In a time of war, rising costs and Medicaid cuts, Democrats in Maine say another issue is motivating them in this fall’s Senate race: Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court eight years ago.
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A pivotal vote by longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine pushed Kavanaugh over the finish line in 2018 after she famously said he considered Roe v. Wade “settled law” — a comment that turned out to be wrong.
In 2022, Kavanaugh was a deciding vote in the 5-4 majority that overturned the landmark case, paving the way for abortion bans in many states.
“After she voted for Kavanaugh, that was the last straw,” said Arie Mobley, who attended a rally on Friday for Collins’ presumptive challenger Graham Platner, a Democrat.
“I remember listening to her when she was on the radio, and I was so excited that she was talking as if she wasn’t going to confirm Kavanaugh. I was like, ‘Oh, good, good, good!’” recounted Janice Low as she and her husband, Galen Low, exited the same rally. But then Collins voted to confirm him. “It was just so representative. That she could say this — and then do that.”
Now, with Senate control on the line, Kavanaugh’s shadow is looming large in Maine in more ways than one. In 2018, Collins defended the Supreme Court nominee as he faced allegations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct that Democrats called disqualifying for a position of power. Kavanaugh denied the allegations, saying, “The truth is I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone, in high school or otherwise.”
Today, Collins is facing a Democratic opponent who is accused by an ex-girlfriend of being physically threatening, an allegation she calls “extremely troubling.” Meanwhile, Platner’s allies have observed that his accuser is a conservative advocate who fought to discredit Kavanaugh’s accusers in 2018 over allegations he adamantly denied.
Platner and his allies are already reviving Collins’ Kavanaugh vote, seeing his 2022 abortion decision as fresh ammunition that they lacked six years ago when she was last up for re-election. They also note that if Republicans reclaim the Senate, there is a chance that Collins could again play a pivotal role in voting for one or two Supreme Court justices given that at least two conservative justices are at retirement age.
Revival of abortion rights as a key issue
The prominence of Collins’ Kavanaugh vote was clear Tuesday night, when in his primary victory remarks Platner brought up the Supreme Court’s abortion decision and Kavanaugh.
“She got elected promising to protect Roe versus Wade, only to turn around and put on a justice, put a justice on the Supreme Court who overturned it? She lied to us,” Platner told supporters. “If you are so bipartisan, why were you the deciding vote to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, the deciding vote to defund our healthcare and our hospitals?”
Already for months on the stump, Platner has cast Collins’ vote for Kavanaugh, who critics said at the time would be the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, as a core reason that she cannot be trusted.
“She looked him in the eyes, and he told her that he would never do such a thing. Well, either she lied to us or she’s a fool,” Platner said at a rally in Bar Harbor last week. “Either way, you shouldn’t be a United States senator from the state of Maine.”
In the years since her vote, Collins has expressed disappointment in Kavanaugh’s ruling — but never voiced regret for her vote to confirm him.
In a February interview with an NBC affiliate in Maine, Collins defended her vote.
“I believe that I cast the right vote. It was a difficult vote that I spent a great deal of time. I had two interviews. I consulted with legal experts,” Collins said. She added that she also voted for Democratic-appointed justices and lamented, “I never hear from Democrats giving me credit.”
Of the battleground states, Maine is unique. It has regularly elected a Republican senator even as voters historically have overwhelmingly backed reproductive rights.
For that reason, a key Democratic super PAC, the Senate Majority PAC, is “highly likely” to run abortion-related ads in Maine in the general election that focus on Collins’ “anti-choice record,” a person with knowledge of the strategy told NBC News. It is the only battleground state where abortion-related ads from the left are expected to play a role in the midterms, this person added.
“We believe this is a persuasive and motivating issue for voters given that this is Collins’ first time on the ballot post-Roe,” they said.
In March, Senate Majority PAC’s own polling found that going after Collins on abortion, framing her as the deciding vote for the justices who overturned Roe, was the second-strongest issue to get traction with registered Democrats, behind healthcare and Medicaid cuts.
