How Sen. Susan Collins' allegiance to Trump has been a disaster for her popularity

A new Morning Consult poll suggests things are looking grim for Senate Republicans in their quest to keep their majority in 2020. But the worst news of all is for Sen. Susan Collins, who has plummeted further than any other sitting senator in approval ratings.

Morning Consult conducts Senate approval rankings every quarter, so this is comparing apples to apples, and damn, these are bad apples for Collins. "Collins' net approval—the share of voters who approve of her job performance minus the share who disapprove—has fallen by 44 percentage points since the first quarter of 2017, when Trump took office." She's underwater this time, with 48% disapproving and a positive rate of 45%. She's lost 16 net points since the first quarter of this year. That means her strategy of consolidating the hard-right vote to try to stave off a potential challenge from her right is driving away voters.

She's in what has been the most dangerous time for her yet, and her pathetic excuse for a reprimand to Trump for his racist tweets isn't helping her. As Maine's leading political sage writes, Collins issued a 70-word statement on Trump's racist tweets that took more than 24 hours to produce, and the first 40 of those words were an attack on the same women Trump took after.

"That's pandering, pure and simple." Bill Nemitz writes. "What's worse, it renders Collins complicit in normalizing behavior that once would have evoked universal—and unequivocal—condemnation from all corners of Capitol Hill. […] [D]id Collins simply wait for her marching orders from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his tight-lipped minions: Be sure to go after 'The Squad' first and, above all, no use of the 'r' word, capiche?" Everyone in Maine who cares at all about politics is reading Nemitz and nodding their heads right now.

Collins is "tiptoeing without a safety net" on the tightrope between her moderate past and her present allegiance to Trump and the worst of his base, and doing it in front of a fed-up audience.