NO REPUBLICAN senator looms larger in the schemes of left-wing protesters than Susan Collins of Maine. One of the last New England moderates, a once-common Republican species, Ms Collins is considered the likeliest holdout against the draft Republican health-care reform that has overshadowed the week-long Independence Day recess. But on the evidence of her appearance at the Fourth of July parade held in Eastport, Maine, America’s easternmost city, liberals can relax.

“Everyone wants to talk about health care—I’ve never known everyone wanting to discuss the same issue like this before,” said Ms Collins, seated in an office at the town’s harbour, after she had marched alongside the local pipe bands, beauty queens and veterans, and chatted with the crowds that lined the parade route. “Almost everyone says the same things: ‘Stay strong’, ‘We’re with you’, ‘Thank you for being opposed to the Senate bill’.” Of the “hundreds and hundreds” of people who raised the issue with her in Eastport—which is in one of Maine’s most conservative counties, 56% of whose voters backed President Donald Trump last November—Ms Collins said only one person had told her to quit griping and repeal Barack Obama’s health-care regime, as the Republicans have long vowed to do.

For Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, this is the nightmare he had sought to forestall by trying to hustle the health-care bill—derided on the left as “Trumpcare”—through before the recess. Exposed to anxious voters—22m of whom stand to lose their health-care coverage over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of Trumpcare—Republican senators seem increasingly unlikely to rally behind Mr McConnell’s bill, or anything closely resembling it.

The left-wing activists will claim success for that, but should not. In fear of a barracking from angry lefties, only three of the 52 Republican senators, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jerry Moran of Kansas—all of whom criticised Mr McConnell’s bill—scheduled a town-hall hearing during the recess. Only four, including Ms Collins and Mr Cruz, were willing to advertise their Independence Day plans. Mr Cruz, who objects to the draft health-care bill on the basis that it retains too much of Obamacare’s pro-poor regulation, was rewarded by being greeted in McAllen, Texas, by protesters waving “Ted wants us dead” placards. (“Isn’t freedom wonderful?” he said.) Yet Republican lawmakers are more concerned about the effect of the threatened reform on their own voters, millions of whom could lose their health insurance under the draft bill.

Mr McConnell, who has himself been subjected to a range of protests—including a street-rave by gay dancers outside his Washington, DC, residence—maintains he will address all Republican objections to the bill, and bring it to the Senate floor shortly after the recess. He can hardly promise less. Republican lawmakers are also keenly aware that they face humiliation and a backlash from conservative voters if they—while in control of all arms of the government—cannot claim to have scrapped Obamacare, after having promised for seven years that they would.

Under the provisions of the draft bill, which would cut an estimated $160bn from annual Medicaid spending by 2026 compared with current plans, Mr McConnell has substantial means at his disposal to try to coax support. Some senators, led by Rob Portman of Ohio, worry that narrower Medicaid coverage would jeopardise treatment for opioid addiction (see article). A dollop of extra cash for the affected states might go a long way to satisfying that complaint. But even with his war-chest, and reputation for ruthlessness and cunning, Mr McConnell may fail.

To muster the 50 votes he needs (assuming Mike Pence, the vice-president, is prepared to cast a tiebreaking vote for his party), the majority leader can afford to lose the support of no more than two senators (also assuming no Democratic senator backs his bill). Currently, at least two moderates, including Ms Collins, and four hard-line conservatives, including Mr Cruz, have said they cannot support it in its current form. And Mr McConnell cannot expect much help from the president in bringing them into line. An attempt by Mr Trump to drum up support for the Republican bill, at a pre-recess gathering of Republican senators at the White House, was unsuccessful. The president appeared not to understand the bill he was lobbying for.

Maine-lining

If conservative holdouts such as Mr Cruz may yet come around, Ms Collins appears pretty much irreconcilable. “It is hard for me to see how we get there,” she said. “If Senator Mitch McConnell can satisfy my concerns so that we no longer have 22m people losing insurance and deep cuts to Medicaid, he will have problems satisfying some of our more conservative colleagues.” Ms Collins also ruled out two alternative reforms belatedly being pushed by some Republicans—which indicates how little Mr McConnell’s convoluted proposed makeover of Obamacare is liked by any of them.

The first, offered by Mr Trump (in a tweet) and backed by at least two senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ben Sasse of Nebraska, would scrap Obamacare and only later, over the course of an extended phase-out period, worry about what to replace it with. “I would not support that and I do not believe it would have widespread support,” said Ms Collins. “I’m afraid, if you look at our current difficulties, we would never get to ‘replace’. Many of the people involved in the debate want to diminish the role of the government in providing medical care.” A proposal by Mr Cruz, who is certainly one of them, to placate moderates by retaining Obamacare’s subsidies and conservatives by allowing insurers to provide only bare-bones coverage, was also a non-starter for Ms Collins. “I don’t want to see insurance that’s not really insurance.”

Time is against Mr McConnell. The Senate is due to break up for a month-long recess on July 28th, and other important business is encroaching. Congress must pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling, or risk the federal government running out of cash by the end of September. That is liable to lead to similar clashes between moderates and conservatives and, on the Republicans’ past form, the party’s leaders may require support from the Democrats to end the impasse. Though if the Republicans have just wrecked Obamacare—the proudest achievement of a president revered by Democrats—that support might not be forthcoming. This is an additional headache for Mr McConnell.

The debacle suggests he, instead of improving on Obamacare, is determined to recreate its biggest political weaknesses, and throw in some new ones, too. Mr Obama did at least try to persuade his opponents to back his health-care proposal. Yet the fact that Obamacare was passed without any Republican support made it so toxically divisive that the parties have never talked seriously about co-operating to improve it. Mr McConnell is now promising the same again—a reform that, because of the complexity of health-care policy, as well as the inevitable compromises, misjudgements and oversights, will at some point require bipartisan remedial action, which, for the same reason, would probably be unavailable to it.

This would be a poor way to govern even if the stakes—the health care of millions and a sector equivalent to nearly a fifth of the economy—were not so high. “The Republican leadership is making the same mistake President Obama made,” sighed Ms Collins. “It has written a very complex, major health-care bill without support from the other side.” If politics would only permit compromise, she claims, a group of ten Democratic senators would stand ready to work with moderate Republicans to fix Obamacare’s high deductibles, shallow markets and other problems. But that is currently unimaginable.

Meanwhile, the longer the Republicans remain consumed by this issue, the likelier voters are to start pinning their many complaints about health care on their party—whether Mr McConnell passes his reform or not. “I’ve always voted Republican, but I don’t know why, or if I will again,” said Rose, a mental-health nurse and middle-aged mother, at the parade in Eastport. Access to Medicaid, for her and her family, she said, was her biggest worry.