Vance calls Susan Collins a 'dear friend' during Maine stop she skipped for the second time

Vice President JD Vance lavished praise on Sen. Susan Collins during a campaign event in Maine on Monday, but the Republican senator was nowhere in sight, choosing to stay away from the administration's top surrogate for the second time in a row.

Vance traveled to a manufacturing facility in Brewer, Maine, to stump for former Gov. Paul LePage, who is running for Maine's 2nd Congressional District. But before turning to the main event, the vice president spent several minutes offering an unprompted, extended tribute to Collins, calling her a "dear friend" and "amazing" at her job, the Washington Examiner reported.

Collins, who faces a tight reelection fight against Democrat Troy Jackson, cited a scheduling conflict. Her campaign spokesman Blake Kernan told the Examiner that the senator's personal schedule prevented her from attending and pointed to her working relationship with Vance as evidence of no friction between the two.

But the absence was not a one-off. Fox News reported that Collins also declined to appear alongside Vance during his earlier visit to Maine in May, making Monday the second consecutive time the senator has avoided sharing a stage with the vice president in her home state.

Collins breaks with the administration on tariffs and mail-in voting

The pattern fits a broader strategy. Collins has publicly opposed President Trump's 50-percent tariffs on Canadian goods and new U.S. Postal Service rules restricting mail-in voting, two positions that put her at odds with the White House in a state where independent voters hold outsized power. Rather than appear at the Brewer rally, Collins gave a local news interview criticizing the tariffs, the New York Post reported.

Collins has also broken with most Senate Republicans on two other fronts. She announced earlier this month that she would oppose the confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general. And in April, she voted with Democrats to advance an Iran war powers resolution aimed at withdrawing American forces from Iran, a vote that put her on the opposite side of the majority of her own caucus.

Vance, for his part, has been deeply involved in the administration's Iran policy, making Collins's April vote a direct point of friction between the two, even if neither chose to say so publicly on Monday.

Vance's praise carried a pointed edge

If there was tension, Vance buried it under a thick layer of goodwill. He told the Brewer crowd that Collins visits his residence at the Naval Observatory regularly and described her as relentlessly focused on her state.

Vance said in his remarks:

"And whenever I'm in Maine, I got to give Susan a little bit of crap, because as you know, Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate, and as the president of the United States Senate, she sometimes makes my job just a little bit harder."

He followed that with what amounted to a full character endorsement. Vance said Collins visits his home "probably a half dozen times" and that he has "never seen a person who is more attuned to the details of every single thing."

He continued:

"She's always asking, 'What does this do for Maine? How is this good for Maine? How is this bad for Maine?' And she tries to get as much good for this state out of Washington and as little bad out of Washington for this state."

Vance closed his Collins tribute by calling it "a very hard job" and asking the audience to "give it up to our very independent friend Susan Collins." The crowd obliged, even without the senator present to hear it.

Fox News also quoted Vance acknowledging the dynamic more candidly: "Sometimes I get frustrated with Susan Collins... I almost wish that she was more partisan."

Why the White House needs Collins despite the distance

The vice president's warm public posture toward a senator who routinely crosses the administration is not accidental. Democrats need to flip four Senate seats to retake the chamber, and Collins's seat in blue-leaning Maine is near the top of their target list. Her race against Troy Jackson is described as one of the tightest of the cycle.

Trump endorsed Collins's reelection bid in June, back when she was expected to face Graham Platner in a primary. Platner later exited the race after reports surfaced about controversial behavior with past girlfriends. With the primary threat gone, the White House has avoided backing any challenger against Collins, a practical calculation that her independent brand, however inconvenient, is better than handing the seat to a Democrat.

Vance's role as the administration's chief campaign surrogate has kept him busy. Monday's Brewer stop was his second visit to Maine in a single month. He used the event to promote what he called a "manufacturing renaissance," delivering remarks at a defense technology manufacturer, Just The News reported. The vice president has been crisscrossing the country stumping for Republican candidates ahead of the midterms, even as he navigates internal party tensions on other fronts.

Collins, meanwhile, appears content to let the vice president say nice things about her from a distance, so long as she does not have to stand next to him while he says them.

Collins's reelection math runs through independence

The senator's calculation is straightforward. Maine gave its electoral votes to the Democratic presidential nominee in three of the last four cycles. Collins won her last race in 2020 by a comfortable margin, but only after convincing enough independents and crossover voters that she answered to Maine, not to Washington. Standing arm-in-arm with a Trump administration surrogate, no matter how friendly, risks undoing that brand at the worst possible moment.

Vance seems to understand the math. His public remarks contained no criticism of Collins's votes against the administration. He did not mention her opposition to the attorney general nominee or her siding with Democrats on Iran. He framed her independence as a feature, not a defect, even calling her the Senate's "most independent member," a label most Republican base voters would not consider a compliment.

Whether rank-and-file conservatives in Maine share Vance's generosity remains an open question. Collins has built a career on threading the needle between party loyalty and bipartisan appeal. That needle gets harder to thread when the vice president has to praise you at an event you chose not to attend, twice.

Vance's rising national profile makes the optics sharper. He is not a backbench surrogate Collins can quietly dodge. He is the vice president, the president of the Senate, and the most visible face of the Republican Party's midterm push. Every time Collins declines to appear with him, the absence itself becomes a story.

For now, the arrangement seems to work for both sides. Vance gets to look magnanimous. Collins gets to look independent. And Democrats get to point out that the Republican senator from Maine cannot bring herself to share a stage with her own party's vice president.

The question is whether voters see a senator who fights for Maine, or one who wants it both ways. Vance's travel schedule will bring him back to competitive states again and again before November. If Collins keeps finding reasons to be somewhere else, the scheduling excuse will wear thin long before the ballots are counted.

In politics, you can praise a colleague from the podium or you can stand beside them. Collins wants the praise without the photo. Sooner or later, Maine voters will decide whether that counts as independence, or just having it both ways.