Rep. Jared Golden is best known for being a Democrat willing to buck his party. That makes sense in Maine’s 2nd District, which voted for President Donald Trump three times while also backing Golden in four straight elections.
And he’s been that way since his first job in politics. In 2011 the Marine Corps veteran went to work for Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who has her own reputation of sometimes breaking party ranks.
“I had zero discomfort with the concept,” he said when asked if he had been wary of staffing a Republican. “It was like, no, this is one of Maine’s senators, right?”
He stayed with Collins until 2013, when he left to work in the Maine legislature. He soon ran for — and won — a seat in the state House, serving there for four years before coming to Congress.
Golden sat down with Roll Call earlier this month to look back on his time as a staffer. Though his name has been floated in recent years as a potential contender for statewide office, including as a challenger to Collins, he once again reaffirmed he would be running for his House seat in 2026.
Meanwhile, Golden has some thoughts on how the Hill has changed.
“I think about how you would hear members of the Senate back then, maybe in the committee room waiting for a hearing to start, lamenting how bad things had gotten. ‘Remember back when we had regular order? We used to do it differently. It used to be so much more collegial, bipartisan,’” he said.
“And then you look at the way it is today, and 2011 to 2013 looks pretty functional,” he continued. “You do sometimes wonder, is this going to bend back around?”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Q: What’s your earliest memory of politics?
A: What comes to mind is registering to vote when I was a senior in high school for the presidential election in 2000, and I enrolled as a Democrat, because that’s what my dad was. I never really knew what my mother’s political leanings were. But I remember him asking me who I would want to vote for, and I told him, “That guy Gen. Powell seems pretty solid.”
And he was like, “That’s a Republican.” But I was thinking about character, and Colin Powell was pretty prominent in the Gulf War, so I obviously had tuned into some of that, even at a young age.
Q: A couple years later you enlisted in the military, in the wake of 9/11.
A: When I was infantry in the Marines, we hardly ever talked about politics at all. I had a very healthy respect for the commander in chief, who was President [George W.] Bush, but we were not political in the service.
But I was a little more, I guess, engaged than other people. I drew an overseas ballot in Afghanistan in ’04, and voted for John Kerry. And I can remember debating with some of the guys I served with when I was in Afghanistan about whether Iraq really made sense in the context of what we were doing.
We were up on the Pakistani border in the mountains, doing counterterrorism operations, and part of the reason why it was coming up was there was a lack of resources. Even air support was not always reliable, because there was so much going on in Iraq. That being said, I did not have any hesitation or lack of willingness to go do my job in Iraq when I went in ’05.
Q: After that you went to Bates College. How did you land your job with Collins?
A: I went back to Iraq and Afghanistan, working for a private company out of Virginia. I was thinking I might like to be a part of the effort for rebuilding war-torn countries. But I quickly decided I wanted to be back home. I had visibility into USAID projects and workers, and there was a sense that some of the development stuff going on was a little astroturf — or not likely to take root without a forever, consistent flow of foreign funding and support. So it does kind of make you wonder, what am I doing here?
I had gotten some kind of recognition when I was at Bates, and one of Collins’ staffers came to that, so I had her business card just by chance. I was spreading my resume around to any contacts I had, and they reached out. That was a long process, because I was in Baghdad or Kabul or wherever, but they ended up offering me a job on the staff of the Homeland Security Committee.
Q: What made you want to work for her?
A: During the interview, I remember being so nervous. Obviously, this is one of Maine’s senators, and she had an interesting portfolio with Homeland Security that kind of connected to my time in the Marines. That department didn’t exist before 9/11, and Collins actually helped build it with Joe Lieberman, and that was still the team on the committee when I got there, as ranking member and chair.
At one point when I was interviewing they asked about my politics, and I said something like, “Well, I think of myself as a kind of pragmatic realist, and I just want to help you draft good policy and get things done.” They were probably like, “Yeah, that’s cool. We know you’re a Democrat.” And kudos to them, because that didn’t matter to them. You’re just going to do the work.
Q: What kind of work did you do?
A: One of the chief things I worked on in that time frame was the reauthorization of the SAFER grant program [for local fire departments]. Not every Republican supported federal grants to those types of things, but Collins was very strong on that.
When she left the committee, Tom Coburn came in and pretty much cleaned the bench of the committee staff on the Republican side. Normally most of the professional staff members stay and develop long-term expertise. But for those of us that had Maine connections, they threw us a life raft with jobs in the senator’s personal office, and I covered her veterans portfolio.
Some of the junior staff would also drive her places in D.C. Once I got pulled over for running a red light in D.C., trying to get her to the airport in time to catch a flight. She was, I’m going to guess, not super jazzed, but reasonable in her polite recommendation that maybe I don’t hurry through the red light next time there’s a left turn.
Q: Have you had any full-circle moments now that you’re in Congress yourself?
A: It was full circle to suddenly be like, my former boss is now my constituent, because she lives in Maine’s 2nd District. Of course, she would probably say, ‘I’m the senior senator, and he is also my constituent.’
I was always very nervous in her presence, and that’s not because of who she is or how she treated staff, but just being around elected officials, I was always very uptight. And that definitely affects how I interact with staff now and how I approach things. Members of Congress are just normal people, and I want staff to be at ease, to speak freely. I mean, we have a hierarchy here, but I do often try and flatten it out.
The post Jared Golden’s first job on the Hill? Working for Susan Collins appeared first on Roll Call.
