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Our verdict

we endorse Susan Collins, flaws and all

Election Day is November 3. Maine has no-excuse absentee voting — any registered voter can vote absentee, in person at town halls through October 29 — and ballots must be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day. Maine also uses ranked-choice voting: if nobody tops 50%, the count continues in Augusta. This is the whole race — the platforms, the records, the worst claims against each of them, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses Susan Collins — with her flaws named in this piece, not hidden from it. Read the research, and decide for yourself.

How Maine got here

Susan Collins has been in the Senate since 1997. She is running for a sixth term, chairing the Appropriations Committee, in the only Republican-held Senate seat up this year in a state Kamala Harris won in 2024 — Harris took Maine 52.4% to 45.5%. Democrats have not won a Maine Senate race since 1988. Collins survived 2020 by nine points on a ballot Joe Biden was carrying by nine, and she announced for re-election in February 2026 with a familiar pitch: "At a time when Washington seems broken and trust is low, Maine needs experienced, steady leadership and a senator committed to the hard work it takes to get things done."

The story of this race, though, happened on the other side — a Democratic primary that produced a winner, a collapse, and a nominee nobody voted for in a primary at all.

Gov. Janet Mills entered the Democratic race in October 2025, then suspended her campaign on April 30, 2026, short of money, though her name stayed on the ballot. The winner on June 9 was Graham Platner — a Sullivan harbor master, Marine and Army veteran, and oyster farmer backed by Bernie Sanders — with about 72% of the vote, more votes than any Democrat had ever won in a Maine primary. His campaign had already survived one autumn of revelations: Reddit posts across a decade in which he criticized police, called rural Americans "stupid," called himself a "communist," and downplayed sexual assault in the military — and a shirtless wedding video showing a skull-and-crossbones chest tattoo resembling the Nazi SS Totenkopf, which he said he got drunk with fellow Marines in Croatia in 2007, not knowing what it was; he had it covered up and apologized, blaming PTSD.

What ended him came in July. On July 6, a woman he had dated accused him of raping her while he was drunk nearly five years earlier; the next day, another former girlfriend alleged he had removed condoms during sex without consent. Platner denied any non-consensual behavior as "categorically untrue." His endorsers — Sanders, Warren, Schumer, Gillibrand, the DSCC — rescinded en masse, and the state party told him to get out. He announced his withdrawal on July 8 and filed the paperwork on July 10. The allegations are allegations; he denies them, and no charge has been reported. But he is not on your ballot, and any account of this race that names him as the nominee is wrong.

On July 25, 601 Democratic delegates met in Bangor and chose the replacement: Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger from Allagash, former president of the Maine Senate — 566 votes to 5. Jackson is a real politician with a long record, and we will get to it. But note the shape of it: Maine Democrats will be represented in November by the choice of 571 convention voters, installed after the man 156,000 primary voters chose destroyed himself.

The raters call it close. Cook Political Report and Inside Elections both rate the race a Toss Up. Sabato's Crystal Ball sits at Toss-up in most trackers, though at least one aggregator shows it Lean D — the sources conflict, and we report the conflict rather than pick one. The polling average has Jackson up about two points; the most recent Fox News poll had them tied, 49–49. Both candidates are from Aroostook County — Collins from Caribou, Jackson from Allagash.

Susan Collins (Republican)

Her platform: Experience and the chairmanship. Her campaign puts it plainly: the Appropriations Committee "decides how federal dollars are spent each year… Susan's position gives Maine an outsized voice at the table when critical decisions are made which allows her to deliver serious results for Maine." She says she has secured $1.5 billion for 672 Maine projects in the past five years. On the issues: she voted for the 2017 tax cuts; she describes herself as pro-choice and introduced a bill to codify abortion rights with conscience protections; she supports voter ID — "Only Americans should vote in American elections"; she calls herself "the most outspoken opponent of the tariffs with Canada" — "Canada is not China. It is our neighbor, our friend, our closest ally, and our biggest trading partner."

Her independence, on the record: It is real, and it cuts both ways. She was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. She opposed Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation. In 2025 she voted against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill — one of three Republicans — over its Medicaid impact, with nearly a third of Mainers on Medicaid. She backed a war-powers resolution on Venezuela that drew Trump's public wrath, and she voted against Canada's tariffs. By the Bangor Daily News's analysis of 10,076 votes, Collins cast 200 deciding votes in her career — 144 with her party, 56 against, the most party-breaking decisive votes of any senator of her era.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: She "voted to support Donald Trump on the largest Medicaid cut in history." FactCheck.org: false framing. Collins voted against final passage of the 2025 law on July 1, 2025, primarily over Medicaid. The Democratic ad rests on her June 28 procedural vote to proceed — and even a "no" there would have left a 50–50 tie for Vice President Vance to break in favor of proceeding. Jackson's debate version — that she "advanced the Big, Beautiful Bill out of committee" — is inaccurate per PolitiFact: the bill never had a committee vote.

