Bera Dunau, an organizer for a broadcasting union, came to Troy Jackson’s Saturday rally with a specific reason. Jackson, she said, pushed to get free school lunches for kids as a state senator, and that mattered to someone who grew up around a lot of rural poverty. “We know he’s going to do what he’s always done, which is stand with us,” she said.
Ten days from the midterm election, Jackson, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, spent the day rallying union members and volunteers. His target was Republican Sen. Susan Collins, and he came at her on three fronts: health care, tariffs and her relationship with President Donald Trump.
Tariffs
The sharpest exchange followed Collins’s announcement on Friday that she had pushed the Trump administration to roll back additional tariffs on Canadian products affecting Maine’s agricultural industry. Jackson was unimpressed. “I can’t believe the most powerful U.S. senator in the world would stand there and say, ‘Well, I got this and this off the list,’” he said, “instead of the fact there should’ve never been a list.” Trade authority, he argued, belongs to the Senate and not to Trump.
Health care
Jackson renewed his call for Medicare for All and attacked Collins’s support for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes major cuts to projected federal Medicaid spending. He called the health care system “in crisis.”
Collins answered in an interview with NEWS CENTER Maine earlier in the week. “I don’t support those cuts,” she said, while defending work requirements for certain Medicaid recipients: able-bodied adults without young children or caregiver duties.
The left, and the president
Jackson had appeared in Portland on Thursday with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Collins used that to question his backers, arguing that Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders want to push the Democratic Party further left. She said the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Jackson for governor and backed Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, are trying to turn a center-left party into a socialist one.
Jackson replied that he would rather fight with people who have their own ideas than defer to Trump, as he accused Collins of doing. He also raised the Justice Department’s decision to send election monitors to Maine polling places, calling it an effort to “take away voting rights and access.”
The incumbent and the field
Collins has served as Maine’s senior senator since 1997 and has chaired the Appropriations Committee since 2025. Since 2019 she has been the only Republican holding statewide office in Maine. Often described as a moderate, she was the sole Republican to vote against confirming Amy Coney Barrett, though her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh drew scrutiny. In 2020 she beat Sara Gideon in the most expensive race in state history, despite trailing in every public poll.
This year’s opponent was not the original one. Graham Platner, who won the Democratic primary, withdrew on July 10 after a rape accusation published in Politico on July 7, which he denied. State Democrats then chose Jackson, a former president of the Maine Senate, to take his place. Between January 2025 and May 2026, 79 billionaires gave almost $10 million to Collins’s campaign and supporting PACs.
In Lewiston, a blue-collar bellwether that helped carry Collins last time, some voters are ready for a change. Others are wary of losing her sway in the Senate.
Sources
- Susan Collins
- A blue-collar bellwether weighs ousting longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins in Maine
- Troy Jackson rallies union supporters as US Senate race in Maine enters final stretch
Photo: United States Senate (Public domain)
