Welcome back to Maineweek Madness, an occasional column where Jezebel gazes wistfully North. This installment is dedicated to the construction guys who held my dog’s leash and politely listened to me sing John Prine karaoke after one too many at Skywalker’s Barre and Grille in Machias, back when we could do such things and John Prine was still alive. Thanks, guys! It would have been entirely appropriate for you to laugh, but you were so kind.
Today we have a big development on the Fuck Susan Collins beat, which is that something entirely predictable happened that nonetheless inches us closer to the day when Susan Collins gets finally and eternally fucked. Yesterday, Sara Gideon, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, formally became the Democratic nominee to challenge Collins for her seat in November. The race is one of the elections that will be influential in determining which party holds the Senate next year. As we have noted in the past, Susan Collins is best known these days for her soppy, disingenuous attitudes towards Brett Kavanaugh’s abortion stance and Donald Trump’s sense of contrition.
Though Gideon’s opponents included Bre Kidman—a queer attorney who righteously chose a guillotine as their campaign logo—and longtime lobbyist Betsy Sweet, Gideon’s victory seemed more or less inevitable given the embrace of her campaign from the Democratic establishment, even in a state that votes using ranked-choice. Gideon’s campaign allies included Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, and the Democratic New York Senator Chuck Schumer, giving her a wild advantage in terms of campaign contributions, as the Portland Press Herald notes:
Those high-profile endorsements helped Gideon raise more than $23 million for her campaign as of June 24, demolishing all previous fundraising records in Maine even before the Democratic primary. Since announcing her candidacy in June 2019, Gideon has focused almost exclusively on Collins, not her primary opponents.
Factoring in the nearly $17 million raised by Collins’ campaign to date and the tens of millions in spending by outside groups, Maine’s Senate race is already the most expensive race in state history and could be one of the costliest Senate races nationwide in 2020.
Now that Gideon has taken the official mantle as Collins’s challenger, she’s also getting the additional $4 million crowdfunded for whoever ended up running against the Republican following Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Collins, according to the New York Times, is a little concerned about the money and also bummed that all the state fairs she’d usually campaign at are canceled given Maine’s ongoing issues with the vi.
Perhaps in solidarity with Collins and her impending defeat, all kinds of terrifying creatures have been crawling around the state of Maine over the last couple of weeks. A motel owner in Norway, seeking to collect an unpaid bill, walked into one of his tenants’ rooms to find 53 spiders packed into various cages, including three tarantulas, which are illegal to own without a permit. The guest and his pals were evicted—many of the spiders to a natural science center; the man in question to parts unknown. It also appears that three counties have been designated as “high bear conflict” areas as either residents see more bears during quarantine or the animals, ravenous given the recent drought conditions, wander further afield.
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