Someone dumped a bucket of red paint outside Republican Senator Susan Collins’ office in Biddeford, Maine, on election eve and left four words on the sidewalk leading to the door. The message read “BLOOD on her HANDS,” with the first and last words in capital letters. It was the second time that fall someone had targeted the entrance. Collins said the office was open for business Tuesday.
The Main Street office is where people in southern Maine can go for help from the senator’s staff. Collins herself was at the other end of the state on Election Day, meeting voters in her native Aroostook County as she sought a sixth term in the U.S. Senate. Her Democratic challenger was Troy Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate, who had also spoken out the last time the office was vandalized.
Photographs the Collins campaign shared Tuesday showed a pool of paint beside the lettering and red splatter on the front doors. The September vandalism looked different. That time, someone had used red spray paint to write a vulgar insult referring to President Donald Trump directly on the door. This time, the words were on the pavement where anyone approaching the office could read them.
Biddeford police told WMTW that the call about the vandalism at 160 Main St. came in shortly before 11 p.m. Monday, November 2nd. By the time Collins stopped at Hub Coffee in Presque Isle on Tuesday, she had called the woman who runs the Biddeford office to ask if she was OK. Collins described that call to voters at the coffee shop, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Katie Brown, Collins’ chief of staff, told Fox News that she regarded the two incidents in Biddeford as attempts to intimidate both the senator and the people who worked for her. “These tactics are disturbing, but not effective,” Brown said. Jackson issued his own statement to the outlet after learning about the paint outside his opponent’s office. “There’s no place for this in Maine. Vandalism and intimidation are wrong, full stop.”
The Biddeford staff had also faced a protest that summer. In July, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national, near the senator’s office, the Associated Press reported. Days later, demonstrators went through the front doors chanting “vote her out.” As Trending Politics News reported, authorities had established no connection between that demonstration and the paint left outside on election eve.
Watch the coverage of the attack on Collins’ office here:
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Collins’ home in Bangor had been targeted as well. On September 18th, her husband, Tom Daffron, found eggs splattered on the garage door, front door, window and porch. A police report obtained by the Bangor Daily News put the egging between 4:45am and 5:10am that morning. An officer drove through the neighborhood to check whether anyone else had been hit and found that the Collins home was the only one.
When CBS News correspondent Jericka Duncan spoke with Collins on Election Day, the senator took issue with what her employees in Biddeford had faced when they came to work. “This is so unacceptable and it’s unfair to my caseworkers who are working there,” Collins said. She said the staff had kept the doors open so constituents could still come in that day.
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.