Group cites Kavanaugh vote, abortion record as race stakes

Reproductive Freedom for All, one of the oldest abortion rights organizations in the United States, endorsed Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson in his challenge to Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, according to details first shared with The Guardian.

The endorsement lands as Collins, a five-term incumbent, faces her first reelection since the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Collins voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018; Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion in that ruling, after which more than a dozen states enacted near-total abortion bans.

“Flipping the Maine Senate race is a critical path to winning a Senate majority, and we do not restore a federal right to abortion without flipping the Senate majority,” Mini Timmaraju, the group’s president, told The Guardian. The Maine race is considered one of a small number of contests that could determine control of the Senate in November.

Timmaraju is scheduled to join Jackson on Wednesday in Brunswick for the launch of the campaign’s Women for Troy coalition.

Jackson, a former logger from northern Maine who served as president of the state Senate, won the Democratic nomination in July at a snap convention that replaced Graham Platner, an oyster farmer who exited the race after facing allegations of sexual assault, which he denies.

The turmoil around the nomination “gave us pause,” Timmaraju said, explaining why the group waited before endorsing Jackson. “We needed a little bit of time to regroup. We needed to follow the lead of people on the ground in Maine.”

Jackson began his political career as a Republican and once cast votes restricting abortion access before reversing course years later. He has expressed regret for his record and his earlier belief that abortion should “never be legal.”

In a July interview with MS Now, Jackson said he recognized he had been “wrong.” “Early on, I wasn’t real clear on reproductive rights. But I had a lot of conversations over time. A lot of conversations with women, doctors, community members, just people that I came to trust,” he said. “And it became more and more clear to me that abortion access was healthcare.”

Since 2017, Jackson has held a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood and in 2023, the year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, he co-sponsored Maine legislation expanding abortion access to include medically necessary procedures after fetal viability.

“[Jackson] in many ways reflects the reality of a majority of independents and Republicans in this country who now support abortion rights, but might personally have felt conflicted in the past,” Timmaraju said. “Having someone like Troy in the Senate who can talk to his Republican colleagues and talk to some of those moderate Democratic colleagues who don’t have the same courage that he has is actually going to be a huge value add for our movement.”

In June, Collins — who has long cast herself as a moderate Republican supportive of abortion access — said she did “not regret that vote” for Kavanaugh. Jackson’s campaign has seized on the remark to tie her to the Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda.

“She can defend that vote all she wants. I’m running for Senate to restore and expand the federal right to abortion and make damn sure politicians never again get to take this freedom away from Mainers,” Jackson said in a statement.

Planned Parenthood’s Super Pac announced earlier this month that it would spend more than $600,000 on ads criticizing Collins’s record on abortion in Maine.

Strategists in both parties note that Collins’s seniority in Congress — and the federal dollars she has steered to Maine over the years — has historically proven difficult to beat. In a midterm shaped by record inflation, affordability concerns, and the military conflict with Iran, they argue her vote to confirm Kavanaugh may not be top of mind for many Mainers weighing their choices at the ballot box.

As MSI reported in July, former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed Jackson two days after Maine Democrats’ special convention nominated him to replace Platner. Harris endorses Jackson in Maine Senate race, boosting Democratic bid