Susan Collins should never be underestimated. She won her first Senate election 30 years ago, and her sheer tenacity in staying in power is formidable, especially since, over the course of her political career, Maine hasn’t been hospitable ground for Republicans (the state last gave the popular vote to a GOP president in 1988).
But Collins’s undeniable gift for pork-barrel spending could now come back to haunt her, thanks to a new pay-for-play scandal broken on Tuesday by ProPublica. The ProPublica story focuses on Collins’s links to Martin Kao, the former CEO of a defense contractor called Navatek. Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison for bank fraud and Covid relief fraud.
ProPublica’s reporting shows that Kao’s operation was almost comically corrupt. Despite the denials of Collins’s office, the ProPublica report is damning. It’s also being picked up by local media in Maine. Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate in the Senate race, put out a punchy ad quoting the reporting and labelling his rival “Corrupt Collins.”
You know how the left correctly blames the center Democrats for picking bad corpo candidates, eg against Trump (Clinton, Harris) that end up losing? The American left should also do a bit of introspection and self-criticism for picking a bad candidate in Maine. The whole saga of how he ended up stepping down was very demobilizing. This magat should not have it this easy…
Troy Jackson is a great candidate, and he’s more progressive than anyone we’ve thrown at the seat. Maine is a retirement community for fox news boomers. I still hope we can win the election. 2020 was a corporate candidate. The center democrats wanted Janet Mills to run against susan collins and that was a 100% losing situation. There plans were foiled by populism.
The only reason that Graham Platner got as far as he did was because the centrists pushed Janet Mills. Once Mills was in the race, leftists who were actually properly vetted by organizations like the DSA decided it wasn’t worth competing against a DNC funded candidate (of course, they didn’t know she’d implode spectacularly). That’s why you had a two person senate primary and a five person gubernatorial primary. There’s an alternate timeline where Schumer doesn’t meddle in the race, there’s a competitive primary field, and Platner’s voters switch to Troy Jackson after the Nazi tattoo story breaks.
It’s the center’s fault that leftists just refuse to run against them? You have to actually run to win.
Yeah, but you can’t win every battle on every front. DSA had an amazing primary season in NYC by picking their battles. There were plenty of people who were pissed that they didn’t primary Jefferies, but instead of pouring all there money into unseating the minority speaker, they focused on several smaller races, and took three congressional seats and four state rep seats.
It’s important to remember that, when we’re talking about centrists, we’re talking about the Democratic establishment, which has functionally unlimited financial resources, and when talking about leftists, we referring to candidates that are either backed by small organizations or completely independent. There actually was a leftists alternative to Platner in the race; her name was Andrea LaFlamme, and you probably didn’t hear about her because she didn’t qualify for the ballot and had to run as a write-in. So why would the DSA throw their limited money into splitting the leftist vote three ways against Mills, when instead they could focus on the governors racd?