Lose the ‘R’ Or Take the ‘L’?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has a reputation for bipartisanship that may actually understate the case: As the Lugar Center runs the numbers, she is the single most bipartisan member of the Senate, meaning the one most likely to cosponsor legislation with members of the opposing party. Bipartisan in this sense is not necessarily a synonym for moderate or centrist—note that Sen. John Cornyn of Texas ranks high on the bipartisanship index, too—but Sen. Collins is hardly a right-wing ideologue or a conservative hardliner: She is typically ranked as the most moderate Republican in the Senate and the most ideologically centrist senator overall.

 

Moderation and centrism are not necessarily virtuous: A man should not be moderately honest or split the difference between virtue and vice. But in the realm of electoral politics—and, especially, in this time of populist demagoguery—bipartisanship and moderation have real practical value. We do not want our elected officials to be easily carried away by ideological enthusiasm and passion—especially in the Senate, which is meant to be a brake to the House’s accelerator. And because we have a big election every two years, the only sure path to creating a stable policy environment (and there are many cases in which an imperfect stable policy is preferable to an improved but unstable policy) is bipartisanship.

 

Sen. Collins also provides a reminder that more than a few supposed conservatives in our time need: To be conservative is not the same thing as to be a right-wing revolutionist. Republican partisans may complain that they would like to see Sen. Collins be more conservative and less moderate (and I repent of having demanded that of Sen. Collins and others over the years) but, properly understood, such moderation is conservative. About that much my radical left-wing friends are correct: The moderating impulse is inherently conservative, necessarily counter-revolutionary. Being a conservative, I do not care for revolutions.

 

“Oh, to hell with that!” Democrats will respond as they shop around for a new challenger to Sen. Collins in the wake of Graham Platner’s spectacular self-immolation. Thus goes the argument: Sen. Collins is a Republican, and, as such, she is a vote for Republican priorities—for the foreseeable future, Donald Trump’s priorities—a vote for Republican leadership in the Senate that will be utterly subservient to Trump’s whimsy and madness, and a vote for Trump’s appointments to the federal bench and other high offices. Sen. Collins voted to impeach Trump in 2021 but voted to acquit him in 2020, and she is not a certain vote to convict him in the impeachment Democrats likely would undertake should they take the House after the midterm elections.

 

If Sen. Collins is returned to the Senate and must vote in a future impeachment of Donald Trump, it probably would be the most consequential vote of her career—and no one knows how she would vote. That probably speaks well of Collins—that we do not know how she would vote in a case in which the facts are unknown and that may involve acts not yet committed; but if your first political priority is banishing Trump from American political life—and there is a case that it should be so—then a Democrat who is committed to voting to convict in any case, whatever facts emerge, would be a more reliable bet and a more irresponsible senator: more reliable because more irresponsible.

 

What a position to be in.

 

If Sen. Collins wished to break definitively with Trump and her party’s leaders, this would be the time to do it. In 1983, U.S. Rep. Phil Gramm, a Texas Democrat, decided his party was going the wrong way and, after a confrontation with Democratic leaders in the House, resigned his seat in order to force a special election, which he successfully contested as a Republican. “I dared to practice in Washington what I preached at home,” Gramm said of his alienation from his party. Gramm was, and is, a man of principle. When it comes to managing the demands of a party, there is a high road—but it can be a lonesome one.

 

Party is not everything. But it is something.

 

As my colleague Jonah Goldberg often points out, Americans vote—and argue—as though we lived under a parliamentary democracy in which the majority party gets its way for the time it is in power and that’s that, making party preference more politically salient than a voter’s private judgment about any individual candidate. Our system is not set up that way: Even where there is a “trifecta”—meaning a single party in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress—those are usually short-lived, and, beyond that, our constitutional order gives the states a say in policymaking, too, and puts hard limits on the government’s ability to do certain things. To take a familiar example: Democrats are very, very keen on limiting Americans’ ability to engage in political speech, but, unless they repeal the First Amendment, no Democratic trifecta in Washington can actually do the thing that so many Democrats want to do.

 

We do not have a parliamentary system. But we do have parties and party-line voting, and, consequently, the character of the parties matters and may be considered independently of the question of the character of the individual candidate. The Democratic case against Sen. Collins is, simply, her membership in the Republican Party: Sen. Collins may be moderate, centrist, bipartisan, etc., but her party is a dangerous and demagogic personality cult mired in corruption. The question Democrats will put before the voters of Maine is whether the Republicans as a group are so depraved that one cannot in good conscience support even the most anodyne individual candidate among them.

 

Democrats will make that argument this year and may have some luck with it. More relevant is the fact that Republicans have been making that argument on Democrats’ behalf since 2016 and are, if anything, much more persuasive in making it. They’ve certainly managed to convince me, and I’m far from a New England moderate swing voter.

 

It may be that Sen. Collins’ real choice is to lose the “R” or take the “L.”