Reproductive Freedom for All is spending a quarter of a million dollars on direct mail aimed at more than 100,000 Maine households, all built around a single message: Susan Collins should lose her Senate seat because she voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
The campaign, first detailed by the Washington Examiner, is one piece of a $23.5 million national effort by the group, which has endorsed Democratic challenger Troy Jackson and made Collins's Kavanaugh confirmation vote the centerpiece of its case against her. Planned Parenthood Votes has separately announced it will spend more than $600,000 on ads targeting Collins, its largest investment against a single state candidate this cycle.
Collins, seeking a sixth term, is not backing down. She told reporters in June that she does not regret voting to confirm Kavanaugh, though she added that she disagrees with some of his subsequent rulings. The five-term incumbent now faces a general election fight in a state Kamala Harris carried with 52.2 percent of the vote in 2024, a margin that has turned the race into one of the most closely watched contests in the battle for Senate control.
The strategy is straightforward: link Collins to the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade by hammering the vote that put Kavanaugh on the bench. The direct-mail blitz will land in mailboxes across the state as part of a coordinated outside-spending push that dwarfs anything Collins faced in previous cycles on this issue alone.
One Allagash resident, Darlene Dumond, captured the sentiment driving the campaign in comments reported by the Associated Press:
"Why would our girl from Aroostook County be the deciding vote for the justice that overthrew Roe v. Wade?"
Collins has long argued that Kavanaugh assured her he considered Roe settled precedent. The Dobbs decision in 2022 upended that assurance, and abortion-rights groups have treated Collins's vote as a political liability ever since. Whether that argument still carries force four years after Dobbs is the central gamble behind the spending.
The man on the other side of the ballot arrived there under unusual circumstances. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation lumberjack from Allagash and former Maine Senate president, was not the original Democratic nominee. He replaced Graham Platner, who exited the race after a sexual assault allegation surfaced. Maine Democrats held a nominating convention in Bangor and selected Jackson by a lopsided 566-to-5 margin over his only remaining rival, Saundra Pelletier, as Fox News reported.
Jackson wasted no time framing the contest on his terms.
"Today we turn the page. Today, this becomes a general election campaign. And today we begin the work of defeating Susan Collins in November."
His working-class biography is central to his pitch. Jackson entered politics nearly three decades ago after a failed logger blockade protest and has built a career on labor activism and populist economics. He describes himself plainly: "What I am is a guy from northern Maine that's a logger."
But the compressed timeline between Platner's exit and Jackson's coronation has created vetting headaches. Reports surfaced about Jackson's alleged temper, workplace conduct, mortgage improprieties, and a past strict anti-abortion stance. One unnamed Democratic strategist, quoted by Fox News, put it bluntly:
"This is a bit of a rocket vetting process. Maine Democrats have seemingly made their choice, and they're just going to have to ride with it."
Whatever doubts linger inside the party, donors are not waiting. Jackson raised over $1 million since launching his Senate campaign, with more than $600,000 of that total coming in just the first few days after he became the presumptive nominee, Just The News reported. That early haul signals national Democratic interest in flipping the seat and gives Jackson a financial foundation that Platner never had time to build.
Combined with the outside spending from Reproductive Freedom for All and Planned Parenthood Votes, the financial infrastructure around Jackson's candidacy is forming quickly. Collins will need to match or exceed that pace. She has won five consecutive terms, but none in an environment where national abortion-rights money flows this aggressively into a single state race.
Jackson's evolution on social issues could complicate the very narrative his allies are trying to build. Early in his career, he opposed both abortion and same-sex marriage. He reversed both positions after becoming a Democrat in 2004, as Newsmax noted in its coverage of the race. That history hands Collins a ready-made counterattack: the man running against her on abortion rights once held the same position she is being attacked for enabling.
Jackson has also never demonstrated broad electoral appeal outside his home region in Aroostook County. He lacks an endorsement from Maine's Democratic governor, a gap that raises questions about how deep his support runs within the state party's establishment.
Collins, by contrast, has built a brand on bipartisan independence that has carried her through five elections. Whether that brand can survive a cycle defined by abortion spending and a blue-trending electorate remains the open question.
The contours of the race are now clear. Democrats and their allied groups plan to run the Kavanaugh vote on a loop, betting that Maine voters still hold Collins responsible for a Supreme Court outcome she says she did not foresee. Collins will counter with her record of independence and try to define Jackson as a hastily vetted replacement nominee with a thin statewide profile and a past that contradicts his current platform.
The financial arms race will only accelerate. With Senate control potentially hinging on a handful of seats, both national parties have every reason to pour resources into Maine. The $250,000 mail campaign is an opening salvo, not a final investment.
Voters will decide whether a single confirmation vote cast eight years ago still matters more than everything else on the ballot. The groups writing the checks have already made their bet.
