As Maine’s Senate race heats up, there has been a similar attack launched against both Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic replacement candidate Troy Jackson: lobbying ties in the family.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC that works to elect Republicans to the U.S. Senate, has in recent weeks spent over $4 million on ads that attack Jackson because of his son’s work as a lobbyist at the state level while his father was Maine Senate president, according to ad-tracking firm AdImpact, raising questions about whether those lobbying connections changed Jackson’s positions on legislation at the State House. 

Jackson, like former Democratic nominee Graham Platner before him, has gone after Collins for her husband’s federal lobbying and consulting history, suggesting that work and his stock portfolio have been intertwined with her efforts in Congress to their shared financial benefit. 

Beyond the one-sided attacks on the campaign trail, and the different circumstances at hand, these family lobbying ties also highlight vastly different rules at the state and federal levels — along with the ongoing work by ethics reformers to ensure that lawmakers subject themselves to strong and transparent safeguards.

At the federal level, U.S. Senate rules prohibit immediate family members, including both spouses and children, from directly lobbying the personal office or committee staff managed by their lawmaker family member unless that work predated a lawmaker’s election or their marriage. At the state level, there are no such prohibitions on lobbying a family member. 

Craig Holman, who helped write the first-of-its-kind federal law in 2007 that curtailed the influence of family member lobbyists, would like to see the federal prohibitions extended to state legislatures as well. 

“I’d like to see more states start adopting that type of policy, somewhat similar to what we have at the federal level,” said Holman, a longtime ethics and campaign finance lobbyist for good governance non-profit Public Citizen. 

Two Jacksons in Augusta

Troy Jackson was Maine Senate president for six years from 2019 to 2024. In October 2021, his then-chief of staff BJ McCollister departed and within a month had founded a political consulting and public affairs firm, the Resurgam Group. McCollister built Resurgam into one of the top five compensated lobbying firms in 2025, state records show, and he had help from Jackson’s son. 

Chace Jackson joined Resurgam in 2022, and went on to lobby alongside McCollister in the Maine Legislature while his father was one of its presiding officers. 

Chace Jackson brought in over $180,000 for Resurgam in 2024 from clients that included Covenant Health, Maine Audubon, the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, alcoholic beverage company Diageo, the Maine Public Health Association and others, according to state lobbying records. 

While Maine law defines certain conflicts of interest under which lawmakers are not allowed to influence legislation, the statute does not expressly include anything about lobbying by their family members. As Maine Ethics Commission Executive Director Jonathan Wayne told The Maine Monitor, state lawmakers don’t have to recuse themselves if a family member has lobbied on a particular piece of legislation, and lobbyists don’t have to disclose if they have a family member in the Legislature. 

Wayne said it was possible that the Senate president’s office had its own recusal or disclosure safeguards in place beyond what is required in state law. 

The Maine Monitor asked Troy Jackson’s campaign if he and his office took any specific steps to prevent conflicts of interest related to the lobbying efforts by his son and former chief of staff, and also asked whether Jackson took meetings or had communication with them on issues and legislation they were lobbying on in Augusta. 

Jackson’s campaign said that he did not give Chace Jackson, McCollister or Resurgam any special access or treatment, but did not clarify whether Jackson ever met with his son and former chief of staff as part of their lobbying efforts.

Republican-aligned attack ads have honed in on Jackson’s evolving position on gun legislation in the wake of the Lewiston shooting that claimed 18 lives in 2023. Prior to the shooting, Jackson had a long history of opposing gun control measures and had enjoyed the backing of the National Rifle Association. But after Lewiston, he went on to support measures such as a 72-hour waiting period, which passed in the Maine Senate by a single vote.

Chace Jackson and Resurgam were representing the Maine Gun Safety Coalition at the time, and the opposing ads have inferred that Jackson changed his position as a result. But Jackson’s campaign pointed to a 2024 Bangor Daily News article reporting that there was “no evidence” that Troy Jackson’s stance on gun legislation had changed since their hiring. The same article featured a legislative spokesperson for Jackson failing to clarify whether he had spoken with his son or McCollister on gun issues during that debate. 

