Collins Shows True Colors With Ad Mocking Troy Jackson’s Working Class Roots

Senator Susan Collins has taken another cheap shot at her Democratic opponent Troy Jackson. First there was the sleaze “kissing cousin’ ad from a PAC she ‘denounced’ even though she set the whole thing in motion. This new one carries the stock ‘I approved this ad’ and it starts with a guy denigrating Jackson as being ‘only’ ‘working class.’ The guy talks about Collins, and says he also knows Jackson and referring to Jackson’s heritage and early career mocks him about needing to know more than what a cord of wood is.  Two such ads in a week suggest Collins is in panic mode. Is her internal polling painting a grimmer picture than the media is telling us?

Collins has been on the ropes before but keeps getting elected because she’s got a great constituent services operation back home. Many a person there has been grateful for what her staffers have gotten done on their behalf. It’s been enough that they’ve felt like despite her wealth and status deep down she’s one of them. Well, as this Daily Beast article lays out she’s just thrown that carefully crafted image into the wood chipper (pun intended):

Republican Sen. Susan Collins has made a colossal campaign blunder that one of her former staffers says may well have cost the GOP a must-win election.

Collins’ team put out a 30-second spot featuring Maine TV personality Bill Green talking the senator up and taking aim at her Democratic opponent Troy Jackson over his background as a logger.

“Now, I also know Troy Jackson, but we’re not talking about buying a cord of wood here,” Green says in the ad. “We’re sending someone to the U.S. Senate, and Troy doesn’t have the tools he needs to be effective.”

For the record forestry is a huge contributor to the state’s economy, employing over 29K people and producing well upwards of $8 billion annually to the state economic output.  It should also be noted that although he’s spent two and a half-decades in politics (either in the Maine state legislature or a stint with the DNC) he’s more than a fifth-generation logger. After getting his associate’s degree his parents wanted him to continue his studies but the call of his family’s history in the timber industry was too strong.  He’s worked, hard during his life and no one in Maine can dispute that.  To mock him for it, and to ignore all his years of public service by effectively saying ‘he’s nothing but some working class guy’ is being talked about as a world-class political gaffe.

Let’s compare Collins’ life and Jackson’s:

Collins, 73, is a multimillionaire whose family has operated a lumber business in northern Maine since 1844.

Jackson, 58, a former logger who went on to become president of the Maine Senate, has built his campaign around attacking Collins as out of touch with ordinary Mainers struggling with unaffordability under Donald Trump.

The race is in the tossup category, or at least was although polling indicates Jackson had a slight lead.  However as we know Collins has been on the ropes before and yet won.  This time now feels different. A double-barrel of negative ads in less than a week isn’t the kind of thing one would expect from Susan Collins. Maybe as I suggested already she knows something the rest of us don’t.  As in she was going to lose if she didn’t do something to turn things around and fast.  That would explain the negative ads.

Collins (I say) carefully crafted the sleazy ‘shame them as trailer trash’ ad against Jackson and his partner of four decades with whom he has two children.  Yes, it was a public attempt at shaming citing them being cousins (I wrote about this – they are SECOND cousins and such relationships are common both here and around the world) and having kids.  In other words shame the kids too.  But since the Collins campaign didn’t produce and put the ad on the radio without the ‘I’m Susan Collins and I approved this ad’ tag she manufactured some faux distance.  THIS ad mocking someone as ‘just a logger’ is from the campaign and carries the tagline of her approval.

Criticism mounted quickly and there’s little time for Collins to repair the damage. She put on a good act for a long time but revealed to her constituents that she looks down her nose at them.  Even a former staffer is taking her to task, saying ‘she’s done.’  Sam Patten isn’t just your average Mainer. He used to work for Collins, as a press secretary and aid.  He knows her, and has since his time working for her been critical including about the first ad I talked about.  He went on twitter/X and blasted Collins’ tone-deafness:

Wow: There’s a lot there in not that many words. Let’s emphasize the key points:

• Patten starts with amazement, that at first he didn’t believe the ad was real
• He says it matters because for three decades Collins put on an act, and concealed her arrogance because revealing what she really thinks of voters in her state would be ‘fatal.’
• He reinforces that Collins has made a ‘public confession’ of ‘disdain for little people.’

It was quite the tweet. However Patten wasn’t the only one to weigh in with harsh criticism of Collins:

He wasn’t alone. Democratic former congressional candidate Jordan Wood said the commercial “made my jaw drop,” while labor federation Maine AFL-CIO said that “Susan Collins has spent so much time in Washington she thinks working-class Mainers are beneath her.”

I pointed out Collins has survived politically because she’s got great staff up in Maine providing enviable (to other Congress Critters) constituent services. Still, being born and raised in small/town rural America and living in a similar place out east for 10+ years most politicians who get caught being condescending, or looking down on constituents pay the price. Trump has gotten away with it but his ability to defy the political laws of physics so much is unique to him. And it looks like gravity is finally grabbing hold of even Trump. I’m not so sure Collins can pull of another political rescue act after this blunder.  We’ll know next week.  She might just experience a different kind of cold than the reading on the thermostat. Wouldn’t it to be nice to see Mainers finally freeze her out?

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