‘30 YEARS FOR WHAT?’

Desperate Must-Win Republican’s Debate Derailed by Protester

A protester interrupted Susan Collins during her fourth and final debate.

Susan Collins and Troy Jackson’s fourth and final Maine Senate debate got testy, thanks in part to a protester’s interruption.

The incumbent Republican and Democratic challenger sparred Thursday over their voting records, campaign financing, and Donald Trump. Collins aimed to portray herself as someone with a bipartisan voting record, while Jackson sought to tie her to the president and his agenda.

One unscripted moment in the debate at Husson University in Bangor—the first in front of a live audience—came when a protester interrupted Collins.

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“Susan Collins, I am so sorry to interrupt... I’m terrified,” the man, one of about 200 audience members, yelled about twenty minutes in. “A.I. data centers are destroying our climate. They are poisoning our water...”

As the protester was escorted out of the theater, he shouted, “30 years for what?”—a reference to Collins’ Senate tenure.

Collins, 73, then commented, “So, this is obviously one of Troy’s supporters.”

Jackson, 58, took offense.

“Oh, shut up,” he said. “I don’t even know that kid.”

Another notable exchange in the debate, hosted by MainePublic, the Portland Press Herald and NewsCenter Maine, came when Collins was asked to name a time when she voted against Trump in a way that was outcome-determinative.

Collins replied that there were “several examples.” She mentioned how she tried to block Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s nomination, but that one of her Republican colleagues changed his mind at the last minute.

The moderator then noted, “So, that didn’t change the outcome.”

“Well, but it came—it would have, had that person stayed there,” she replied.

“There actually are 56 times when the outcome was changed, according to an analysis that was done by the press,” Collins then said, in what her office told the Daily Beast was a reference to a Bangor Daily News review of her roll-call votes.

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Jackson seized on that answer.

“The reality is that 100 percent of the time, when Donald Trump needs her, Susan Collins is going to be there,” he said.

Collins said she has voted against the GOP “more often than any other senator on either side of the aisle.”

“That is not something that Troy could ever say. He’s going to be an automatic vote for the Democratic position, no matter what,” she said. “We have lost a lot of the centrists, and one reason I’m running again is we need people who will work across party lines.”

Collins was also pressed about her vote to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

While noting she disagreed with Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, Collins stood by her vote, saying the secretary has benefited low-income Maine residents by helping fund a program for them buy heating oil.

During the hour-long debate, Jackson confronted Collins about how an FBI bribery investigation that could have implicated the senator was scrapped shortly after Trump was inaugurated last January.

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“I don’t have Donald Trump getting me out of investigations like you do,” he said, while discussing how one of his campaign finance reports was filed a day late because he wanted to make sure it was done accurately.

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Collins has denied any wrongdoing.

The Republican faces an uphill battle, with a Washington Post poll, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 5, finding 50 people supported Jackson compared to 46 percent backing her re-election.

Last month, Collins revealed having a tremor she medicates, a health condition she kept secret for decades.

In August, she begged supporters for as little as $5 to “help us put gas in the tank” of her campaign bus, despite voting to back Trump’s war on Iran multiple times and her husband owning thousands of dollars worth of oil and gas stocks.

During a previous debate this week, when asked about the war, Collins admitted, “I agree that the president did not have a good plan.”

She was previously seen as out of touch for pointing out that she had gone without health insurance for one year more than three decades ago.

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