It’s hard to know how much trouble she really was in, but there’s no question that the party activists in Maine have been moving in LePage’s direction for years.

It didn’t take long for Collins to change trajectory. A month after her announcement in Rockport, she showed up in Biddeford with Ivanka Trump. Then Collins voted for the tax bill, even though she knew provisions in it would destabilize the health insurance market and drive up premiums.

At the time of her vote, Collins told reporters that she had two separate bills to fix that problem and an “ironclad” promise from Vice President Mike Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that her bills would pass by year’s end. By March, there was no bill, but Collins blamed Democrats for the failure – she didn’t blame her party’s leadership.

Blaming the other party for being partisan was also a theme of her speech in which she explained her vote for Kavanaugh. She failed to mention that Kavanaugh himself had set a new standard for partisanship, at one point warning Democratic senators “what goes around comes around.”

Whether her shift to the right was intentional or intuitive, it appears to have worked – if the volume of letters to the editor means anything.

Along with the anguished letters from former Collins supporters who say they will never vote for her again, we are getting multiple letters of support from the same people who used to call her RINO, for “Republican in Name Only.”

According to Collins’ spokeswoman Annie Clark, it’s the commentators, not Collins, who changed. “The pundits seem to let the anger of the far left influence their predictions for the future – and thus they are forced to conclude that whenever Sen. Collins sides with the Democrats it is because she has taken a principled position and courageously stood against her party,” Clark told me in an email. “When she sides with the Republicans, however, it is because she has a cynical political motive or has caved to party pressure, or both.”

This is a bad time in history to make predictions. But it’s not a prediction to look backward and notice that Collins could have used her swing-vote power as leverage against Trump or to force her party to re-establish bipartisan norms in the Senate. She chose not to.

In doing so, she may have lost the pundits, but she has gained one important fan.

Interrupting himself at Kavanaugh’s swearing-in ceremony Oct. 6, President Trump said: “I thought that Susan was incredible yesterday. … I have great respect for Susan Collins. And I always have.”

Greg Kesich is the editorial page editor of the Portland Press Herald. He can be contacted at:

gkesich@pressherald.com

Twitter: gregkesich