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Booed In Maine, Collins Faces Dimming Prospects In Midterm

When Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) spoke at a late August ribbon-cutting ceremony in her state, she was aggressively booed and heckled by attendees. This booing was quite a contrast to the enthusiastic support she enjoyed in Maine in the past, when she was reelected by 23 percent in 2008 and 37 percent in 2014.

Maine voters were quite willing to split their tickets in 2008, choosing Barack Obama in the presidential race while voting overwhelmingly to give Republican Collins another term in the U.S. Senate.

MSNBC's Steve Benen, in an opinion column published on August 28, stresses that the booing Collins recently suffered underscores a broader problem in the GOP. President Donald Trump's economic policies, according to Benen, are wildly unpopular — and even a moderate conservative like Collins is having a hard time distancing herself from them.

The recent booing, according to Benen, is quite a contrast to 2017 — when she voted "no," along with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), on a Trump-backed bill that would have overturned the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (also known as "Obamacare").

"In July 2017," Benen recalls, "Republican Sen. Susan Collins made a routine trip home, as she'd done countless times during her lengthy congressional career. But this time, her arrival was quite a bit different: After walking into the terminal at Bangor International Airport, the senator was greeted with spontaneous applause. There was no great mystery as to why: Collins had just voted to derail the Republican Party's far-right health care gambit, and relieved Mainers apparently wanted to show their appreciation for her having done the right thing to protect the public from her own party's agenda."

Benen adds, "Collins, receiving the kind of outpouring of support most members of Congress can only dream of, described the scene as 'amazing.' Eight years later, the GOP incumbent is facing a very different kind of public reception in her home state."

Collins, now in her fifth term, is up for reelection in the 2026 midterms — and the recent booing, according to Benen, "probably wasn't encouraging."

"Collins' detractors raised a variety of points, though at this specific event, a local report from the Midcoast Villager noted, 'Detractors questioned Collins’ role in celebrating new spending while President Donald Trump and her fellow Republicans in Congress push through federal budget cuts to health care, food assistance and other services.'"

Benen continues, "The senator has argued that when her party's far-right megabill recently came to the Senate floor, she voted against it. That's true. But it's also true that when the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act needed to clear a key procedural hurdle a few days earlier, which allowed senators to advance the radical legislation, Collins voted with her party and the megabill's proponents — even as some other Senate Republicans sided with the package's Democratic opponents. Some of her constituents appear to have noticed."

Collins, now in her fifth term, is up for reelection in the 2026 midterms — and the recent booing, according to Benen, "probably wasn't encouraging."

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Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.

Report typos and corrections to: feedback@alternet.org.

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Bannon Outlines MAGA Plan To Suppress Votes And Subvert 2026 Elections

War Room host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon this week spelled out a vision of how MAGA media could attempt to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, including by advocating for the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling places, extreme Congressional redistricting, and a mail-in voting ban.

Bannon’s proposed playbook is an evolution of the MAGA movement’s central ideological myth, which asserts that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. This load-bearing fantasy supports any number of related policies, including MAGA media’s oft-repeated threat that every immigrant who came to the United States without authorization during the Biden administration must be deported.

It’s only a matter of time before election denial again becomes ubiquitous in right-wing media, as it did in the run-up to the 2022 midterms and prior to the 2024 general election. Beyond false claims about noncitizen voting, right-wing pundits also spread conspiracy theories in 2020 about Dominion voting machines and wrongly asserted that some votes had been flipped in 2024.

This history is key to understanding the moves that the Trump White House and MAGA media are making in anticipation of the 2026 midterms with the goal of cementing power through a host of anti-democratic means, including:

Sending federal police, the National Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to occupy liberal cities like an invading army.
Seeking to ban mail-in voting.
Pushing for unprecedented, mid-decade Congressional redistricting efforts.
Attempting to purge voter rolls and suppress turnout by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
Calling for a mid-decade census that would exclude people in the United States without authorization, which experts have argued would be unconstitutional.

Bannon laid out MAGA media’s theory of the case during his Tuesday morning show.

The Trump administration must “get these elections squared away, for once and all,” Bannon said, adding, “No mail-in ballots.”

A day earlier, Trump posted on Truth Social that he would “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we're at it, Highly 'Inaccurate,' Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” (Trump’s claim that voting machines are unreliable is false.)

Bannon then escalated his rhetoric, demanding that ICE agents enforce voter ID measures in cities throughout the country, seemingly without regard to local and state laws.

“They're petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we're taking control of the cities, there's going to be ICE officers near polling places,” Bannon said. “You damn right.”

“If you don't have an ID — if you're not a citizen — you're not voting,” he said.

Bannon’s threat is not idle, given the Trump administration’s posture toward some of the country’s biggest cities. In June, Trump deployed ICE agents to Los Angeles to carry out workplace raids, subsequently calling in the National Guard for additional repressive power. Then in August, Trump took over Washington’s local police department and surged federal police on the city’s streets. Once again, Trump sent in the National Guard; Republican governors lined up to provide their state’s troops to serve his ends. Trump has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to New York City, Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland, and has directed ICE to ramp up deportations in cities run by Democrats.

