What Susan Collins Just Did on Trump and ICE Should Worry All Dems

To be fair, Maine Democrats are pushing back hard on Collins’s ploy. “Collins’s support handed ICE $70 billion with no guardrails,” the campaign of Democratic challenger Troy Jackson told me in a statement. “If she wants credit for a bodycam headline this week, she can start by explaining why she voted to fund ICE with a blank check and zero accountability attached.”

What’s more, Democrats assure me they take seriously the need to prevent Collins from turning the tables on ICE in any way. They say Collins is already in deep trouble on inflation and health care, issues that will drive the race. They doubt Collins can use ICE bodycams to establish her independence in the face of those other overwhelming problems. Even if she tries, they say, it will only remind people of her votes to empower ICE.

But the worry here is not that Collins can suddenly campaign aggressively to transform ICE into a uniformly winning issue for herself. She’ll still have to tiptoe around it. What can happen, however, is that she starts citing the securing of bodycams in a longer litany of things that demonstrate her willingness to take on Trump on Maine’s behalf.