The Jackson campaign did not answer repeated questions about whether McCollister is now working for the campaign. It did say that Chace Jackson is not employed by the campaign, but failed to clarify whether that also meant he is not doing any consulting work for them.

At this point in a typical U.S. Senate campaign, information about paid staff and consulting services would be publically available through Federal Election Commission reports. However, because Jackson became the Democratic nominee at such a late stage following Platner’s withdrawal, full campaign finance information isn’t currently available online for Jackson and may not be until the next FEC quarterly reporting deadline in mid-October, after early voting has already started in Maine.

Jackson’s campaign emphasized that he supported a range of legislation over the years in the State House to lessen lobbyist influence and improve lobbying transparency, including measures to ban state political contributions from lobbyists and making it a conflict of interest for lawmakers to vote on legislation when they, an immediate family member or close economic associate “would derive a benefit from, or be harmed by, proposed legislation to a significantly greater extent than others in the same enterprise, profession, trade, business or type of employment.”

Adult children who are financially independent from their lawmaker parents are not considered immediate family members under Maine legislative ethics law. 

The Jackson campaign also pivoted to the lobbying history of Collins’ husband, claiming there is no comparison between the two candidates when it comes to lobbying influence. 

“Susan Collins is married to a longtime former lobbyist who holds hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock in companies Collins oversees, and who was paid by a lobbying firm just last year,” said an unnamed Jackson campaign spokesperson. “Meanwhile, Troy Jackson is fighting for working Mainers and has worked to cut down on the influence of lobbyists and special interests in our politics so Maine’s working families stop getting squeezed while the rich get richer.” 

Daffron’s work in Washington

Collins and her husband, Tom Daffron, first met professionally when he was chief of staff to then-Rep. Bill Cohen and she was an intern. Daffron, who later served as chief for several other Republican senators, went back and forth between Senate service and the private sector in the 1990s and 2000s, according to government affairs tracking website Legistorm. 

Daffron is listed on the site as a lobbyist with consulting firm Chesapeake Enterprises Inc. in 2003, and later with Jefferson Consulting Group from 2006 to 2007. He and Collins married in 2012. He stayed with Jefferson until 2016 as its Chief Operating Officer, where the organization was engaged in lobbying but he was no longer himself a registered lobbyist. 

“Tom has not engaged in lobbying anyone for the entire fourteen years that they have been married,” Collins campaign spokesperson Blake Kernen told The Monitor in a statement. “Tom was last registered as a lobbyist in 2008, so he has not been registered for the past 18 years.”

However, the Senate rules prohibiting lobbying by lawmakers’ immediate family members don’t just apply to registered lobbyists. They also apply to family members who are “employed or retained by such a registered lobbyist or an entity that hires or retains a registered lobbyist for the purpose of influencing legislation.”

Collins and Daffron’s financial disclosure information from the Senate show that he did consulting work as recently as last year for Chesapeake Enterprises, which also engages in lobbying according to federal reports. 

Federal lobbying records also show repeated lobbying activity by an entity called Jefferson Business Consulting LLC while Daffron and Collins have been married and while he was in charge of Jefferson Consulting Group. Dating back to the early 2000s, Jefferson Business Consulting sometimes listed its lobbyist registrant name as Jefferson Consulting Group and listed lobbyists whose Legistorm and LinkedIn profiles indicate were employees at Jefferson Consulting Group. 

Jefferson Business Consulting represented big-name lobbying clients such as defense contractor Lockheed Martin, telecommunications company AT&T, and kidney health services company DaVita while Daffron was Jefferson’s COO and he and Collins were married. 

Democrats have also highlighted that Jefferson Consulting Group received more than $70 million in federal contracts between 2006 and 2016, according to a report from Salon in 2020. Collins authored legislation in 2007 to reform the federal contracting process, before she and Daffron were married but at a point where he had already been a longtime advisor, which led to allegations from former opponent Platner that Collins “funneled” money to her husband’s firm.

The Collins campaign pushed back against those allegations, stressing that the contracts were awarded by the executive branch rather than Congress, and mostly took place under the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama. Kernen said Platner’s allegation about the contracts “simply does not make sense and is obviously untrue” and pointed to the overwhelming support it received at the time in the Senate, where it passed by unanimous consent.

