EIGHT YEARS AFTER COLLINS’ KAVANAUGH VOTE, JACKSON WILL PUT ABORTION RIGHTS FRONT & CENTER AT DEBATE

PORTLAND, ME — Eight years to the day after Susan Collins voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Troy Jackson will face Collins in their first debate tonight.

Collins must answer for helping put the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade on the Court, voting with Donald Trump 96% of the time, and backing an agenda that raises costs and threatens Mainers’ health care. Jackson will make the case for a senator Mainers can trust to protect their freedoms, lower their costs, and put working people first.

A fifth-generation logger from Allagash and former Maine Senate President, Jackson has a record of delivering for working Mainers. He helped lower prescription drug costs, expand access to health care, secure collective bargaining rights for loggers, deliver free school meals, and strengthen abortion protections after Roe fell.

Tonight’s hour-long debate airs on WGME at 7:00 p.m. ET.

What you need to know ahead of tonight’s debate:

• Tory Jackson is a fifth-generation logger from Allagash, lifelong fighter for workers' rights, and a former Maine Senate President. 

• Troy knows working Mainers because he is one. A lifelong logger and union member, Jackson entered politics fighting for workers who had been pushed aside. He has won tough races in northern Maine, including Aroostook County.

• He has delivered on the costs families face every day. In the State Senate, Troy helped lower prescription drug costs, deliver free school meals, pass paid family and medical leave,  expand health care, win collective bargaining rights for loggers, and invest in rural communities.

• He acted to protect reproductive freedom when Collins led to the fall of Roe. Jackson gave Mainers some of the strongest  abortion protections in the country. 

• In the U.S. Senate, Troy will fight to: 

  • Lower costs for Maine families by passing Medicare for All, cutting prescription drug prices, lowering electricity bills, building more housing, and making child care more affordable.

  • Put working Mainers before corporations and billionaires by cutting taxes for working people, making the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share, banning congressional stock trading, overturning Citizens United, and getting big money out of politics.

  • Protect Mainers’ rights and freedoms by restoring a federal right to abortion, passing comprehensive civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, and strengthening unions and the right to organize, dismantling and abolishing ICE.

Meanwhile, Susan Collins has voted with Donald Trump 96% of the time — selling out Mainers to serve billionaires and fund her own campaign at the expense of rolling back reproductive rights, gutting health care, and writing blank checks to ICE. 

What Collins must answer for tonight:

• Her pivotal vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and Collins still says she does not regret supporting him. She also voted to confirm more than five dozen Trump-appointed anti-abortion judges.

• Her record of voting with Trump 96% of the time. Collins cast a pivotal vote to advance legislation cutting Medicaid and delivering tax breaks for billionaires, putting tens of thousands of Mainers’ health coverage at risk.

• Her blank checks for ICE. Collins voted to give ICE $70 billion with no meaningful reforms or guardrails and opposed requiring ICE agents to wear body cameras.

• The pay-to-play corruption scandal surrounding her campaign. Bombshell investigation from Propublica revealed that Susan Collins was being examined by the FBI for steering federal contracts to a major donor — until Donald Trump ended the investigation.

• Her ties to corporate money and opposition to a congressional stock trading ban. Collins took hundreds of thousands of dollars from private equity, insurance companies, and special interest PACs, and the wealthy — including Epstein associates — while Washington kept delivering for the wealthy and she kept opposing a Congressional stock trading ban.

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