Maine

Find out more about your senators below.

Susan Collins

Susan Margaret Collins was born in the small northern Maine city of Caribou on December 7, 1952. Her family runs a fifth-generation lumber business, founded by her ancestors in 1844, and operated today by two of her brothers. Each of Senator Collins’ parents has served as Mayor of Caribou, and her father served Maine as a State Senator.

In 1975, she graduated with magna cum laude honors from St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where she was also elected to the Phi Beta Kappa national academic society.

After working for 12 years on the Capitol Hill staff of Maine Senator William Cohen, she joined the cabinet of Maine Governor John McKernan in 1987 as Commissioner of Professional and Financial Regulation. After five years in that post, she then served as New England Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration from 1992 to 1993.

In 1994, Senator Collins ran her first campaign for public office. She emerged from an eight-way Republican primary in June 1994 as the first woman in Maine history to win a major-party nomination for governor. She lost that fall’s general election, but remained committed to public service.

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Olympia Snowe

Before her election to the Senate, Olympia Snowe represented Maine’s Second Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives for sixteen years. Senator Snowe is only the fourth woman in history to be elected to both houses of Congress and the first woman in American history to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress. When first elected to Congress in 1978, at the age of 31, Olympia Snowe was the youngest Republican woman, and the first Greek-American woman, ever elected to Congress. She has won more federal elections in Maine than any other person since World War II.

In 2001, Snowe became the first Republican woman ever to secure a full-term seat on the Senate Finance Committee, and only the third woman in history to join the panel. She is the former Chair, and now Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship and a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. She also sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Prior to her service on the Finance Committee, Senator Snowe had been the fourth woman ever to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

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