Troy Jackson, the 58-year-old Democrat nominated just days ago to challenge Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, has been in a decades-long relationship with his second cousin, and his campaign's only response was to blame Collins.
Independent journalist Steve Robinson published genealogical records showing that Jackson and his long-term partner, Lana Pelletier, share the same great-grandparents. Jackson's maternal grandmother, Albertine Pelletier O'Leary, and Pelletier's paternal grandfather, Louis A. Pelletier Sr., were siblings. That makes Jackson's mother, Colleen McBreairty, and Pelletier's father, Louis Jr., first cousins, and Jackson and Pelletier second cousins who grew up near each other in one of the most remote corners of the country.
The couple attended Fort Kent High School together, began a relationship, and have two adult sons. Locals told Robinson the pair has never been legally married. Jackson has, however, referred to Pelletier as his wife in the past.
Robinson's report landed on a Thursday. By Friday, Jackson's campaign had emailed a statement to the New York Post, one that never addressed the second-cousin relationship directly.
Instead, the campaign pivoted to the incumbent Republican:
"Susan Collins will do anything to distract from the fact that she votes with Trump 96% of the time and has sold out working people in Maine."
The statement added that "personal attacks on Troy's family are shameful and desperate." No one in the campaign confirmed or denied the genealogical findings Robinson laid out. The campaign did not explain how a report by an independent journalist constituted an attack by Collins.
Neither the Maine Democratic Party nor the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee returned requests for comment.
Second-cousin relationships are legal under Maine law. Since 1985, the state has prohibited marriages between an individual and their parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, or uncles. The original statute also banned first-cousin marriages, but an amendment passed roughly two years later carved out an exception: first cousins may marry if they present a certificate of genetic counseling signed by a physician certifying that their potential children face an acceptably low risk of physical deformity or cognitive impairment.
Second-cousin unions fall outside both the original ban and the amended exception. Robinson noted that such relationships are not uncommon in the rural North Maine Woods region near the Canadian border, where Jackson grew up in the village of Allagash, population 237, per the 2020 census. Small, isolated communities produce overlapping family trees. That is a demographic fact, not a scandal in itself.
But Jackson is not running for town selectman. He is the Democratic nominee for a United States Senate seat. And the question voters will weigh is not whether the relationship is lawful, it plainly is, but whether a candidate who spent years in Maine politics, including a stint as president of the Maine State Senate, should have been more forthcoming about a detail that was always going to surface once national attention arrived.
Jackson was not the original Democratic standard-bearer in this race. He was formally nominated at a special party convention on July 25 after Graham Platner, the previous Democratic candidate, withdrew from the contest following allegations of rape by an ex-girlfriend.
That timeline matters. Maine Democrats had already lost one candidate to a personal-life controversy. They turned to Jackson, a onetime logger and former state Senate president, as the replacement, and within a week, a second personal-background story broke. The party's vetting process, or lack of one, now faces obvious questions.
Robinson's report is sourced to genealogical records and local interviews. No independent corroboration from official documents has been cited beyond those records, and Jackson's campaign chose not to dispute the underlying facts. The campaign's statement treated the report as a political attack rather than a factual claim worth answering on the merits.
Campaigns face unflattering stories all the time. The standard playbook has three options: deny the facts, confirm them and explain, or change the subject. Jackson's team chose the third. Blaming Susan Collins for a report published by an independent journalist on social media is not a denial. It is a redirect, and voters can read the difference.
The 96-percent Trump-voting figure the campaign cited against Collins was not attributed to any specific organization or study. It appeared only in the campaign's own statement. Whether or not it holds up, it has nothing to do with whether Troy Jackson and Lana Pelletier share great-grandparents.
If the relationship is legal and the couple has been together since high school, the simplest move would have been to say so plainly, acknowledge the family connection, and move on. The decision to treat the report as an enemy attack, while refusing to address its substance, suggests a campaign that either did not anticipate the story or hoped it would never come up on a national stage.
Maine voters deserve a candidate who answers straight questions with straight answers. So far, Jackson's campaign has offered deflection dressed up as outrage, and that is never a good sign six days into a nomination.