A Collins campaign spokesperson responded, saying that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his “partisan allies” think “repackaging old attacks that were litigated in 2020 will distract from the complete dumpster fire happening on their side of the street — they’re wrong. Mainers have a lot more on their plate to consider this election cycle than 6-year-old leftovers.”
That’s not the only entanglement that Kavanaugh has in this race.
Platner last week faced allegations from women who described to The New York Times “toxic” and “unsettling” behavior in their personal relationships with him. In the most serious allegation, which Platner has denied, one woman described him as physically threatening.
That woman, Lyndsey Fifield, said that when she dated Platner from roughly 2013 to 2015, he once “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’”
But now Platner allies are pointing to Fifield’s support for Kavanaugh and her searing criticism of his accusers. At the time of Kavanaugh’s explosive Senate confirmation hearings in 2018, Fifield helped found Ladies for Kavanaugh, which sought to defend him and push for his confirmation. At that time, Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school in the 1980s. She offered affidavits from those who said she had told her story before Kavanaugh’s hearings. At least one other woman, who attended Yale University with Kavanaugh, accused him of sexual misconduct.
“In the wake of the baseless, 11th-hour accusations orchestrated to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, we couldn’t stay silent anymore,” Fifield told the New York Post in 2018.
“The orchestrated smearing of a good man to make the public believe he’s a sexual predator (when he isn’t) is yes, a monstrous evil,” Fifield also posted on X at the time.
Fifield is affiliated with Independent Women, a conservative women’s group. She also worked for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and Nikki Haley’s 2024 Republican presidential campaign.
While prominent Democrats have not gone after Fifield over her activism for Kavanaugh, outside progressives have been less shy about it. Now it is Platner’s supporters who are accusing Fifield of leveling eleventh-hour false accusations.
“This is a right-wing smear campaign,” the commentator Emma Vigeland wrote on X.
Her post garnered more than half a million views. And Platner supporters began posting that — and other similar posts — in replies to Fifield’s posts on X. Fifield did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The pivotal vote
“Big picture wise, Platner is probably going to make the case on what Kavanaugh is doing on the bench,” a Democratic strategist familiar with the Maine Senate race said. “The last time Collins was on the ballot, the Supreme Court hadn’t yet overturned Roe. And obviously Collins voted for that.”
The strategist, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter on the record, said Kavanaugh will undoubtedly be “a significant issue in the campaign” for that reason. But the strategist doubted that voters are following the various “layers” of what Fifield said about Kavanaugh’s accusers in 2018 and how it bears on her recent allegations against Platner.
The strategist added: “There are few things that U.S. senators vote on that are more important than Supreme Court justices and war and peace. And those are going to be front and center in this race.”
Two years after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Collins won re-election in what her allies saw as a vindication of that vote. But after Kavanaugh later cast the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, Collins said Kavanaugh misled her in their discussion prior to her confirmation vote.
Collins has voted for seven of the eight sitting justices that came before the Senate during her tenure — four conservatives and three liberals. The lone exception is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whom she said she opposed for procedural reasons as the confirmation vote was just days before the 2020 election.
Then and now
In 2018, Collins touched on Ford’s allegations in her Oct. 5 speech announcing that she would cast the pivotal vote to confirm Kavanaugh. She cast doubt on Ford’s claims and said witnesses “could not corroborate any of the events of that evening gathering where she says the assault occurred.”
“The confirmation process now involves evaluating whether or not Judge Kavanaugh committed sexual assault, and lied about it to the Judiciary Committee,” Collins said at the time. “In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”
Collins recently questioned Platner’s behavior, calling the accusations “extremely troubling,” and said he owed the people of Maine a “detailed answer.”
“I haven’t heard that,” she said.
Collins told local reporters Friday that she had no connection to Fifield.
“I’ve never met her,” Collins said. “And I’ve never even heard her name before I read the New York Times story.”
