Maine Senate candidate Troy Jackson and fellow Democrats are hoping to finally oust GOP Sen. Susan Collins by focusing on her decisive vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, a justice who joined the majority in the Dobbs decision.

Four years after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade shook the 2022 midterms, reproductive rights have reemerged as a central campaign issue in Maine, where Jackson aims to prevail where his party fell short six years ago. He has made the issue a core component of his pitch to voters in areas like  Portland and its southern suburbs that include  a healthy composition of politically moderate female voters.

“The fact that, just recently, [Collins] said that she doesn’t regret her vote on Kavanaugh says everything to me because I sure as hell do, and everybody else in this state and everybody else in this country does,” Jackson said at a town hall this week in the Portland suburb Scarborough.

But Jackson faces some headwinds in his attempts to sell reproductive rights as a core issue this fall. And he lacks potential ammunition in the form of Gov. Janet Mills, the most powerful female Democrat in Maine — who has not endorsed the Democratic nominee.

Jackson and Mills have a notoriously icy history, something Jackson was candid about during his run for governor. 

“We obviously disagreed a lot — it’s no secret,” he said in April. “I mean, the governor vetoed more than 40 of my bills.”

A spokesman for Mills said Jackson hasn’t sought her support.

“Since becoming the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, Mr. Jackson has not reached out to the Governor to seek her support,” the spokesman, Ben Goodman, said in a statement. “The Governor believes it’s crucial that Democrats retake the U.S. Senate majority and stand up to President Trump, and she would welcome a conversation with Mr. Jackson.”

A Jackson spokesperson declined to comment.

And while Jackson helped advance a bill to protect abortion rights that Mills signed into law in 2023, he opposed abortion rights early in his career. His previous position on this issue was used against him when he ran in the Democratic primary for governor earlier this year.

Jackson has framed his evolution as a genuine change of heart from someone who grew up in a deeply conservative part of rural Maine.

“I grew up in a very strong French Catholic area, you know, conflicted on that all the time,” he said on the Pine State Politics podcast in April.

But, he said, “I talked to many people who, you know, had those stories, and it just came to me that … reproductive access is healthcare, and that really came to me eventually, and I started to understand that.”

Planned Parenthood Action, an abortion rights advocacy group, endorsed Jackson earlier this month. Mini Timmaraju, the group’s president appeared with the candidate at a “Women for Troy” event in a backyard in Brunswick in August.

At that event, she touted Jackson’s evolution, saying he “learned tough lessons, really listened to his constituents, had really tough conversations with people who were upset with him, looked them dead in the eye and said, ‘I regret that.’”

Collins “pretends she’s pro-choice,” Timmaraju told the intimate crowd. “She can’t hide behind that label anymore as she guts our fundamental freedoms and guts our economic affordability in the state.”

After this story was published, a Collins spokesperson responded to MS NOW’s request for comment with a statement attacking Jackson’s record on the issue.

“Troy Jackson has flip-flopped his abortion position from a stance of being strictly pro-life with no exceptions for any reason, to now saying he is supportive of all abortions, including late-term abortions,” spokeswoman Blake Kernen said. “Senator Collins has consistently been pro-choice and was recognized just last year by Planned Parenthood for her long record of protecting women’s rights.”

Collins reiterated Friday that she does not regret voting to confirm Kavanaugh in 2018. But she has said she disagrees with the justice’s Dobbs vote and claimed he assured her before the confirmation vote that he believed Roe was settled law.

But her caveats don’t seem to be convincing a number of Maine women who have yet to forgive her for putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

Regi Robnett, a 71-year-old independent voter, said she used to vote for Collins, but she and the senator “don’t agree as much anymore.”

“I think it really changed with Kavanaugh. When she voted for Kavanaugh, I was like, I can’t believe she voted for Kavanaugh. And then Roe v. Wade went away,” Robnett told MS NOW outside a library in South Portland.

In a focus group held recently by MS NOW contributor Elise Jordan, Maine women, all of whom had voted at least once for Collins in their lifetimes, criticized the senator’s Kavanaugh vote.

“The Brett Kavanaugh vote was one that really resonated with me, how a woman could put back Roe v. Wade and everything like that, knowing what we fought so hard in all these years, to be going backwards, and for her to side that way, I really lost a lot of respect,” one woman in the group said.

Jackson must also contend with the fact that Democrats tried using Collins’ Kavanaugh vote against her in 2020.

“That was the entire campaign in 2020. The entire campaign was Brett Kavanaugh. It was the whole thing,” a person close to the Collins campaign told MS NOW. “She already faced this Brett Kavanaugh thing in 2020 and handled it well.”

And even some voters dismayed at Collins’ support of Kavanaugh may still vote for her in November.

The woman in the focus group who said she “lost a lot of respect” for Collins acknowledged that she still leaned toward voting for the senator.

“I don’t think that’s going to be the key thing,” a Democratic political insider in Maine told MS NOW, granted anonymity to speak freely about the race, said about reproductive rights, which ranked low in an NBC News survey among issues voters nationally see as the most important facing the country.

“I just think it’s going to be, at the end, are people finding a way to know who Troy is? And that’s his problem. I’m not sure he’s going to get there, that there are enough people who are finding their way to find out who he really is.”

The post Maine voters remember Susan Collins’ vote for Kavanaugh, but will that make them vote for Troy Jackson? appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.