“Lost in this discussion is the fact that this reform was seen as a good government reform — not as a windfall to government contractors,” Kernen said. “That is why it received such broad bipartisan support. This is legislation that we are proud of and the fact that it is being portrayed this way is absurd.”

The Monitor asked if Collins and her staff have taken any specific safeguards to make sure the family lobbying rules were followed and there were no lobbying contacts between her legislative staff and Daffron. 

“Susan Collins has never been married to a lobbyist, and none of her family members is a lobbyist, so this question does not apply to her,” Kernen said. “This question is more relevant to Troy Jackson and his son, whose prolific lobbying career was closely intertwined with his father’s stint as Senate President.” 

The Monitor followed up with Collins to clarify about lobbying contacts, which can be any oral or written communication to legislative or executive branch officials related to federal legislation, rulemaking and executive orders — and don’t necessarily have to come from a registered lobbyist if they happen just one time.

“Tom has never had anything that would constitute ‘lobbying contact’ with anyone in Senator Collins’s office because he has not been a lobbyist for the entire fourteen years that they have been married,” Kernen responded. 

The campaign stressed that Collins supported the federal lobbying reforms that reined in direct family member lobbying nearly 20 years ago. 

“Senator Collins believes that family members should not work as paid lobbyists retained to lobby relatives,” Kernen said. “Senator Collins was one of the cosponsors of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 — the most significant lobbying reform bill to become law in the past thirty years.” 

States haven’t matched federal lobbying rule changes 

That 2007 law was the first of its kind in terms of limiting the lobbying activity of family members, according to Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist who helped write the law. Holman said he worked closely with then-Sen. Obama to craft the legislation, which included practical compromises — exemptions for family members who were already lobbying at least a year before the lawmaker was elected, or at least a year before a lobbyist and their lawmaker spouse got married — in order to secure enough support in Congress. 

Holman said he had been doing independent research at the time to see how many family members were lobbying in Congress, and found “they were all over the place” in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. 

“They had immediate access to their own spouses or family members,” Holman said. “And so they came out of the woodwork.”

He used the example of a lawmaker’s son who went from working at a fast food restaurant to suddenly becoming a high-powered lobbyist as soon as his father became chair of a powerful committee. 

“That’s when I realized we’ve got to rein in this type of abuse,” Holman said. “And we’ve done it, to a fair extent, in Congress.”

The strongest version of a bill curtailing family member lobbying would not include any exemptions, Holman said, but he explained that Obama believed a pragmatic approach was necessary to get the bill through the Senate, where it eventually passed 96-2. Collins was one of the many yes votes in 2007. 

While it’s been almost 20 years since Congress put additional guardrails on family member lobbying, Holman and other government ethics experts aren’t aware of a state that has followed suit. 

In recent years, state lawmakers in South Dakota and Illinois have proposed legislation that would have instituted some sort of ban on lobbying by family members — either for spouses or immediate family members more broadly, depending on the proposal. But those state bills haven’t become law. 

“It’s a very, very popular idea,” Holman said, likening it to the issue of individual stock ownership by lawmakers. “Voters love it, but boy Congress and state legislatures are really reluctant to try to impose any kind of ethics restrictions that in some way curtail their privileges or their potential for gaining some financial rewards.”

Danielle Caputo, the senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, said the current prohibitions on lobbying family members at the federal level are necessary and would like to see them extended in some way at the state level — though she acknowledged it is harder because some legislatures, like Maine’s, are part-time.

She said that attempts to regulate family member lobbying is a balance between the ability of children, spouses or parents who didn’t run for office to still make money, while giving voters confidence that it’s their interests and not family financial interests that are being represented in public office. 

“But when it comes to lobbying, there’s such a clear conflict that really isn’t avoidable,” Caputo said. 

Editor’s note: Matt Junker worked in the U.S. Senate for Sen. Angus King from 2013 to early 2017 and spent several of those years living in Washington, D.C., with staff members of Sen. Susan Collins.

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.