Claim: She voted to cover up the Epstein files, and "Jeffrey Epstein's business partner funneled $3 million to her super PAC." FactCheck.org: misleading on both halves. Collins voted in September 2025 to table an amendment attaching Epstein-file release to a defense bill — she said it didn't belong there — then supported the standalone Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed the Senate by unanimous consent; in her words, "I support the release of the Epstein files." The $3 million is real: Stephen Schwarzman gave $2 million in June 2025 and $1 million in June 2026 to a pro-Collins super PAC. The "business partner" label rests on Schwarzman and Epstein both being founding members of a private club; a Schwarzman spokesman said the men had no relationship and calling them partners would be "categorically false."

Claim: She doesn't think insider trading "should be illegal." FactCheck.org: false. Collins helped write the 2012 STOCK Act, the law affirming that members of Congress are not exempt from insider-trading rules. The true kernel is narrower: she opposes a complete ban on members trading stocks, favoring portfolios managed by independent outside advisers — and her husband's Pfizer bond purchase was disclosed five days late in February.

The Navatek matter. This one comes from reporting, not a fact-check, and it deserves both sides in full. ProPublica reported in September that Martin Kao — Navatek's former CEO, who pleaded guilty to campaign-finance and loan fraud — told the FBI he exchanged campaign cash for contracts: that he funneled $150,000 through a shell company to the pro-Collins super PAC 1820 PAC in 2019, and that Collins committed to $32 million in contracts. The FBI examined Collins, her aides, and the super PAC; ProPublica reports the later corruption review was shut down in 2025 after the Trump administration pushed out public-corruption agents and prosecutors, and that agents had corroborated some of Kao's claims with documents. Collins calls the allegations "categorically false" and "a political hit job," says she cooperated fully, and notes the source is "a twice-convicted felon." The FBI's own statement says Kao's allegations "had already been investigated by the FBI years ago and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins' campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false." ProPublica's follow-up found her "totally cleared in 2021" defense conflates the earlier investigation with the later one — which did not conclude under Biden. No one in her orbit has been charged. That is the whole record: a felon's word, documents that corroborate parts of it, an FBI statement in her favor, and an investigation whose ending is itself disputed.

Also on the record, for fairness: when Jackson says Collins "is voting with Donald Trump 96% of the time," PolitiFact's roll-call analysis puts her second-term alignment at about 92% — among the lowest of any Republican, but not 96%.

The flaw, plainly: Collins's flaw is the Cornyn pattern in a milder climate. Her independence is genuine, and it reliably materializes on constitutional ground: she voted to expand background checks, to add dating partners to the prohibited-persons list, and to implement red-flag laws — the same architecture Texas voters threw John Cornyn out over. She voted to convict the president her own voters chose. She opposed Barrett and stands by Kavanaugh, who told her Roe was settled law months before voting to overturn it. Thirty years in, she is the institution she sits in: indispensable to Maine's appropriations, fluent in every room in Washington, and answering to all of them a little. The question her record asks is the Texas question, translated: will she represent Maine, or the room she's in?

Troy Jackson (Democratic)

His platform, in his own words: "Working people are getting crushed while billionaires and corporations buy power in Washington. I've spent my life fighting that same rigged system — from the logging woods to the Maine Senate." The program: "Medicare for All on the national level" — "health care is a human right," and "not, in my mind, a for-profit industry." "Tax the billionaires and make sure greedy corporations pay their fair share." Scrap the Social Security payroll-tax cap — "If you make more than $184,500 a year, you don't pay Social Security taxes on income over that amount… It's not fair, and I'll fight to change it." "Dismantle and abolish ICE," replacing it with "a humane, civilian agency," while deporting people "here illegally or [who] have committed crimes" with a "better process." A federal right to abortion. Ending federal funding for Israel's military. Banning members of Congress from trading stock. He opposes voter ID: "As a working logger, many times I went to the polls without my ID." He says he prefers Bernie Sanders to Chuck Schumer as Democratic leader; asked if he is a democratic socialist, he answers, "I see myself as a Mainer and a working class person."

