Maine Democrat Troy Jackson, campaigning against “greedy corporations,” said he “can’t help” that a PAC he led took corporate and lobbyist money, and Sen. Susan Collins called the dodge unbelievable.
In a Thursday evening debate with Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, Troy Jackson faced a direct question about fundraising by the Maine Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, the PAC he led while serving as president of the Maine Senate.
Jackson’s answer was blunt. He did not claim the money never arrived. He said he could not stop it.
“I can't help that an organization that I actually worked with and had a real significant role in decided to take checks from people,” Jackson said, per a Washington Free Beacon report.
Collins rejected that framing on the spot. She said Jackson ran the PAC and set its rules, and that pretending otherwise does not wash.
“Troy was head of this PAC, he set the rules,” Collins said.
"And for him to pretend that he had no idea what the contributions were to his leadership PAC when it was big tobacco, it was pharma, it was many other companies, just defies belief."
The clash cuts to the center of Jackson’s Senate pitch. He has cast himself as a fighter for working Mainers and an opponent of corporate greed. He has accused Collins of selling out to lobbyists and special interests. He has said he is running because the status quo is not working, thanks to high-priced lobbyists and corporate greed.
Those lines are harder to sell when the committee tied to his own leadership years took the kind of money he now campaigns against.
Jackson served as president of the Maine Senate from 2018 to 2024. During that stretch he was also listed as “principal officer” of the Maine Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, a designation backed by linked Portland Press Herald material from 2018.
A Free Beacon review found the SDCC took nearly $54,000 from corporate PACs while Jackson led it. Named examples included PACs tied to Cigna, Bank of America, and Avangrid, Maine’s primary power utility.
The same review found more than $130,000 from firms registered to lobby Maine’s state legislature, plus more than $22,000 from individual lobbyists, during the period Jackson led the committee.
That record sits beside a campaign built around hostility to corporate cash. Readers following the race have already seen the tension in Jackson’s party committee hauling in heavy PAC and lobbyist totals even as he sold an anti-corporate message.
Jackson’s debate line did not dispute the checks. It treated them as something that happened around him. Collins treated them as something that happened under him.
The money fight was not the only integrity issue Collins raised. She also pointed to Jackson’s son, Chace Jackson, and to lobbying around the Maine Senate while Troy Jackson held the gavel.
Chace Jackson worked as a lobbyist for a firm founded by his father’s former chief of staff while Troy Jackson was Senate president. Prior Free Beacon reporting cited in the coverage said Chace charged nearly $200,000 lobbying the Maine Senate in Jackson’s final year as president.
Collins went further on the policy pattern.
"If you look at the number of times that Troy has flip-flopped his position on issues, it usually has to do with issues that his son has been hired to lobby him on."
The Free Beacon account links that charge to gun policy. It describes Chace Jackson lobbying for the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, the state’s leading gun-control group, in the same broader period when Troy Jackson voted for two gun-control bills after a history as a Second Amendment supporter.
Family lobbying has followed Jackson through this race in other ways as well, including scrutiny of a cosponsored bill that steered millions toward a client tied to his son’s lobbying work.
None of that required a novel theory of politics. It required a simple standard. If a candidate runs against lobbyists and corporate interests, voters get to ask what his own shop took, who set the rules, and whose relatives got paid to work the building.
Jackson’s public message has been consistent in tone. He presents Collins as captured by special interests. He presents himself as the working Mainer’s alternative. He talks about greedy corporations as the problem and about status-quo politics as the reason to fire the incumbent.
The SDCC totals cut against that branding. Corporate PAC checks, lobby-firm checks, and individual lobbyist checks are not abstract. They are the same categories Jackson uses as weapons on the trail.
His answer on the debate stage tried to separate personal responsibility from institutional result. He said he had a “real significant role.” He also said he “can’t help” that the organization took the money. Collins’s reply was that a principal officer does not get to plead helplessness about the rules he oversaw.
That is the core contradiction voters can test without a translator. Either the anti-corporate crusade is a governing ethic, or it is a slogan that stops at the door of his own committee’s bank deposits.
Jackson has spent the race managing other self-inflicted problems, from refusing to apologize over dual primary-residence claims to damage control after other flare-ups with parts of the electorate.
He has also worked to put space between himself and socialist backers as the contest tightened, another sign of a candidate adjusting the packaging while the record stays put.
Campaigns can rebrand week to week. Contribution histories and leadership titles do not.
Titles matter in politics because they assign authority. “Principal officer” is not a spectator label. Jackson held it while the SDCC took the corporate and lobbyist money now at issue. He held the Maine Senate presidency in the same years his son worked the lobbying corridor around that chamber.
Collins used plain language for both points. She said Jackson set the rules at the PAC. She said his claimed ignorance about tobacco, pharma, and other corporate sources defies belief. She said his issue shifts often track matters his son was hired to lobby.
Jackson’s camp wants the race framed as working people versus corporate power. The debate exchange framed something narrower and sharper: whether the candidate’s own leadership years match the speech.
Nearly $54,000 from corporate PACs. More than $130,000 from lobbying firms. More than $22,000 from individual lobbyists. A son collecting major lobbying fees in the final year of the father’s Senate presidency. Two gun-control votes tied, in the coverage and in Collins’s attack, to the son’s gun-control lobbying client.
Those are not vibes. They are the concrete facts Jackson has to carry while he talks about greedy corporations.
Maine voters can decide whether “I can’t help it” is accountability or an alibi. A candidate who sells moral clarity on corporate cash should not need a shrug to explain the checks taken on his watch.
