Maine has about 1.4 million people. On Saturday, a Republican super PAC committed to spending $42 million to make sure one of them doesn't become a senator.
Troy Jackson, a logger from Allagash and former president of the Maine Senate, took 566 of 571 delegate votes in Bangor. He replaces Graham Platner, who won the June primary with over 70 percent and withdrew this month after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denies.
Within hours, the Senate Leadership Fund launched an ad calling Jackson “like Graham Platner but worse.”
Run the arithmetic
Forty-two million dollars, divided across a state of 1.4 million people, is roughly thirty dollars a head. Every man, woman and child.
Susan Collins has about $11 million banked. Jackson's campaign says it has raised somewhat over a million since he entered. There are 101 days until the election.
The last time this seat was contested, Collins and Sara Gideon burned close to $100 million between them, and Collins won comfortably. Maine has now become a place where a national party will spend nine figures to settle a question 1.4 million people were going to answer anyway.
What the money buys
Not persuasion. Saturation.
The ad SLF launched isn't about timber policy or Medicaid or the cost of heating oil in Aroostook County in February. It's about temperament — a narrator listing “a volatile personality, anger issues with women, verbal abuse,” then revealing it's Jackson, not Platner.
That's a well-built ad. It's also a decision to fight the race on a single adjective, repeated until November.
Collins's camp has its own version, calling Jackson's positions socialism and warning of a multi-trillion-dollar bill of goods. Jackson has his: he'll say Collins voted with a party that left rural Maine behind.
None of it requires either candidate to be specific.
The part I keep coming back to
Both of these people are from northern Maine. Both come out of industries — timber and potatoes — that have been shrinking for forty years. Collins has been in the Senate for three decades. Jackson spent six years running the state one.
There is a real argument between them about what a rural state does when its traditional economy no longer supports the people living in it. That argument is worth having in public, at length, in a place where voters can hear it.
Forty-two million dollars does not fund that argument. It funds thirty-second spots between innings.
I have no position on which of them should win. I have a strong position on the fact that a state this size cannot hold a conversation while that much money is being poured into the room.
And a caution for both sides
Platner won the primary by seventy points while multiple allegations were already public. Democrats then removed him and installed a replacement by convention.
Republicans call that Schumer overriding Maine voters. Democrats call it a party declining to nominate an accused man.
Both descriptions are accurate. That's what makes it a hard problem rather than a talking point.
Add your perspective
Right: Jackson's legislative record and temperament are legitimate campaign issues, and outside money is protected speech. Left: $42M from a national PAC to defeat a logger is precisely the oligarchy problem, and Collins's incumbency depends on it. Center if your objection is to the sum rather than the side.
