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In the race for the Senate, Tom Allen, currently the U.S. Representative for Maine’s First Congressional District, is challenging two-time incumbent Susan Collins.
Collins grew up in Caribou and attended St. Lawrence University. She worked for former Sen. William Cohen and former Gov. John McKernan and ran for Cohen’s seat following his retirement. She is the 15th woman to be elected to the Senate and is serving her second term.
Allen, a Portland native, attended Bowdoin College and Oxford University. After working on Ed Musky’s presidential campaign, he earned a law degree from Harvard. He served on the Portland City Council, serving as mayor for two years. He is currently serving his sixth term in the House of Representatives.
The Senate race has been marred with negative ads on both sides and been bloodied further by third-party ads targeting the candidates on their position on the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA is a bill aimed at easing the process for workers to unionize. Currently, 30 percent of employees have to petition to unionize, and the staff votes by secret ballot on whether to unionize. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, if 50 percent of employees sign authorization cards, a union can form without a secret ballot.
Third-party advertisements running against Allen show mob-like figures intimidating workers. They accuse Allen of eliminating the secret ballot. Allen defends his position. In an interview he said, “It’s simply a way to compensate, change the labor laws to compensate for the fact that the election mentioned in those ads – the certified union is now often not being held at all because management has so many tools to delay it indefinitely.”
Collins declined to be interviewed for this article, but a spokesperson for her campaign told PolitickerME that Collins has denounced the advertisements against her opponent. “On the issue this ad has brought up, Collins does not support the Employee Free Choice Act and she believes that all workers are entitled to a secret ballot. On this ad she finds it ironic that a public servant elected by a private ballot would vote to deny union employees the same right.”
Negative ads by the campaigns have grown more prevalent. Allen worked to tie Collins to President Bush, noting her votes for the Iraq War, the Patriot Act and tax breaks for what Allen calls the “super wealthy.”
In an interview, Allen said, “So we are clearly in a significant, a significant crisis, and it highlights the differences between Susan Collins and me because she voted for all those tax breaks for the super wealthy that George Bush put out. Olympia Snowe didn’t, John McCain did, but Susan always did. And so I voted against them because I thought they were reckless and fiscally irresponsible, which the evidence indicates they were.”
In response, Collins has touted her bipartisan record and called for an end to partisanship in Washington. An article in Sunday’s New York Times detailed the challenges faced by Allen and said Collins seems to be “gliding toward a third term” in a time when many Republicans are having trouble shaking President Bush’s image. While many congressional candidates are distancing themselves from Sen. McCain as well, Collins is the state co-chair of McCain’s campaign. She has, however, called for McCain to stop the RoboCalls in Maine linking Sen. Obama to former Weather Underground member William Ayers.
Polls show Collins up by as many as 13 points. Collins raised about $2 million more than Allen – mostly from Political Action Committees. In the same Times article a National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson called Collins “absolutely untouchable.”
Collins continued to campaign heavily. Her latest ad questions Allen’s effectiveness in the House. The ad asserts that while Collins had 55 of her bills become law, Allen has seen three of his bills become law. While Collins never missed a vote, Allen missed 157. The Allen campaign pushed back against these claims. A letter to the editor by Allen’s daughter, Gwen Allen, said, “My father has voted in Congress more than 7,500 times and has never been away from Washington when his vote would have changed the outcome. He has an excellent 98 percent attendance record in Congress … He was away from Washington when his parents were dying, when I got married and when my mother needed him during her breast cancer treatments this year.”
Bangor Daily News