Last month, I watched a woman dressed as a large white hen walk in front of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ Lewiston office chanting, “Susan Collins is a chicken. Cluck, cluck, cluck.”

A few nearby demonstrators joined in, but briefly and without much enthusiasm.

The scene got me thinking.

Sen. Collins – no relation – is many things. A coward is not one of them.

In a country where nearly every politician has scurried to one side of the aisle or the other, Collins insists on staking out space in that vanishingly tiny middle ground.

Critics on each side insist she’s faking it. Collins absorbs both catcalls from right-wing zealots who question her loyalty to President Trump and jeers from liberals who expect a lifelong Republican to vote like a Democrat.

Perhaps clinging to the dying notion of bipartisanship is foolish. But I’m not so sure.

I used to cover U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat whose unpopular commitment to bipartisanship during the George W. Bush presidency took his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000 to a stunning defeat in a 2006 primary.

Lieberman didn’t just slip away from public life after that loss. Instead, he created his own political party and ran for reelection as a pseudo independent against the Republican and Democratic nominees. In that campaign, the Democratic candidate, Ned Lamont, now the governor of Connecticut, called Lieberman a “turncoat” who betrayed his own party.

Lieberman countered with a television ad that showed the words “Democrat” and “Republican,” a line dividing them. The senator proceeded to erase that line.

And here’s the interesting thing: Though neither party wanted Lieberman anymore, voters did. He secured a fourth term despite his own party’s anger towards him.

Lieberman remained a Democrat, but never a loyal one. Like Sen. Collins and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden from Maine’s 2nd District, he favored his party most of the time, but never enough to satisfy the hardcore.

During his last years in the Senate, Lieberman was part of a small cadre of politicians who tried, usually without much success, to advance policies that melded ideas from the right and from the left.

One of his frequent allies was, not surprisingly, Susan Collins. When he died last year, Collins called Lieberman a “dear friend, a wonderful senator and a true patriot.”

She even cited him as her favorite person to work with in the Senate because he could put party labels aside and hash out an approach that put country first. Lieberman once hailed Collins for doing the same.

In an age of vicious partisanship, voters in Maine have shown a willingness to compromise that probably could do well elsewhere.

That Collins could win so decisively in 2020, that Golden could squeak through no fewer than four straight U.S. House races in a conservative district, shows us that Maine has a meaningful electoral middle — one that by its nature doesn’t shriek or shout.

If either Collins or Golden were to embrace their party more fully, they would likely lose more voters in Maine than they would gain. Shifting further from the party’s base might hurt them even more.

Catering to that quiet crowd in the middle isn’t cowardice. It isn’t really courage. It’s politics.