His record: Jackson served in the Maine House from 2002 to 2008 and the Maine Senate from 2008 to 2014 and 2016 to 2024, rising to Senate president — a labor legislator through and through: collective bargaining expansion, opposition to right-to-work, a higher tax bracket for earners over $500,000. He ran for governor this year and finished third in that primary before the convention made him a Senate nominee.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim (from Collins): Jackson was "very anti-choice" for the first half of his career. PolitiFact checked Collins's version and found it holds up. Maine Right to Life gave Jackson top marks in 2003 and 2010; in 2011 he supported legislation establishing criminal penalties for offenses against an "unborn" child. In the last decade he has earned top ratings from Planned Parenthood and voted in 2023 to lock abortion protections into Maine law after Dobbs. Jackson says his early positions came from his Catholic upbringing and that he was "wrong." Voters can weigh an evolution; what they cannot do is call the claim false. It isn't.

Claim (the "Taxin' Jackson" ads): He "wants to raise Social Security taxes, hurting our seniors," "voted to tax our gas," "taxed our groceries," "raised taxes on our paychecks." FactCheck.org: misleading, line by line. His Social Security proposal eliminates the earnings cap, which touches about 6% of workers — people still working, not current beneficiaries — and the SSA's trustees have estimated cap elimination could close 58% of the program's long-term shortfall. The "gas tax" vote was a 2013 general sales-tax increase that did not apply to gasoline; Maine's 30-cent fuel tax hasn't moved since 2011. The "groceries" claims cite a packaging fee, a five-cent bag fee, and a 2009 prepared-food tax that expressly excluded grocery staples. The "paychecks" claim is the 2023 paid family and medical leave law — a payroll contribution capped at 0.5% of pay, not an income-tax rate. Whatever you think of the underlying policies, the ads describe a different man than the record does.

Claim (from Collins): Under Jackson's leadership, "electric rates in Maine became the fourth highest in the nation." PolitiFact: it stretches the facts. Maine ranked eighth in 2018 and eighth (tied) in 2024 — never fourth. Rates did rise 46% across his Senate presidency, but the state's public advocate attributes the increase primarily to New England natural-gas costs and storm repairs.

The 1988 police report. In August, the Bangor Daily News reported a 1988 Fort Kent police file: Jackson, then 19, allegedly arrived at a home before 2 a.m., kicked in the door after being told to leave, grabbed a man by the throat and swung at him, and — in Lana Pelletier's statement to the officer — "pushed her around," with Pelletier saying she planned to seek cease-harassment papers. The case closed with Jackson paying the man $50. Jackson acknowledges fighting the man and denies ever being violent toward Pelletier or any woman; Pelletier — his partner of some 40 years and the mother of their two sons — disputes the police account, says she doesn't remember making those statements, and calls them inaccurate. The Daily News's records check found no criminal record and no other case. A pro-Collins super PAC ad welds it to the Platner collapse: "First it was Graham Platner's problem with women… And now — Troy Jackson." Lawmakers who served with Jackson have also criticized his temper — the Associated Press reported one incident of his throwing a plastic water bottle during a disagreement with a female colleague — and in the final debate, after a protester interrupted, Jackson told Collins, "Oh, shut up. I don't even know that kid," and declined to apologize.

The flaw, plainly: Jackson's flaw is values, stated without any embarrassment at all. Medicare for All. Abolish ICE. Tax the billionaires. A federal abortion right. End military aid to Israel. This is not a moderate Democrat who happens to carry the wrong label — it is the program our readers believe is dismantling the country, carried by a man who says so himself, in plain English, in the logging woods' accent. There is no Manchin exception here. And underneath the values sits the legitimacy question Maine cannot dodge: the voters of his own party chose someone else — a man who then disgraced himself — and 571 delegates chose Jackson for them. He did not win this nomination. He inherited it.

The verdict: we endorse Susan Collins, flaws and all

Two candidates. Two different flaws.

Collins's flaw is the moderate insider's flaw: thirty years of deals, an independence that shows up precisely where our readers hold the line — guns, judges, a president's conviction — and an appropriations machine whose orbit a convicted felon could plausibly claim to buy into, whatever the FBI concluded. Those marks are named here because an endorsement that hides them is worthless. They are the price of this one, not a veto on it.

Jackson's flaw is not a flaw in execution. It is the destination: a democratic-socialist program for health care, immigration enforcement, taxation, and abortion that he recites proudly and completely. For voters who hold the Constitution, the free market, and limited government as the ground they stand on, he is not a lesser option. He is the opposition, nominated by a convention because the voters' choice couldn't survive July.

So we will not pretend this race offers a good answer. It offers a research answer — and one honest asymmetry: one candidate's flaw is that she bends; the other's is what he would build unbending. And here is the rule this publication runs on: when one option is the extremist program itself, we endorse the other — noting her flaws, not weighing them into a pass. Vote early — Maine makes it easy. Research your candidates. And vote for Susan Collins: the survivor who will disappoint you on schedule beats the stand-in whose platform is the disappointment entire.

Ranked-choice means the count may run past election night. Swallow it with your eyes open anyway.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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