By Patrick Svitek, CNN
(CNN) — Maine’s battleground Senate race is being roiled by a late burst of Republican ads mocking Democratic nominee Troy Jackson over his relationship with his longtime partner, whom Sen. Susan Collins and GOP allies have said is his second cousin.
Collins has distanced herself from one radio ad from the Senate Leadership Fund, the top Republican super PAC in Senate races. “If he’ll screw his own family, he’ll screw yours, too,” says the ad, styled as a song about Jackson.
“Senator Collins believes there have been far too many personal attacks in this campaign,” Collins campaign spokeswoman Blake Kernen said in a statement. “She called for this ad to be taken down the day it went up.”
But Jackson’s allies believe Collins implicitly approved scrutiny of his relationship with Lana Pelletier during a September interview.
When asked by Politico’s Jonathan Martin whether Jackson’s “personal life and the mother of his children” were “relevant” to the race, Collins replied, “Well, I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin.”
“She’s the one who unleashed this,” said Rebecca Millett, a former state senator who helped lead a “Women for Troy” news conference after the radio ad’s release. “It’s the typical her: Bait and run. And then, ‘Oh, no, this is terrible.’”
The ad’s line of attack has been noteworthy in a state whose politics is known to be relatively civil, amid a race against a battle-tested incumbent whom Democrats almost certainly need to defeat to win Senate control. Jackson and Collins, both from northern Aroostook County, have traded allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness in public office.
Their tension was encapsulated by a recent debate in which Collins said a protester in the crowd was one of Jackson’s supporters and he responded with a curt, “Oh, shut up.”
Pelletier is a social worker from Allagash who has been in a relationship with Jackson for nearly 40 years. They are not married, but Pelletier describes him as the father of their two children and a grandfather to a recent newborn. The Jackson campaign has not responded to inquiries about whether Pelletier and Jackson are second cousins.
“I have never seen anything like that in Maine politics,” Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine, said of the radio ad. “That does definitely represent something different.”
Jackson’s campaign said Collins’ call for the ad’s removal rings hollow.
“Susan Collins herself spread these disgusting personal attacks on Troy’s family,” campaign spokesperson Dan Gottlieb said in a statement. “Now she wants Mainers to believe she’s above the very attacks she helped spread.”
The Senate Leadership Fund did not respond to a request for comment. But it has since launched a different radio ad in the race that more obliquely references the relationship, alluding to a report that Jackson in 2022 helped get a cell tower built on land owned by Pelletier’s parents.
SLF has also released a TV ad in the state that brands Jackson a “creep” and suggests it’s partly because he “fathered two kids with his cousin.”
The chorus of attacks grew loud enough that Pelletier broke her silence in a recent opinion column for the Bangor Daily News. She wrote that she “never imagined U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and her allies would stoop this low.”
“Our children have been dragged into this campaign,” she said. “Our relationship has been mocked. Our family has been talked about as though there is something shameful about who we are or where we come from. There isn’t.”
Chris Lydon, the chairman of the Republican Party in Aroostook County, acknowledged family is a sensitive matter for some voters. He questioned whether Jackson’s relationship with Pelletier is “the primary thing to judge someone on” but suggested it was worth mentioning.
“I think people do have a right to know,” Lydon said.
The race has been consistently tight, with polls showing no clear leader. The candidates are especially fighting over women voters, a voting bloc that Collins narrowly won in her last reelection campaign, according to exit polls.
Collins and Jackson went through a gantlet of four debates in 10 days earlier this month, producing a number of memorable moments displaying how aggravated they have become with one another.
Besides the “shut up” moment, there was an exchange at another debate in which Jackson accused Collins and her husband of profiting off the war in Iran. Collins called the allegation “outrageous” and demanded that Jackson apologize; he did not.
Collins and her allies say that such references to her husband, whose consulting work is targeted in multiple Democratic ads, show that Jackson also bears responsibility for injecting family into the campaign.
Kernen, the Collins spokesperson, argued that unlike the incumbent, Jackson has not distanced himself from attacks involving Susan Collins and her husband.
It’s all testing Collins’ longtime efforts to campaign as a bipartisan workhorse who eschews the rancor of national politics. The latest drama played out last week as she was campaigning with former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat-turned-independent who, like her, has called for more decorum in politics.
The radio ad “goes against her brand, and I can’t ever imagine a scenario where Collins herself would release an ad like that,” Brewer, the political science professor, said.
Still, Collins and her allies have bombarded Jackson with ads for months depicting him as ill-tempered and erratic. And on Friday, Collins’ campaign and the National Republican Senatorial Committee launched a TV ad attacking Jackson over his “shut up” comment, saying “that’s how Troy deals with women.”
“Troy Jackson is a bully, but Susan is always working for Maine,” a narrator concludes in the spot.
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