Politics
Our political journalists are based in the Maine State House and have deep source networks across the partisan spectrum in communities all over the state. Their coverage aims to cut through major debates and probe how officials make decisions. Read more Politics coverage here.
Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and Democrat Troy Jackson finally share a stage Tuesday night in Portland, the first of four televised debates in a race that could decide control of the Senate.
Both are seasoned debaters. Abortion, healthcare, taxes, the Iran war, President Donald Trump, and Jackson’s 20-plus years in Augusta and informal style are all fair game.
Here’s what to watch ahead of the CBS News 13 debate at 7 p.m.
Abortion and Supreme Court
The calendar hands Jackson an opening. Tuesday is exactly eight years since Collins voted to confirm U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who featured in the court’s 2022 decision to overturn federal abortion rights. Collins, who predicted that wouldn’t happen, criticized the decision but has stood by her vote.
Expect Jackson to remind voters that the Republican also backed Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito, whose possible retirement Jackson has seized on as a campaign issue. He held a town hall in Bath on Monday with Planned Parenthood’s Maine fundraising arm.
Collins will return to her standby stance: She weighs judges’ overall qualifications rather than a single issue, and notes she’s the only Republican to vote for all three of the court’s liberal justices. She may also go on offense, as she did in a 2020 debate with Democrat Sara Gideon.
Asked about the court, she called an ad from Gideon claiming she confirmed “181 far right judges” misleading, saying the vast majority of those judges had bipartisan support.
She may also try to tilt the proceedings toward Jackson’s abortion record. Raised Catholic, he now gets perfect ratings from Planned Parenthood, but he once earned perfect marks from an anti-abortion group and backed a 2011 “fetal personhood” bill.
Pressure on ProPublica report
Jackson and allies continue to highlight ProPublica’s report on a defense contractor allegedly engaging in a pay-for-play scheme involving the Collins and other lawmakers.
ProPublica says the FBI was investigating potential corruption as late as 2024 before a Trump administration crackdown on the agency. Collins’ team has said the FBI had not contacted them on the matter since 2021, when they say it was resolved, denying allegations of bribery.
In a video posted Sunday on X, Jackson sits in front of a wall of his own campaign signs, a Diet Coke at his elbow, and reads passages from the article aloud.
Jackson may press another question: What did Collins’ husband, former lobbyist Thomas Daffron, do for Chesapeake Enterprises? The firm, led by Scott Reed, who runs the pro-Collins Pine Tree Results PAC and led the group that took illegal donations from Navatek CEO Martin Kao in 2019, paid him at least $1,000 for consulting last year.
Collins campaign manager Steve Abbott has said he doesn’t know what the consulting work was. Reed told the New York Times that Daffron “never lobbies.” Abbott and the FBI have said Kao’s claims were investigated and nothing implicated Collins, her team or the PAC.
The senator may have a counterpunch: The Washington Post focused this week on Jackson, whose campaign refuses corporate donations, once leading the Maine Senate’s political arm, which was funded in part by the tobacco, gambling and pharmaceutical industries.
Command on national issues
Jackson has spent the campaign tying Collins to Trump on tariffs, immigration enforcement, healthcare and the Iran war, then tying all of it back to Mainers’ wallets.
Tuesday tests whether he can do that on the fly against a five-term incumbent who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee and rarely misses a chance to say how much money she brings to Maine because of it.
Jackson is likely to swing back at Collins’ signature pitch: the federal money she steers to Maine. He argues that Trump and Republicans have cost the state more than the billions she’s brought home. He points to her vote to advance Trump’s tax bill that cut Medicaid and food aid, though she voted against it in the end, citing future Medicaid cuts.
Foreign policy is Jackson’s thinnest area, by his own admission. Last week, he apologized for remarks on the Israel-Gaza conflict and Maine’s Jewish community, an episode critics say showed he isn’t ready for the Senate. Watch whether Collins brings it up.
Jackson’s last debate
Collins hasn’t debated in six years. Jackson has done several forums and debates this year.
His last face-off with a Republican came in February, during his third-place run in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, against Bobby Charles, now the GOP nominee for governor.
That was a sideshow event during two crowded primaries, but the night previewed a line Collins’ team has since picked up: Jackson is an insider despite running against an incumbent nearing 30 years in office.
Charles pinned energy costs, overdose deaths, housing and property taxes on Democrats, Gov. Janet Mills and Jackson’s two decades in the Legislature. He also amplified past Republican complaints that Jackson had fraudulently obtained a Federal Housing Administration loan, which he denied the Maine Ethics Commission declined to investigate.
Jackson was less polished than the bombastic Charles but didn’t back down, repeatedly pointing at the lawyer and calling him a race-baiter and divisive bully unfit for the Blaine House.
Strategists in both parties expect a more civil night Tuesday, but neither candidate is likely to pull punches. Three more debates follow before voters decide Nov. 3.