Susan Collins should never be underestimated. She won her first Senate election 30 years ago, and her sheer tenacity in staying in power is formidable, especially since, over the course of her political career, Maine hasn’t been hospitable ground for Republicans (the state last gave the popular vote to a GOP president in 1988). Collins has kept her seat by repeatedly convincing Maine voters that she’s a different kind of Republican. Along the way, she’s broken all sorts of records: She’s the longest-serving member of Congress from Maine and the longest-serving female Republican senator in history. Earlier this year, The New York Times recorded that she was “the first senator in history to reach 10,000 consecutive votes cast without an absence.”

The Senate, along with the Supreme Court, is a bulwark of American gerontocracy—an institution where seniority is power. Just by hanging around long enough, Collins has become the chair of the Appropriations Committee, an immensely powerful post that itself helps her win reelections by allowing her to shower Maine with government largesse. For voters, the choice between Collins and any Democrat carries with it a brutal cost/benefit equation whereby ideological rectitude has to be weighed against losing a senator who can bring home the bacon. Time and again, Mainers have opted for the bacon; in 2020, Collins won reelection by more than 8 percent even as Donald Trump was trounced in the state by 11 percent.

But Collins’s undeniable gift for pork-barrel spending could now come back to haunt her, thanks to a new pay-for-play scandal broken on Tuesday by ProPublica. The ProPublica story focuses on Collins’s links to Martin Kao, the former CEO of a defense contractor called Navatek. Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison for bank fraud and Covid relief fraud.

Prior to his conviction, Kao had provided damning testimony to the FBI about a political quid pro quo scheme he was working. Legally, defense contractors are not allowed to donate to campaigns, so Kao used shell corporations to donate to super PACs supporting politicians who promoted Navatek projects to the Pentagon. Collins and her office were in the crosshairs of the FBI investigation into Kao’s activities, but the senator was saved from possible criminal charges by Donald Trump’s reelection, which led the president to fire FBI agents working on the investigation (some of whom had also investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election).

According to ProPublica:

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Collins’ office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations…. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.

Collins’s office denies any wrongdoing and claims that they have “disgorged” any money received from Kao. But as ProPublica notes, these denials are themselves filled with misleading claims.

ProPublica’s reporting shows that Kao’s operation was almost comically corrupt. Navatek received tens of millions in government contracts, but produced almost no useful technology for the Pentagon. In 2019, Navatek sent a check for $150,000 to a Collins-supporting PAC in the name of a shell group: “the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers.” (This name contained a typo: “scientist” should have been plural.) The check was made after Kao had met with Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, at the Corner Bakery in Washington.

According to ProPublica, “The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.” A lawyer for the super PAC advised Kao to try to make the shell organization look more legitimate by “giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.” Kao would follow this advice, but not with a gracious spirit. He complained the charitable spending was “just a pack of bitches getting free $.”

Despite the denials of Collins’s office, the ProPublica report is damning. It’s also being picked up by local media in Maine. Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate in the Senate race, put out a punchy ad quoting the reporting and labelling his rival “Corrupt Collins.”

Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that Corrupt Collins will pay any price for her shady dealings. Polls have shown a close race between Collins and Jackson. On Thursday, The New York Times and Siena released a disheartening poll showing Collins with a lead of 49 percent as against 46 percent for Jackson.

This poll might be an outlier and was conducted before the Navatek scandal broke, but there is good reason to be pessimistic about Jackson’s chances. Jackson is a replacement candidate. The original winner of the Democratic Senatorial nomination was Graham Platner, who dropped out in July after the emergence of a rape allegation (which Platner denies).

Jackson is a soft-spoken candidate with a working-class background and links to the populist wing of the Democratic Party. He’s an appealing candidate but undercut by divisions within his own party. Maine Governor Janet Mills, who was defeated by Platner for the senatorial nomination, refuses to endorse Jackson.

Further, after Platner’s career imploded, the centrist faction he had defeated reasserted itself. Rebecca Traister, writing in New York, reports that Jackson’s campaign has been taken over by consultants who have pushed the candidate to adopt more centrist stances (despite the fact that his inclinations are progressive and that he and Platner both won an overwhelming landslide in their primaries on a progressive agenda). Traister notes:

the Democratic side of the race has been defined by an unsure candidate with little national experience, thrust into a huge and disorienting spotlight and counseled by a cadre of hardened advisers from out of state who are trying to guide him to victory in extremely challenging circumstances. These consultants, some connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and national party leaders, have strong views on how to win tough elections: flood the airwaves with ads, stay ultradisciplined on the kind of messaging that will prompt donors to open their pockets, and appeal to centrist voters they imagine as a 55-year-old suburban woman who voted for Hillary Clinton and Collins.

This has led to the campaign’s sending out mixed messages, which has confused voters. The result is a tightening of the race, with the real possibility that Collins might now be the front-runner.

The Navatek scandal offers Jackson a way to break with his centrist consultants and run once again as a progressive. Given the dire state of the economy, with fuel prices rising thanks to Donald Trump’s war, Jackson can seize on a populist message of rejecting Washington corruption that lets the rich prosper by breaking the rules. Although Collins likes to position herself as more moderate than MAGA, the Navatek scandal links her to Trump in a direct way: His purge of the FBI benefited her.

The midterms are shaping up to be a blue wave. It would be a shame amid this wave for the Democrats to lose to Collins again.