Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins announced her reelection campaign in February by posting a video that showed her opening a box of New Balance running shoes.“This is perfect for 2026,” she said to the camera as she held up a sneaker. “Because I’m running.”The video didn’t mention that New Balance’s owner and chairman, billionaire Jim Davis, gave $1 million to the super PAC supporting Collins’ campaign seven months prior. The company is based in Boston and has manufacturing facilities in Maine. It was one of four donations Davis made last year to the network of committees raising money for Collins.Davis, who is worth an estimated $6.1 billion, is one of at least 79 billionaires who donated to Collins’ network between January 2025 and May 20, 2026, according to a Maine Monitor analysis of Federal Election Commission campaign finance data. If billionaires’ spouses are included in the tally, the number rises to 97.Collectively, the group of nearly 100 billionaires and spouses has donated $9.8 million to the Collins network since the start of 2025, representing a third of what groups supporting Collins raised from all donors.The total from billionaires stands in stark contrast with the fundraising of her opponent, Democrat Graham Platner, whose campaign has mostly attracted smaller amounts of funds but from many more people. Platner, who won his party’s primary election Tuesday, has received at least $24,000 from five billionaires, a fraction of 1 percent of his total haul.The breadth of billionaire funding for Collins shows how the race, which could decide control of the U.S. Senate, has drawn national interest and funding from some of the wealthiest people in the world, a group that has made up a growing share of election spending in recent years. Billionaires accounted for 19 percent of all federal election contributions in 2024, up from just 0.3 percent in 2004, according to a New York Timesanalysis from earlier this year.Billionaires and their spouses gave $529,000 to the Collins campaign directly; $370,000 to the Collins Victory Committee, a joint fundraising committee that has disbursed funds to the other committees; $100,000 to Dirigo PAC, the leadership committee Collins uses to raise money for other candidates; and $24,000 to Susan Collins for Maine, a joint fundraising committee. But the billionaires have mostly opted to send their donations, nearly $9 million, to Pine Tree Results PAC, a super PAC dedicated to electing Collins that, unlike the others, is not subject to contribution limits.Pine Tree Results PAC has financed attack ads against Platner since April and has booked $24 million in ads leading up to the general election in November, according to data from AdImpact.The network of five groups supporting Collins is linked through a series of joint fundraising agreements, which are legal arrangements that allow them to raise money together and then disburse the funds according to a predetermined formula. For the first time in Collins’ career, a super PAC — Pine Tree Results — is linked to her fundraising apparatus through those agreements, an arrangement made possible thanks to a 2024 advisory Federal Election Commission opinion. The super PAC also shares a treasurer with the Collins Victory Committee and Dirigo PAC.Counting all her donations, including both from billionaires and others, the Collins network has raised about $30 million since the beginning of last year, with $12 million going to her campaign.The Platner campaign, meanwhile, raised $16.3 million over that time. The total does not include the $200,000 his campaign said it raised in the 24 hours after The New York Times published a story last week detailing what it described as Platner’s “unsettling” behavior with three former girlfriends. The Platner campaign has no joint fundraising agreements with any other committees, according to federal campaign finance filings, and no super PAC dedicated to supporting his candidacy. (Platner has said that super PACs “should be outlawed.”) Experts speculated, however, that big outside money will likely move toward Platner now that he has clinched the Democratic nomination.The Monitor counted billionaire donors by comparing the names on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaire List to Federal Election Commission donor information, which included reviewing location and occupation information to eliminate the possibility of erroneous matches based on similar names.The Collins campaign did not respond to a request from The Monitor for an interview with the senator and then declined to answer questions over email.The amount billionaires gave in support of Collins is similar to the amount that small-dollar donors — those giving $200 or less — contributed to the Platner campaign. Billionaires gave $9.8 million in support of Collins, while small-dollar donors gave $9.6 million to support Platner.