Some of Bannon’s allies have attempted to suppress voter turnout by monitoring ballot drop boxes and otherwise harassing election workers. Now, as the Trump administration prepares to hire an additional 10,000 ICE agents thanks to a newly passed Republican budget, Bannon’s demand that immigration cops stalk polling places doesn’t seem far-fetched.

Already, election denial activist Jenny Beth Martin and her group, Tea Party Patriots, are going on tour to promote the SAVE Act, an anti-voting rights bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Martin’s group sponsored a rally on January 6, 2021, and in 2024 she bragged that she was helping to train poll watchers for the election that year.

In his Tuesday morning monologue, Bannon also called for a “maximalist policy” on redrawing Congressional maps ahead of next year’s midterms instead of waiting until the end of the decade for the completion of the census. Trump initiated the fight, calling for Texas to redraw its maps to produce five more Republican seats in the House of Representatives. Some Democratic governors have matched Trump’s gambit, saying they’ll attempt to do the same in their own states.

In addition to Texas, Bannon called for “Indiana, Missouri, South Carolina, Florida, [and] Ohio,” to create new Republican seats through extreme gerrymandering in order to protect Trump from possible impeachment should Democrats win back the House. Trump has “a lot more than a year and a half's worth of work left,” Bannon said. “He's got more than this term and beyond.”

Bannon reiterated his threats on Wednesday, tying them explicitly to the midterms.

“Remember, for 2026, the mid-decade census that has to be right this time,” Bannon said. “No illegal aliens. You’ve got to get the algorithms right. And the collection — all the mistakes that we had. Also, the redistricting.”

“The last is the mail-in ballots,” Bannon said.

“And the left is sitting there going, well gosh, they take away mail-in ballots, people are going to have to show up, they’re going to have ICE agents around, people are going to be so afraid, intimidated, they’re going to be arrested,” Bannon added. “Well, hey, if you’re an illegal alien you shouldn’t be going to the polls anyway.”

On Wednesday, the Texas House passed a new redistricting map expected to yield an additional five Republican seats. Trump celebrated the result in a post on Truth Social, adding that if Republicans “STOP MAIL-IN VOTING” and “go to PAPER BALLOTS,” Republicans will “will pick up 100 more seats, and the CROOKED game of politics is over.”

The MAGA movement’s attacks on immigrants, voting rights, and cities they don’t control are all attempts to further entrench Trump’s political power and eliminate any possible checks or balances on it. Right-wing media figures are salivating at the opportunity to punish their opponents. It’s incumbent on legacy media to tell the whole story and draw these connections. After all, Bannon and his fellow travelers in MAGA media are very open about their playbook.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

GOP Insiders Fear Trump Economy Is 'Ticking Timebomb' For Midterm

During the 2024 presidential race, Donald Trump used his own variation of Democratic strategist James Carville's famous 1992 line, "It's the economy, stupid." Trump hammered then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris relentlessly on the economy — namely, inflation. And Trump's allies repeatedly claimed that while Democrats were obsessing over pronouns, he was worried about affordability.

It was a close election, but Trump's messaging on the economy helped him get past the finish line and win the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent. But now, seven months into Trump's second presidency, some Republicans are, according to Wired, expressing their fears about the U.S. economy and the 2026 midterms behind closed doors.

In an article published on August 20, Wired's Jake Lahut reports that publicly, members of the Trump Administration are saying "no panicans" — meaning, stay the course, and don't panic over economic news. But privately, Lahut stresses, GOP insiders are worried.

"The (Trump) Administration's areas of focus — deporting immigrants whose labor powers key sectors like agriculture and construction, levying tariffs, and cutting social services among them — have done more than simply increase uncertainty," Lahut explains. "Hiring and tourism have already slowed dramatically in major U.S. cities from Las Vegas to New York in the first half of the year, and Trump has put almost all the ingredients in place for slow growth amid high unemployment and inflation, the potent combination known as stagflation. Behind the scenes, as more tariffs begin to kick in and punted deadlines approach — particularly a tariff hike on Chinese goods, now set to jump from 30 percent to 80 percent by November 10 — some Republicans in Trumpworld's orbit are bracing for impact."

According to Lahut, GOP insiders interviewed by Wired are "growing a little bit anxious about where the economy is heading."

Trump's tariffs, Lahut notes, "could be a ticking timebomb" for Republicans if prices soar and voters blame Republicans.

A GOP strategist, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Wired, "I'm probably surprised that there has not been more concern. I think the reality is that we’re at that sort of inflection point, where retailers were reluctant to raise prices because they feared retaliation from the (Trump) Administration. Now, the reality is setting in that these are not transitory. There are going to be economic consequences."

Another GOP strategist, also quoted anonymously, told Wired, "If this experiment fails, it’s gonna fail horribly, and I think we’ll begin to see the impacts of that sooner than later."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

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