Bath, Maine — Senator Susan Collins is avowedly pro-choice, but her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, is nevertheless attempting to tie her to abortion restrictions.
At a Monday evening town hall at the Maine Maritime Museum with Nicole Clegg, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund, Jackson knocked Collins for voting to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who, along with other conservative justices on the Supreme Court, ultimately voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.
“She very clearly knew what was going to happen, putting Kavanaugh on there and just disregarded all those people that came to her and begged her,” Jackson said. “I mean, they begged her not to do this.”
The date on which Jackson’s campaign held the event was deliberate, since it was the eve of the eighth anniversary of the Senate’s vote to confirm Kavanaugh during Donald Trump’s first term. Jackson and Collins are set to meet Tuesday for the first of four scheduled debates before Election Day.
Collins undoubtedly has an independent streak, but Jackson is attempting to cut against that part of her reputation. For her part, Collins has said she does not regret her vote to confirm Kavanaugh but has said she disagrees with the decision to overturn Roe. She has supported codifying into law the landmark 1973 case that the court overturned in 2022; years ago, she signed on to the bipartisan Reproductive Freedom for All Act. The bill, introduced soon after the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, would have restored the nationwide right to abortion that Roe guaranteed, but it stopped short of matching the more expansive abortion-rights regime that Democrats’ Women’s Health Protection Act would have guaranteed.
Despite Collins’s pro-choice record, Jackson tried to pin the Dobbs decision on her. His rambling remarks in response to questions from Clegg touched all sorts of issues, but he made sure to knock Collins repeatedly for her Kavanaugh vote.
“Senator Collins just turned her back on so many people and and won’t admit that she was wrong,” he said. “That to me is the worst thing about this too. It’s like, she could have made a mistake, but it doesn’t seem like she did because she doesn’t regret that vote.”
Jackson also touted his own record on abortion. That includes his work as Maine’s State Senate president in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Many blue states worked to expand abortion access after the court’s ruling, and Maine passed a law in 2023 that allowed more abortions later in pregnancy. While the state’s previous law prohibited abortion after viability — around 24 weeks — except for when the woman’s life was in danger, Governor Janet Mills signed a bill that allowed abortion whenever a doctor deemed it medically necessary.
“We heard some stories from people that were heartbreaking about why we needed to make reproductive rights easier for people that had real issues later on in the pregnancy, and that was a tough fight,” Jackson said. “It was a tough fight for all of us, but it was the right thing to do.”
Jackson was not always in favor of permissive abortion laws. He was once a solidly pro-life state legislator. Multiple times, Jackson received a perfect score for his voting record from a major pro-life group in Maine. However, as the Democratic Party became more solidly pro-abortion, Jackson underwent a conversion and eventually aligned himself with his party’s position.
In Democratic primaries, Jackson’s opponents have hit him for his previous pro-life stance. As he runs for Senate in Maine, he acknowledges that his beliefs on abortion have changed.
“I changed my view on that,” he said on Monday. “I don’t think I was ever radical [on] the other side, but I had conflicting beliefs, I guess. I just wasn’t understanding quite what it meant. And somewhere along the line, with those discussions, I just understood very well that this was not my decision.”
The question of the future makeup of the Supreme Court is one that whoever wins next month’s election might very well need to tackle. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are both over 75, and Alito has said that he considered retiring after the Court’s last term. Jackson is attempting to make the task of voting on a Supreme Court justice a major issue in the race.
Republicans “might have a chance to put somebody else on that will be, you know, 40 years old, and we’ll have the Court stuck this way for the longest time ever,” he said.