Susan Collins' top super PAC Pine Tree Results PAC raised $12.7M for 2026.

The $2 million vote

The closest documented donation-to-vote sequence on record in the 2026 race. All three dates are public.

1. June 27, 2025

   Stephen Schwarzman wires $2,000,000to Pine Tree Results PAC. The contribution is recorded on the PAC's FEC Schedule A.

2. June 28, 2025

   Collins casts a key procedural vote to advance Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to the Senate floor. The motion-to-proceed passes 51-49. Vice President Vance is at the Capitol to break a tie if she votes no.

3. What the bill does

   Makes permanent the 20% pass-through business deduction — a tax provision Blackstone-style private-equity firms have long sought.

What about Bath Iron Works?

Collins regularly cites Bath Iron Works as a Maine success story she's protected. The shipyard's owner is not a Maine company.

Parent company

General Dynamics

Headquarters

Reston, Virginia

Career contributions to Collins

$208,328 (General Dynamics PAC, per OpenSecrets)

CEO

Phebe Novakovic (since 2013)

What Maine workers experienced under Novakovic

• Summer 2020:4,300 BIW machinists (IAM Local S6) struck for nine weeks over the company's use of outside contractors, seniority rules, and work assignments.
• July 2020:The company terminated striking workers' health benefits in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Striking workers received $150 per week in strike pay.
• The same period:General Dynamics spent roughly $450 million on stock buybacks while pressing for concessions from Maine's shipbuilders.
• $22 million:CEO Phebe Novakovic's total compensation in 2023. [SEC proxy filing]
• $66,700:Average Bath Iron Works employee salary (BIW's ~$447M 2023 payroll across ~6,700 employees). [Mainebiz]

The private equity industry — Collins' biggest financial backers

Susan Collins is one of the U.S. Senate's top recipients of private-equity money, and there's a documented favor behind it.

• She's the industry's favorite senator. ProPublica's 2020 reporting identified Collins as the No. 1 Senate recipient of private-equity donations that cycle. The pattern has held: about a third of Pine Tree Results PAC's $12.7M this cycle has come from financial-sector donors. [ProPublica]
• She tried to close a billionaire tax loophole — then backed down. In November 2017, Collins proposed closing the “carried interest” loophole to help fund a child-care credit. She dropped the amendment the next day and voted for Trump's tax bill, which kept the loophole intact. Tax experts told ProPublica the survival of the loophole likely saved Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman alone tens of millions in taxes. The industry has been a major source of her campaign money ever since. [ProPublica]
• The pattern repeated in 2025. Schwarzman's $2 million check landed one day before Collins cast the procedural vote that advanced Trump's tax bill — a law the Congressional Budget Office scored as cutting Medicaid spending by roughly $1 trillion over 10 years, paired with permanent tax breaks that disproportionately benefit large business owners including private-equity firms. [Common Dreams] [CBO]

What is Dirigo PAC?

Collins's “leadership PAC.” It does not fund her campaign. It funds her power inside the party — and it's run by the same operator as the $12.7M super PAC.

• $0 of it goes to her campaign. A leadership PAC legally can't fund a senator's own campaign beyond the $5,000 PAC cap, and the filings show none. In the 2026 cycle Dirigo PAC raised about $978,000.
• $278,500 went to other Republicans. The National Republican Senatorial Committee ($30,000), plus GOP candidates around the country — John Cornyn, Bill Hagerty, Harriet Hageman, the Husted and Moody (Florida) campaigns, a Paul LePage-for-Congress committee — and Maine GOP committees. This is how a leadership PAC buys influence and IOUs inside the party.
• $324,758 went to political operations. Fundraising consultants (Aristeia Group, ~$54,000), resort events (the Nonantum Resort, ~$36,000), a $25,000 strategy consultant — Steve Abbott, Collins's former chief of staff — and accounting through Koch & Hoos, LLC.
• Same operator as the super PAC. Dirigo PAC's treasurer is Theodore V. Koch — the same treasurer named on Pine Tree Results PAC, the $12.7M super PAC. Both file from Virginia. (A shared treasurer is a documented filing fact, not a claim of illegal coordination.)

Leonard Leo

The architect of the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade.

• A dark-money fund tied to Leo gave $1 million to the pro-Collins super PAC. Pine Tree Results PAC received $1,000,000 from the Lexington Fund on June 27, 2025 — the same day Stephen Schwarzman wired his $2 million, and one day before Collins's procedural vote advancing Trump's tax bill. The Lexington Fund is a 501(c)(4) arm of Leonard Leo's national dark-money network, the active successor entity to the recently dissolved Concord Fund (formerly Judicial Crisis Network). [FEC] [NOTUS]
• He built the conservative court that ended Roe. Leo, the longtime Federalist Society co-chair, advised the Trump White House on the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — the three justices whose votes were necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022). [NPR] [ProPublica]
• Collins cast the votes that made it possible. Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh on October 6, 2018 in a 50-48 vote — one of the closest Supreme Court confirmations in modern history. She also voted to confirm Gorsuch in 2017. Both justices later joined the Dobbs majority that overturned Roe — directly contradicting the testimony about precedent that Collins cited when she announced her Kavanaugh vote. [Kavanaugh roll call] [Gorsuch roll call]

The STOCK Act she wrote — and broke.

Susan Collins helped write the federal law requiring Congress to disclose its stock trades. In 2025 she violated it — and she opposes the bill that would end the conflict for good.

• She helped write the STOCK Act. In 2025, she broke it. In 2012 Collins co-championed the STOCK Act, the law requiring members of Congress to disclose stock and bond trades within 45 days. In 2025 her husband, Thomas Daffron, bought a Pfizer corporate bond ($15,001–$50,000); Collins disclosed it five days past the deadline — a violation of the law she helped pass. Her office blamed “a delay in notification from the third-party advisor.” [NOTUS] [The Maine Monitor]
• Her household holds stock in the industries she legislates. The Collins-Daffron portfolio includes defense contractors Boeing and RTX (Raytheon) — Collins is a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee — alongside the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck and the insurer UnitedHealth Group, while she sits on the Senate Health Committee, which oversees the FDA, CDC, and NIH. Most holdings are in her husband's name. [Colorado Newsline]
• She opposes banning congressional stock trading. In August 2025, Collins declined to support a bipartisan bill to bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks. Her position: members should be allowed to hold individual stocks as long as an outside advisor manages the portfolio — the same kind of “third-party advisor” her office blamed for her own disclosure violation. [Bangor Daily News]