Susan Collins drops brutal reminder of Dem rival rocked by accusations

A 1988 police report is now doing campaign work in 2026, and that tells you something about where this race actually stands. Susan Collins didn't have to dig this up herself. It resurfaced, as these things do, right when Troy Jackson is trying to introduce himself to Maine voters as a steady alternative. Her line about him "struggling to control his temper" is sharp, but it's not invented out of thin air. It's attached to an actual document.

What's interesting is how predictable the response will be. Jackson's camp will call it desperate, decades old, irrelevant, ancient history dredged up by a nervous incumbent. Maybe some of that is fair. People change in thirty-plus years. But voters get to weigh that for themselves, and pretending a police report simply doesn't count because of its age is its own kind of spin. Character isn't something campaigns get to timestamp out of relevance whenever it's inconvenient.

Collins has been in the Senate long enough to know exactly how a story like this lands. She's not accusing Jackson of anything new. She's reminding Mainers of something old and letting them draw their own line to the present. That's a shrewd move in a race that's going to be close, and it's also just politics played straight, not politics played dirty. If Jackson wants to change the subject, the fastest way is to answer the question directly instead of complaining about the timing.

None of this decides the race. Maine voters have been here before with candidates carrying old baggage into new campaigns. But acting like history has no bearing on judgment is a convenient argument only when it's your own history on the table.