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Laurel Libby represents Auburn and Minot in the Maine House of Representatives and is the founder of Lead Maine.
By the time Troy Jackson finished his run as Maine Senate president, the state government was spending about $2,800 more per year for every household in Maine than when he took over.
What would your family do with an extra $2,800 a year? For a lot of Mainers, the answer is simple: keep up with the basics. Four in 10 Maine households can’t cover housing, child care, food, transportation, health care and a phone plan, according to 2024 United Way ALICE data.
Now the bill is coming due. Gov. Janet Mills’ own budget office projects a gap of about $1.3 billion in the 2028-2029 budget: $1.085 billion in the General Fund and $257 million in the highway fund. Rising MaineCare costs alone account for $345 million.
That hole didn’t appear overnight. The two-year General Fund budget was $7.2 billion when Jackson got the gavel. The budget for 2024 and 2025, the last one written on his watch, was $10.6 billion. That’s an increase of nearly 47%, and that budget alone was 24% bigger than the one before it.
That’s $3.4 billion more for the two-year budget cycle, or about $2,800 per taxpaying household per year.
Gov. Mills may be the face of the shortfall, but she didn’t build those budgets alone. In 2021 and again in 2023, Democrats unilaterally passed two-year budgets, without any Republican support. Both times, Troy Jackson was presiding over the Senate. The spending commitments made on his watch didn’t leave the State House when he did.
Maine families feel it on their power bills, too. Since 2019, the price Maine households pay for electricity has climbed more than 70%, from about 18 cents to 32 cents per kilowatt-hour. Nationally, prices rose 40% over the same stretch. Maine now has the fourth-highest residential rates in the country.
I believe that is a direct effect of choices made in the State House, crafted by Troy Jackson and Augusta Democrats. Maine’s renewable energy mandates require every power supplier to buy credits from subsidized solar and wind, power that flows when the sun shines or the wind blows, instead of investing in the reliable power generation families count on during a January cold snap. Ratepayers paid $110 million in 2024 just to comply with the mandate, on top of the solar subsidies now billed separately.
Troy Jackson helped build that system. In 2019, he voted to raise Maine’s renewable mandate to 80% by 2030 and cosponsored the law that created the solar subsidy program. When the costs started landing on family bills, Republicans pushed to rein them in. In 2023, a bill to end the solar program cleared the House, then died in Jackson’s Senate.
This is all just a small taste of the agenda I believe Troy Jackson would bring to Washington if elected. He has already made clear one of his top priorities is to pass Medicare for All — a program one study found could cost $34 trillion in federal spending over the next decade.
Someone has to pay for that. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 Maine campaign Jackson ran, proposed a new 4% premium on household income, with only families of four earning less than $29,000 exempt. That would reach straight into the paychecks of working Maine families.
Sen. Susan Collins has worked the other direction, bringing federal dollars home to Maine. Since 2021, she has secured nearly $1.5 billion for 672 community projects across all 16 counties.
Maine families can’t spend money they don’t have and send the bill to someone else. The people they send to Washington shouldn’t either.
Troy Jackson has shown us how he budgets. Before you vote on Nov. 3, look closely at his record, and remember who’s paying for it.