With voting in person less than two weeks away and polling showing a tossup, Maine Democrats are betting that new corruption allegations can crack the political image Sen. Susan Collins has carefully built during 30 years in the Senate.

Troy Jackson spent part of the week in New York City asking donors to help him defeat Collins. His campaign then received an unexpected political boost from a ProPublica investigation published Tuesday.

The report alleged a scheme involving Collins, members of her staff and Martin Kao, a military contractor based in Hawaii. Jackson quickly seized on the findings, calling the alleged conduct “corruption in the highest order.”

Maine Democratic leaders gathered reporters outside Collins’s Portland office Wednesday morning and repeated Jackson’s charge. Democrats have spent the days since the report appeared trying to make its allegations stick with voters.

The stakes are high for both parties, which view the Maine contest as crucial to control of the Senate. Democrats also have little room for error as voting in person approaches and neither candidate holds a comfortable lead.

The report gained significant attention across Maine shortly after publication. Local television newscasts carried the story Tuesday night, while the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News still featured it near the top of their homepages Wednesday afternoon.

ProPublica makes most of its reporting available for other news organizations to publish for free. That arrangement helped place the allegations before Maine voters through multiple local outlets during a pivotal stretch of the race.

A New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll released Thursday morning placed Collins at 49% among likely voters and Jackson at 46%. With a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, the contest was effectively a tossup.

Another 5% of voters remained undecided, leaving both campaigns with a consequential group still available to persuade. The survey was conducted mostly before ProPublica published its investigation.

Collins’s support had risen slightly since a June survey conducted by the same pollsters. Even so, neither Collins nor Jackson had enough support to claim any meaningful cushion.

Collins and her aides vigorously denied the allegations. They argued, inaccurately, that ProPublica had merely recycled earlier accusations about campaign finance violations involving Kao, whose connections to Collins had previously been reported.

Kao is serving a prison sentence of 87 months for fraud involving Covid relief and bank fraud. ProPublica’s latest report focused on allegations of a broader scheme involving Kao, Collins and members of her staff.

Collins’s chief of staff, Steven Abbott, dismissed the uproar as a familiar campaign attack. “We hear this every cycle that Susan Collins is corrupt. I mean, whatever,” Abbott told reporters Wednesday.

“I’m just so, I guess, used to it, and it’s so tiresome. It’s the same thing over and over and over again. It’s their effort to discredit the work that she does on behalf of the people of Maine.”

Dan Shea, a professor of government at Colby College in Waterville, said Collins’s carefully maintained reputation could make the allegations difficult for Democrats to land. Her political identity has long centered on presenting herself as intensely attentive to the concerns of Maine constituents.

“It’s going to be tough,” Shea said. “I think there is a predisposition to not imagine that Susan Collins would engage in this … that this would not be something Susan would do. It’s not part of the narrative that has sort of circled the senator for 30 years.”

Shea nevertheless said that “as new evidence emerges, I think there could be a growing crack in that narrative.” He also warned Democrats against “storming out of the gate” and said they “should lay off and let the media do their business.”

At Wednesday’s news conference, Maine Democratic Party executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson said the party would “add this to the very long list” of arguments it is making against Collins.

“A lot of [our] conversations with voters are very lengthy,” Murphy-Anderson said. “We do still have undecided voters in this state, and that’s what we’re focused on in the last 40 days … We feel confident that we are going to beat Susan Collins on Nov. 3.”

For Democrats, the challenge is turning extensive local coverage into voter movement before ballots are cast. For Collins’s camp, the response is already clear: deny the allegations, dismiss the scrutiny and call it the same old story.