, recalled that Collins once returned from a
Thanksgiving break and told him, “I had to tell my parents I was in
your class about 20th-century Marxism; it didn’t go over well.”
One former Collins Senate staffer said that in her early days in
the Senate, Collins’s parents’ sense of how she was doing in Wash-
ington was a consideration at the office. “The senator heard about
it if her mom was unhappy.” Several people mentioned Collins’s
outsize sensitivity to her parents’ perception of her work and life,
one noting that what Patricia thought weighed heavily on Collins
even into her 40s and 50s.
After her brush with Marxism in college, Collins returned to
working in Cohen’s congressional office, a job she was hired for by
Cohen’s chief of staff, Tom Daffron, a respected Maine political
operative who would become Collins’s mentor, close friend, and—
nearly 40 years after they met—husband; the couple wedin 2012,
when Collins was 59 and Daffron 73.
Guarasci remembered her as a talented, driven student who “had
this old- fashioned belief in public service; she saw it asa noble
activity, the highest duty one can have.” Drawn to (half ) of the fam-
ily trade—politics—she would go on to work in McKernan’s guber-
natorial administration during a controversial overhaul ofMaine’s
worker-compensation laws. Appointed by George H.W. Bush to be
regional director of the Small Business Administration in Massa-
chusetts, she left Maine for two years before coming back to run for
governor, a race she lost to independent Angus King, now her fellow
senator. She worked at Husson College before running and winning
Cohen’s old Senate seat.
Collins remains very close to her family; her wedding was small
and unfussy; she brings little of her Washington life backto rural
Maine with her. Her brother Michael has spent time in jailon drug
charges; he was arrested with 1,000 pounds of marijuana during
her 1994 gubernatorial campaign, and her family has been open
about his troubles. Her brothers Sam and Gregg now head up the
other half of the family business—the lumber part—and are cred-
ited with its resurgence. When we are in Aroostook County, my
family makes it a point to shop at the local hardware store rather
than at the Walmart that has led to the closing of so many other
businesses; that local hardware store is S.W. Collins.
The sharp memory and detailed niceties of retail politics come
easily to Collins, especially with regard to the geography and indus-
tries of her home state. “When you get to the question ofwhy the
senator is so successful,” said one person whose family was close to
hers in the County, “it’s that when I would see her on a plane from
D.C. to Maine, she could always quote my parents’ Christmas let-
ter.” Sarah Day, whose husband, Avery, interned in Collins’s Senate
office as an undergraduate, recalled how Collins had made sure
that Avery, who hails from a family of lobstermen on the island of
Vinalhaven, got to staff the senator for the annual Fishermen’s
Forum in Rockport, though he was just a college sophomore. And
when I spoke on the phone to Collins in 2017 (she would answer
questions only via email for this story) and told her that my family
was from the County, within moments she was able to recall expe-
riences she’d had on the road on which my mother grew up.
Understanding Collins as a “County girl” is key to some of her
appeal to Maine voters, at least to some of those who feel a rugged
affection for the area and are aware of its rural character and long
history of economic decline.
Don Flannery, the head of the Maine Potato Board, whois a reg-
istered Republican (but has seldom voted a straight ticket), described
his relationship with Collins as great, in part, because “she came
from potato country, and grew up picking potatoes by hand, so she
knew a lot about the industry.” Some years ago, when new science
about low-carb diets, along with the nutritional advocacy of then–
First Lady Michelle Obama, almost got potatoes kicked off school-
hot-lunch and WIC programs, Flannery recalled, “Collins went to
bat for the potato industry all across the U.S.”
Collins did not grow up on a potato farm herself, but until recently,
most schools in Aroostook observed a harvest break during which
students earned money by filling potato barrels. When Collins was
young, that meant picking spuds out of the dirt where they’d been
dug up, putting them in baskets, and dumping those heavy baskets
into bigger barrels. It’s this experience that Democratic senator
Harry Reid cited in 2015 when he congratulated Collins on casting
her record-breaking 6,000th consecutive floor vote. “It’s nosurprise
to me that Susan Collins is such a hard worker,” Reid said in a state-
ment that Collins has posted proudly on her web page. “She started
this as a young woman digging potatoes for 30 cents a barrel at her
neighbors’ farm.” (Collins has never missed a vote, and in July cast
her 7,000th.)
Collins, said Katz, “takes everything in her life very seriously. Yes,
her family is No. 1, and she has close friends, but other than that,
this is her life. She’s working 70 hours a week.” Before marrying
Daffron, staffers worried that she went home every nightto a pile
of briefing books, taking little vacation time. “I said to her one time,
‘I can’t imagine having to come to Maine from Washington every
weekend, and then on a beautiful July day when you’d like to be at
a lake, you have to do parades,’ ” said Bob Umphrey, an old
Collins-family friend who runs a packing company in Presque Isle,
“but she just laughed.”
Her reputation as a workhorse with a commitment toscrupu-
lous study is one that Collins cultivates. During the impeach-
ment hearings, she proudly showed a local reporter the 25 pages
of notes on a legal pad that she had managed to take during
opening statements.
Collins hates to be caught unprepared. Mary Small, a former
Maine state senator who first met Collins in state government in
the 1980s, later worked for a nonprofit that required herto meet
with her as a senator. “You had to tell her everything you were going
to be talking about,” said Small. “And woe if you didn’t give her the
stuff you were going to be talking about, because she wanted to be
able to converse intelligently about it all.”
Of course, one woman’s nose-to-the grindstone preparedness is
another’s desire to maintain tight control of unpredictable situa-
tions. One activist who was granted a meeting with Collins in 2017
took contemporaneous notes on the preparatory phone call with a
staffer, noting that the staffer “is handling the meeting soit is our
‘first’ meeting ... and not our last. She wants it ‘civil.’ She wants ‘NO
surprises.’ She wants NO interruptions. She wants thisto NOT
blow up in the senator’s face.”
Collins’s work ethic forces a very high bar for those staffers. “She
is incredibly demanding,” one person who used to work for Collins
told me. “She did not tolerate staff mistakes well.” This former staffer
told me of being called to the carpet via “very sharp emails.”
Some swear that her reputation as a tough County girlis key to
understanding why Collins is behaving the way she is now, politi-
cally. Speaking before impeachment proceedings, oneformer
staffer, also raised in Aroostook, told me, “The way to get her to
stand up to Trump is not to criticize her. She’s a kid from the
County; she’s stubborn and she doesn’t like to be insulted. The
thing to do would be to warmly tell her that standing up to Trump
would be five times the courage of Margaret Chase Smith standing
up to McCarthy; praise her backbone and challenge her to be great.”
But having all that County character can be a double-edged
sword, especially if part of the suspicion about you is that you’re not
being straightforward or available. This is something Collins’s