Susan Collins as "County girl"

That's the label journalist Rebecca Traister uses repeatedly to refer to U.S. Senator Susan Collins in her just published feature in New York Magazine, "The Immoderate Susan Collins."  Why "County girl"?  Well, not only is Maine a pretty rural state, it turns out that Collins grew up in a particularly remote corner, Aroostook County, also known as "the County," hence County girl.  Aroostook is a massive local government unit that borders Canada; its population is 71,872 and falling, all spread across 6,800 acres. 

Here's an excerpt from Traister's story focusing on Collins' Aroostook roots:

Collins is from Caribou, a town of just about 8,000 in Aroostook County, Maine’s northernmost region. Aroostook, where my mother grew up on a potato farm about 60 miles south of Collins’s hometown, is rural, wooded, wild, and remote; once you get to Bangor, you keep driving more than an hour to enter it from the south. 

It’s also conservative; Maine’s liberal populations are clustered near Portland and on the coast, while everything north and west in the state is pretty red. When Collins was growing up, the County — as Aroostook is called in Maine — had a robust farming economy that has slowed, as well as military bases and a college that have since closed. 

Collins’s family has run a lumber and hardware business based in Caribou for five generations, and it wasn’t just her mother who was mayor; her father, Donald, was too, before he served five terms as a Republican in the state legislature. (Collins’s uncle was on the Maine Supreme Court and in the state senate.) 

And here's the first reference to "County girl":

Understanding Collins as a “County girl” is key to some of her appeal to Maine voters, at least to some of those who feel a rugged affection for the area and are aware of its rural character and long history of economic decline. 

Don Flannery, the head of the Maine Potato Board, who is a registered Republican (but has seldom voted a straight ticket), described his relationship with Collins as great, in part, because “she came from potato country, and grew up picking potatoes by hand, so she knew a lot about the industry.” Some years ago, when new science about low-carb diets, along with the nutritional advocacy of then–First Lady Michelle Obama, almost got potatoes kicked off school-hot-lunch and WIC programs, Flannery recalled, “Collins went to bat for the potato industry all across the U.S.” 

* * *  

Some swear that her reputation as a tough County girl is key to understanding why Collins is behaving the way she is now, politically. Speaking before impeachment proceedings, one former staffer, also raised in Aroostook, told me, “The way to get her to stand up to Trump is not to criticize her. She’s a kid from the County; she’s stubborn and she doesn’t like to be insulted. The thing to do would be to warmly tell her that standing up to Trump would be five times the courage of Margaret Chase Smith standing up to McCarthy; praise her backbone and challenge her to be great.” 

But having all that County character can be a double-edged sword, especially if part of the suspicion about you is that you’re not being straightforward or available. This is something Collins’s detractors mention again and again.

I'm a fan of Traister (who wrote Good and Mad:  The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger), and according to an NPR interview with the journalist, Traister's mother also grew up in the County.  This personal connection suggests that Traister knows something first hand about the character profile she proffers of the remote region.

Postscript:  This Brookings Institute piece, post-election, also touches on Collins' geographical provenance.