Politics
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The Republican super PAC that has spent heavily to reelect U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is running a country song on Maine radio that mocks her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, for having children with his second cousin.
The ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, which surfaced Tuesday, calls Jackson “weird,” a “freak” and a “creep” because “he has two kids with his cousin.”
“If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours too,” the chorus goes.
It’s one of a series of scorched-earth ads the group, which is tied to Senate Republican leaders and is the biggest spender in the Maine race, launched against Jackson over the weekend. Another calls the former Maine Senate president “a crook and a creep.”
Collins told reporters in Lewiston on Wednesday that the ad should come down. The attacks came two weeks before Election Day in a toss-up election that could decide control of the U.S. Senate.
Jackson and Lana Pelletier, a social worker from Allagash, have been together for nearly 40 years and have two adult sons. The Maine Wire reported this summer that they are second cousins, and Collins raised it herself in a September interview with Politico.
Pelletier pushed back in a Bangor Daily News opinion piece published Wednesday, saying Collins and her allies have mocked her family and children.
“I never imagined [Collins] and her allies would stoop this low,” she wrote.
She also disputed again a 1988 police report, exclusively reported by the BDN in August, which says Jackson punched a man at a Fort Kent home when he was 19. Jackson paid a fine. Pelletier told an officer that night that Jackson “pushed her around,” according to the report, but she has said she doesn’t remember saying it and that the statement isn’t accurate.
The Senate Leadership Fund and an offshoot are the biggest outside spenders in the race. They have booked nearly $50 million in Maine ads, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. They anchor a Republican network of super PACs and nonprofits that has booked about $126 million in ads to reelect Collins.
Democrats have also gone negative. WinSenate, a super PAC aligned with the party’s Senate campaign arm, has booked $38.6 million in Maine. One of its ads late last month misleadingly tied Collins to Jeffrey Epstein. Collins bemoaned those ads in Farmington on Tuesday.
“I have had tough races, always, always, but this is the first time where there have been nonstop lies about me and my record, character assassination,” she said. “I think it’s very disappointing that Chuck Schumer, Troy Jackson and their allies have sunk to this level.”